Every year produces a number of ‘firsts’ and ‘mosts’ in architecture – and 2022 was no different. Most obviously, at least for residents of New York, the world’s skinniest skyscraper, with sixty storeys of single apartments stacked to a height of 435 metres, was completed on ‘billionaire’s row’ in Manhattan, perhaps becoming the ultimate example of ‘form following finance’ in the construction annals.
There is, of course, no endeavour, no craft, no profession, no trade that neglects to ‘reflect society’. This is a commonplace. The collective narcissism of considerate builders, for instance, claims that hod carriers and brickwork reflect society. The contention of Menu Design in Europe is kindred. Graphic artists, restaurateurs, decorators and chefs have, through two centuries, expanded their capabilities according to the milieux in which they have practised. Menus are, then, not merely functional lists, they are self-advertisements, exhibitions, seductions and, occasionally, desirable objects that are apparently collectible. Indeed this book has the unmistakable feel of an obsessive’s scrapbook, a completist’s trophy.
It's not in Whitehall nor Westminster; not on the central London tourist trail. Instead it’s ten miles away, on the wrong side of the North Circular, an obscurity in the suburbs, rarely visited for its own sake. But Arnos Grove Tube station is one of the masterpieces of 20th century British architecture – and this week it celebrates its 90th anniversary. Until September 1932, the northern branch of the Piccadilly line ended at Finsbury Park. Then five new stations were built: Manor House, Turnpike Lane, Wood Green, Bounds Green and, finally, Arnos Grove, all commissioned by Frank Pick and designed by Charles Holden. Suddenly it was only 20 minutes to Leicester Square.
It’s the thin end of the wedge, the slippery slope, the beginning of the end of a civilised Christmas. It is the first week of December and I still haven’t started my cards. My friend Charlotte was at it in October. She signed up for a lino-cutting class, cut holly boughs and robin redbreasts and printed her own cards. She sent me photos of the fruits (berries?) of her labours and very merry they were, too. Usually, I am a Charlotte. By November, I have made cards, addressed envelopes, applied thumbs to 80 stamps. But after an illness in the autumn, I’m feeling as uncreative as a turkey. Could I cheat and send emails with a pious little homily about how, for the sake of the planet, I’m forgoing paper cards this year?
An editor once told me: always look at the loos. It was remarkable, she said, how many grand cultural projets, having spent a fortune on the atrium, the concert hall, the galleries, spent pennies on the bogs. The smallest rooms at Charles Jencks’s Cosmic House are among the loveliest loos in London with windows on to the garden and a ‘Jencksiana’ mirror over the sink. This was the Baltimore-born writer, critic and landscape designer’s take on the ‘Serliana’ window devised by the mannerist architect Sebastiano Serlio and it recurs throughout this mad and marvellous post-modern house. Jencks died in 2019 leaving his house on Lansdowne Walk in Holland Park as a stucco memorial. From the pavement, there isn’t much to distinguish No.
‘Design. Humanity’s best friend,’ proclaims a row of posters outside the Design Museum. ‘It’s the alarm that woke you up… The card you tapped on the bus… And the words you’re reading right now. So embedded in our lives we almost forget it’s there.’ It is one of the ironies of good design that the better it is, the less we notice it. This is especially true when we really need it: when lost in an airport five minutes before the gate closes or battling helplessly down the wrong road. In these instances, the woman we invariably have to thank for helping us to find our bearings is currently the subject of an overdue tribute at the Design Museum.
Plexiglass bubbles hover over diners’ heads in restaurants. Plastic pods, spaced six feet apart, separate weightlifters in gyms. Partitions of all kinds are creeping up in workplaces. As offices, restaurants, bars and businesses reopened after months of lockdowns and closures, a new phenomenon emerged, one that I’ve come to think of as ‘blocked-off design’. It’s design and layout that aims to construct and enforce distancing in a somewhat makeshift way. It’s characterised by partitions, sheer walls, six-foot markers. As a visual language, it’s defined by barriers and blockage — physical reminders that spaces where we once went to mingle with others are now fraught, and that even in public, isolation is necessary.
It was possible to stand in the middle of the road during the lockdown without being run over. In Willow Place, near Victoria Station, I crouched over a narrow grating of stout grey iron, and caught a glimpse of light reflected from moving water deep below, as though at the bottom of a well. This was the River Tyburn, on its way from Hampstead via Buckingham Palace to the Thames. During the endlessly sunny lockdown days, I wandered the streets near my office in Victoria. The bright unpeopled silence (like a landscape by de Chirico) brought to my attention details unnoticed before. With all the galleries closed, this was street art.
Consider the carpet. In all likelihood, you usually don’t. It’s simply something beneath your feet, soft or scratchy, bright or beige, thick or thin. But in a new book, Bill Young asks you to pause and really look at a particular genre of floor-padding: the carpets in the hotels around the world. In Hotel Carpets, the long-neglected designs pop from the pages. Young, a corporate pilot, would often send pictures of hotel carpets to his wife and daughter while he was travelling. ‘Because I spend most of my life in hotels, that’s just one thing that was sticking out,’ Young says, in a video interview from his home in Dallas, where he’s been mostly grounded of late, due to the pandemic.
Three million years ago one of our ancestors, Australopithecus africanus, picked up a pebble and took it home to its cave, most likely because the pattern of lines and holes on its surface looked beguilingly like a face. Perhaps this was the birth of art. Or perhaps not. Maybe art arrived in this world later. One day in 1940 Marcel Ravidat was walking in the Dordogne when his dog, Robot, fell into a hole. Robot had stumbled across the entrance to a network of caves containing more than 600 wall and ceiling paintings of horses, deer, aurochs, ibex, bison and cats dating from 17,000 to 15,000 BCE. The discovery of Lascaux’s caves in the era of the Holocaust and Hiroshima resonated for many.
We were looking at a 1956 Fiat Multipla, a charming ergonomic marvel that predicted today’s popular MPVs. Rather grandly, I said to my guide: ‘I think you’ll find the source of the Multipla in an unrealised 1930s design of Mario Revelli di Beaumont.’ He looked a bit blank. This exhibition is a rare attempt to explain the car, perhaps the most dramatic since the Museum of Modern Art’s 1951 New York show where Philip Johnson coined the term ‘rolling sculpture’. It is both occasionally brilliant and continuously exasperating. Rather as if in a crowded restaurant you are overhearing snatches of fascinating conversation coming from different tables. The context is significant. The V&A and the Science Museum were only separated in 1909.
‘Bigger,’ said Sir Osbert Lancaster when asked the difference between his work for the page and for the stage. ‘Definitely bigger.’ For almost 40 years Lancaster was the ‘pocket cartoonist’ for the Daily Express. He had remarked to the features editor that no English newspaper had anything to match the little column-width cartoons of the French papers. ‘Go on,’ said the editor, ‘give us some.’ On 1 January 1939, Lancaster gave them the first of around 10,000 line-drawn cartoons. His subjects were the war, the Blitz, the weather, Stalin, Hitler and Dr Spock, the Swinging Sixties, the Common Market, the test tube baby and the topless swimsuit.
The word ‘jewel’ makes the heart beat a little faster. Great jewels have always epitomised beauty, love — illicit or sanctified —romance, danger and mystery. And no one knew better how to cash in on this mystique than the firm of Cartier, for years the go-to jewellers for discreet, elegant razzle-dazzle. Its customers were kings, princes, maharajas and the whole of ‘society’. The iconic panther brooch it created for the Duchess of Windsor sold for $7 million (in 2010). When Francesca Cartier Brickell, searching for a special bottle of champagne in her Cartier grandfather’s cellar, spotted a battered leather trunk in one corner, she opened it to find bundles of letters, each tied and neatly labelled.
Batsford has just brought out a huge tome on Nova — ‘one of the most influential magazines in history’ — compiled by two of the magazine’s star art directors, David Hillman and Harri Peccinotti. It covers the ten years that the magazine existed, 1965 to 1975, and focuses on the brilliant and groundbreaking layouts it introduced. But somehow it is not quite the Nova that I loved when I went to work there as assistant editor in 1967. For me, Nova was its editor, Dennis Hackett, who had been brought in to save the failing magazine soon after its launch. I don’t know what genius first thought of putting a tough Yorkshire newspaperman in charge of a women’s magazine but he had already made a name for himself on trendy Queen.
It’s to be expected. You take photographs in order to document things — Paris in the case of Eugène Atget in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the shacks of the American south in the case of Walker Evans in the 1930s — and these documents then acquire a quality of elegy. What is extraordinary is the speed with which this happens, the brevity of the ‘then’. As soon as the images emerge in the developing tray — even, conceivably, the moment the shutter is clicked — they are imbued with how they will be seen in the future. The photographs in Fred Sigman’s book Motel Vegas were commissioned in the mid-1990s in order to record the signage of once-thriving motels on Fremont Street in Las Vegas.
Plastics — even venerable, historically eloquent plastics — hardly draw the eye. As this show’s insightful accompanying publication (a snip at £3) would have it, ‘Plastics have no intrinsic form or texture, thus they are not materials that can be true to themselves.’ They exist within inverted commas. They can be shell-like, horn-like, stony, metallic — they do not really exist on their own behalf. Mind you, the first vitrine in Raw Materials: Plastics at the Nunnery Gallery in east London contains an object of rare beauty: a small, mottled, crazed, discoloured sphere that looks for all the world like the planet Venus, reduced to handy scale. It’s a billiard ball, made of the first plastic: cellulose nitrate.
I must have seen hundreds of opera productions in my time. Out of these, hardly any made a lasting impression on account of their design: the great Tarkovsky Boris Godunov for Covent Garden; Hockney’s Rake’s Progress for Glyndebourne; Es Devlin’s Les Troyens; the Richard Peduzzi Bayreuth Ring preserved on film. Very few others. For many opera-goers, an interventionist or bold visual approach to an opera is automatically a bad thing, and (I guess) a lot of the musicians involved are visually somewhat conservative. The ludicrous 1980s Met Ring cycle, designed by Gunther Schneider-Siemssen to follow every one of Wagner’s demands, was driven by musicians.
I think I probably qualify as the oldest fashion editor in the world, because in spite of my advanced age I am still writing about clothes (in the Oldie). This gives me one USP: it means that I was actually around — even wearing them myself — when the revolutionary fashion ideas that are now the stuff of museum exhibitions were being invented. Next month the Mary Quant exhibition opens at the V&A, and sure enough I have been asked to talk about those giddy times for a video that will be shown at the museum. I was 16 in the autumn of 1955 when Quant’s shop, Bazaar, first shocked the passers-by in the King’s Road, Chelsea, with its startling window displays. One of these featured a black-and-white gingham skirt.
MacDonald ‘Max’ Gill (1884–1947) is less well known than his notorious brother, Eric. But was he less of a designer, less of an artist? The son of a Brighton clergyman, his career was built on a sequence of remarkable connections. The architect Halsey Ricardo, a descendant of the economist, was his tutor. While working for church builders Nicholson and Corlette, Gill very likely met Edwin Lutyens at the Art Workers’ Guild. And for Nashdom, the neo-Georgian house Lutyens built in 1909 for Prince Dolgorouki at Burnham in Buckinghamshire, Gill drew an imaginative ‘Wind Map’. Somewhere between illustration and cartography, this was a pointer of what was soon to come from his pen and brush.
On 10 September 1973 the 1930s Kensington High Street department store formerly known as Derry & Toms reopened as Big Biba. It sold the dress designer Barbara Hulanicki’s distinctive look in furniture, paints and wallpaper, sports equipment and food, as well as her familiar fast fashion. If you had to define that aesthetic then, you’d have said it was campy and kitschy. But above all you’d have said it was deco, an increasingly familiar word for the between-wars moderne style in everything from buildings to jewellery. Derry & Toms itself was a 1933 moderne temple of commerce, slathered in stylised ironwork and bas-reliefs.
