–An exhibit in London which may be of interest is mentioned in the papers. This is Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture. Here are the details:
300 years after his death, a major new exhibition exploring one of the UK’s greatest architects – Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) – is now open at Sir John Soane’s Museum.
Hailed as ‘The Rockstar of the English Baroque’ and ‘The original starchitect’, Vanbrugh designed some of the UK’s most admired and loved country houses, including Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, with each one featuring his signature ability to exploit the emotional impact of architecture by making exciting and dramatic use of light and shadow, recessions and projections. Sir John Soane (1753-1837) cited Vanbrugh as one of his great influences, remarking that he had “all the fire and power of Michelangelo and Bernini”.
Curated by Sir Charles Saumarez Smith CBE and architect Roz Barr, the exhibition features never-before-exhibited drawings from the V&A and Sir John Soane’s Museum, including many in Vanbrugh’s own hand, and is an opportunity to see a selection of Vanbrugh’s drawings for major projects like Castle Howard, but also smaller, more experimental plans for schemes such as the housing estate he envisaged at Greenwich.
Perhaps overshadowed by contemporaries Nicholas Hawksmoor and Sir Christopher Wren, the emotional impact and imagination of Vanbrugh has continued to be admired, particularly by architects, in the centuries since. The exhibition highlights Vanbrugh’s enduring architectural ideas and influence, including on two of the most influential architects of the 20th century, Robert Venturi (1925-2018) and Denise Scott Brown (b.1931). A new short film by filmmakers Anita Naughton and Jim Venturi, their son, explores this connection and will be shown on loop in the Museum’s Foyle Space.
The exhibition is part of the #VANBRUGH300celebrations organised by The Georgian Group, which will include events and activities across the year at six of the architect’s most significant creations.
Waugh mentions Vanbrugh several times in his writings.
—The Times has an article about a new book by Adrian Wooldridge entitled Centrists of the World Unite. It opens with this:
Early on in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies, set amid the chaos and fragmentation of the 1920s, the protagonist describes Shepheard’s Hotel in Mayfair as a place where one can “still draw up, cool and uncontaminated, great, healing draughts from the well of Edwardian certainty”.
One might say something similar about Adrian Wooldridge’s new book. It is a place where the centrists among us, demoralised by the rise of populism, can draw up great healing draughts of 1990s “end of history” certainty about liberalism. It’s all going to be OK, lads, Wooldridge assures us. Liberalism is in retreat but it is not defeated. It can and must be renewed, as it has been before…
—The Spectator has an article entitled “British politics has become a Devil’s Wheel” that opens with this:
There is a moment in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall which has been much on my mind lately. It is the bit towards the very end of the novel when our hero, Paul Pennyfeather, re-encounters the sinister modernist architect Professor Otto Silenus. By this point Pennyfeather has undergone all manner of travails. He has been debagged and sent down from Oxford, accused of human-trafficking and sent to prison. But, as the pair sit outside the Corfu villa in which Pennyfeather is staying, the professor suddenly offers to reveal his theory about the meaning of life.
Silenus describes a particular fairground attraction, the Devil’s Wheel (‘the big wheel at Luna Park’). For five francs the public can go into a room with tiers of seats. At the centre is a great revolving floor which spins around fast. People try to clamber up the revolving floor and get to the center of the wheel. How everyone whoops and hollers as they similarly get flung around and fail…
–The website Medium has posted an article by Ilaria Salvatori comparing Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited with what may be a relatively recently translated Italian novel by Goliarda Sapienza. Here’s the opening:
A Comparative Analysis: Brideshead Revisited (1945) and The Art of Joy (1998)
There is a narrative architecture common to both novels that warrants immediate attention. An outsider of modest origins, the middle-class artist Charles Ryder in one, the Sicilian peasant girl Modesta in the other, comes into contact with a declining aristocratic family. They assimilate its codes, wander its halls, and eventually settle within its walls. In both cases, the ancestral home is a living organism, heavy with history and symbolic power: Brideshead Castle in England, and Villa Brandiforti in Sicily.
Up to this point, the resemblance is striking. However, from this shared threshold, the two novels diverge toward opposite horizons. Understanding how and why they diverge is perhaps the most precise way to read them both…
The full article is available here.
