1994 was a vintage year for architecture. The year’s popular and posh classics included a dynamic football stadium (for Huddersfield Town), a stately opera house (at Glyndebourne) and the wiggly greenhouse that was the Eurostar terminal in Waterloo station.
As there’s a government rule that says buildings normally have to be 30 years old to be considered for listing, the Twentieth Century Society has come up with a list of 10 from that year that it believes should be officially designated as heritage.
What’s striking about the list is not only the levels of invention and quality of detail, but also the richness of ideas. Other inclusions are a modernist-gothic library in Cambridge, a high-tech house in north London and a house in Devon in an updated arts-and-crafts style. These are buildings that anyone might enjoy – you don’t need a master’s degree in appreciating modern architecture to get something out of them. It’s a precious characteristic, especially given the zero-sum debates currently generated by advocates of “traditional” architecture, whereby it’s deemed impossible to like both old and new buildings.
My late father loved Paris, beautiful buildings and a good long read of his morning newspaper. When he was in hospital in the last weeks of his life, the cathedral of Notre Dame caught fire, and it was decided to withhold the last of these pleasures (to his uncomprehending annoyance) to protect him from the bad news – at least until I, as the architectural member of the family, would be able to reassure him that all was not lost. It could, I told him, be rebuilt as good as old, even though it was not then certain that this would actually happen.
The fact that the restored cathedral will reopen next Saturday, with an inaugural mass attended by President Macron, therefore has some personal sweetness, in addition to its very much greater contribution to the culture of the world. My father’s ghost might even forgive the deprivation of his daily news fix.
Heartless bureaucracy
If you haven’t experienced the systems used by many British universities for evaluating “special circumstances”, in the event of serious illness or bereavement, you have been spared a particular purgatory. They go something like this. The sick or distraught student has to submit a form, sometimes to an unforgiving deadline, after which they will have to wait until the end of the academic year to know if their physical or mental state will after all have been taken into account when grades are awarded. Meanwhile they have to struggle through their courses, having to make judgments as to what and what not to attempt, based on guesswork about a committee’s ultimate verdict.
This uncertainty only adds to their turmoil, as I have witnessed in several people close to me, and reduces their ability to deal with both their trauma and their academic work.
I am sure that the universities have their reasons for their procedures, but could they not find a way to be more humane? Could they not make it clear, for example, that certain kinds of loss or disease will definitely be taken into account?
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Daleks defanged
Two of the less scientific items of the 300,000 in the Science Museum Group Collection near Swindon, which I visited for Sunday’s New Review, are a Cyberman and a Dalek from Doctor Who. For those of us whose childhoods were terrorised by these beings, it was reassuring to see that thing sticking out of the right side of the latter is, as might always have been suspected, nothing more threatening than a standard bathroom plunger.
