Preserving Heritage Buildings

At the 2008 AAANZ conference at Griffith University in Brisbane, Ann Toy presented a paper on Public Art and Vice-Regal Patronage at Government House, Sydney.

Government House Sydney was built between 1838 and 1845, to a plan by an architect in Britain, Edward Blore. Fortunately the builders, contractors, designers, craftspeople and materials were all local. It was built in the neo-Gothic taste, crenellated and turreted, with various coats of arms. Additions have included a front portico (1873), an eastern veranda (1879) and extensions to the ballroom and Governor’s study in (1900). From 1845-1996, it served as the Governor’s residence, office and official reception space. Since 1996, the Governor has not used it as a residence.

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Government House, Sydney

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Many Vice Regal families have come and gone over the decades. Conservation and refurbishment have been ongoing issues for the Historical Houses Trust of NSW , even now, since the building is still used for Vice-Regal, state and Commonwealth government functions.

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The Trust's task was to respect the instrinsic historic values of the building's original fabric, decoration and collections, while integrating new technologies, new design and new art into the interiors. I realise that the old clutter needed to be pared back, but the result sofar seemed somewhat jarring. Nonetheless history will tell whether they achieved the ideal balance, or not.

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The conservation Vs modern refurbishment debate reminded me of an earlier visit to Monticello near Charlottesville in Virginia, which I loved. Monticello was the private estate of Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the USA. Designed by Jefferson himself in the Palladian style, work on the house continued intermittently from 1768-1809. Many changes were made to the original plans within Jefferson's own era, making Monticello virtually a lifetime's project.

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By 1879, Jefferson Levy was the new owner of Monticello. He restored and preserved Monticello, which had been deteriorating seriously for many years.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation purchased the house in 1923, had it restored yet again by architects and opened the building to the public.

A correspondent to the AIA Archiblog [2] recognised that buildings have to change, as each generation finds new needs not being met by the existing architect­ure. “This house as architecture is a disaster, mishapenly proport­ion­ed, awkward, which is unsurprising given the interations it went through over the years. Monticello is a mess of a building. He (Jefferson?) can't even resolve the facade and interior well”.

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Of course I cannot compare Monticello with Government House Sydney directly. Monticello now runs as a museum, fixed in time, not as an active arm of government. But that raises another important question: what extant design features in Monticello came from Jefferson himself, which belonged to Levy 100 years later and which elements arrived in the 1920s?

A line in The Design Public Blog [3] was right on topic for this discussion: “Anyway, it was meant to be a museum, full of artefacts from the territory in the Louisiana Purchase, maps, Natural History and American History”. Who decided Monticello was meant to be a museum? and was the decision made after the intial building plans were finalised?
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Monticello <-library and bedroom ->

Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus

In 1929, Le Corbusier created his definitive building: Villa Savoye in Poissy. It perfectly displayed Le Corbusier’s architectural laws:

1. raise the building from the ground on pilotis, to reclaim the lost space under the house;

2. build non-weight-bearing walls to free up the designer;

3. create an open and flexible interior floor plan, free of weight-bearing walls;

4. include long, sliding windows to bring the garden inside the house; and

5. create rooftop gardens to replace the green land swallowed up by the concrete block.

Le Corbusier's design

The Bauhaus School of Architecture did not actually get going until 1927, eight years after Bauhaus first opened its lecture rooms and workshops. And by that time, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and the other Bauhaus architects were very familiar with, and committed to Le Corbusier’s philosophies. Le Corbusier may not have lectured at Bauhaus’ Weimar or Dessau campuses, but his theories were enth­us­iastically read by the staff and students. Bauhaus architects agreed to use principles of classical architect­ure in their most pure form: without ornamentation of any kind. Thus they rejected cornices, eaves and decorative details. Bauhaus designs had flat roofs, smooth facades, cubic shapes, neutral colours (white, cream or grey), open floor plans and functional furniture.

In short they loved his view that architecture was the mould of the modern spirit and of the machine-age civilisation

Mies van der Rohe, 

Brno, then Czechoslovakia

Compare Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye with a] Villa Tugendhat in Brno, built by Mies van der Rohe in 1930 and b] Gropius’ house in Lincoln Mass, 1938. They were in three different countries, but Mies van der Rohe and Gropius were definitely paying homage to the master and to his five principles of domestic architecture.

Gropius, USA

In my post called The Bauhaus Moved to Tel Aviv, I wrote “German Jews who made aliya in the l930s brought with them the then-newest architect­ural ideas: the modernist ideas of ar­ch­itects Le Corb­usier and Walter Gropius”. It occurred to me that I better display a Le Corbusier house, and two Bauhaus designed houses, in order to explicate the link to Tel Aviv. To be sure Tel Aviv Bauhaus architects built blocks of flats, not individual homes. Furthermore they were building in a hot, Mediterranean climate, not a cool northern European or northern USA climate. But the European masters would have recognised their contribution to Tel Aviv’s architectural stock.

Tel Aviv flats

Bauhaus design

Would the Architectural Technologies blog have recognised their contribution? In 2009 the post Smart Sweet Smart Home discusses future buildings having non-weight-bearing walls to free up the designer; creating an open and flexible interior floor plan, free of weight-bearing walls; including long, sliding windows and doors to increase light and airflow; and creating rooftop gardens to increase warmth in winter and coolness in summer. Short of the computerised Greenness, I think Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus architects would have fitted the bill nicely.

"Notes on a Scandal"

A film starring two mature actresses in tough emotional roles is a film worth seeing. The blog called The Balcony is Closed [1] reviewed one such brilliant film:

“I saw Notes On a Scandal a week or so ago, starring the succulent Cate Blanchett and dazzling Judi Dench. Talk about the year of the woman – here are two great roles for two actresses to really strut their stuff. And not in some chewing-the-scenery-I’m-trying-to-win-an-award kind of way.

Judi is Barbara, the older, rumpled, mean and rather strange history professor at a London school in a less than desirable neighborhood. Cate is Sheba (short for Bathsheba – hmmm) the bourgeois bohemian new art teacher who has decided to leave her housewifely duties behind and teach. Like an unsuspecting butterfly, Sheba falls into the web of Barbara, and what begins as a friendship turns into a scary, freakishly codependent relationship built on emotional blackmail.I am not going to give away what makes Sheba give into Barbara’s Single White Female ways, but trust me, you can’t turn away.

What a great foundation! Lots of tension, lots of ambiguous morality, and lots of London. Who could ask for anything more?Both women are excellent and portray characters that are sympathetic and dastardly at the same time. Only these two could elicit such a range of reaction from the viewer, I think. I can’t say I’m going to see this movie again and again, but I did enjoy the story and I love stories without tidy endings.”

But let me add to this blog. Barbara’s thinking about the new young woman teacher went well beyond sisterly friendship. Sheba started the story with enth­usiasm, energy and youth; she was almost a wide-eyed ingénue. Well not quite, in the light of her behaviour with a teenage student. But Sheba’s face told the story: pleasure, ambivalence, uncertainty, fear and finally complete comprehension in the face of sneaky blackmail.

There are not many actresses who could carry off these roles: Blanchett and Dench, to be sure; Emma Thompson for whom I would give a kidney; Helen Mirren, Toni Collette, Meryl Streep and Claudia Karvan.

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[1] http://thebalconyisclosed.blogspot.com/ogspot.com/

Rebecca Solomon, London artist

In Victorian Paintings blog, Hermes gave many fine examples of paintings from the Solomon family of artists. But what scholarly art histories have been written about this amazing Jewish London family Michael and Kate Solomon had 8 babies in 1824-40, which app­ar­ently did not send the family into poverty. They were comfortable, fashionable and part of mainstream London culture .

The Solomons were naturally influenced by Victorian tastes in general and by the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic more specifically. See the Pre Raphaelite Art blog for two of Simeon's dreamy paintings "The Sleepers and the One Who Watcheth"  and  "A Prelude by Bach". The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood didn’t last for many years but it inspired art throughout the second half of the 19th century.

Of the 8 Solomon children, 3 of them became professional artists: Abraham b1824, Rebecca b1832 and Simeon b1840. Simeon was clearl­y talented AND was fortunate enough to meet and become quite close to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. They introduced Simeon to William Holman-Hunt, Algernon Charles Swinburne and other members of the intellectual elite.

But Simeon’s impressive rise and disastrous fall has been very well documented. I am much more interested in Abraham and Rebecca.

The Parting, by Abraham Solomon

Abraham Solomon learned painting in a very decent school of art and went on to admitted to the Royal Academy. Second Class, The Parting 1854 was a very tragic image of a young lad who was about to emigrate to Australia, being farewelled by his mother and sister who feared they would never see him again. Maudlin perhaps, but every mother in Britain would have felt terrible, looking at Solomon’s scene.

The Acquittal 1857, one of a series of court-related images, showed an exhausted family who had waited in a court house all day, finally to hear their relative had been found not guilty of the charge. The relief, although overstated, was heartfelt. Art Blog By Bob makes the point that court cases and prisons remained a harsh reality for working class Victorians as the gap between the haves and the have-nots widened to a chasm. For the upper classes in England, Graphic Content like Abraham painted was largely invisible.

The Acquittal, by Abraham Solomon

Abraham taught art to his sister Rebecca, and it amazes me still that she was able to exhibit her paintings at the Royal Academy between 1851-75. She clearly had a long and successful career, yet I can find so little of her life and art.

The Governess, by Rebecca Solomon

The Governess 1854 showed a gent­eel young lady, attractive but with no family money, having no career alternatives other than being a governess to someone else’s children. The mistress and master of the house gaze with admiration into each other’s eyes; the governess can only dream of what might have been, had she had a family of her own. The Love Letter 1861 was more am­big­uous, but it certainly suggested that Rebecca was an artist of her (high Victorian) time.

Love Letter, by Rebecca Solomon

What is so irritating is that Rebecca has almost been written out of art history. Abraham died very young and Simeon was no longer accepted in fashionable circles because of indecent exposure and sodomy in a public place. But Rebecca’s career should have been well documented. While not a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood herself, she was an assistant in the studio of John Everett Millais for a time and she worked for Edward Burne-Jones as a model. She was not “unconnected” in the art world.

Rebecca died at a quite young age. She was run over by a coach in 1886, aged 54. Read Solomons: A Family of Painters, Geffrye Museum London, 1985, a very useful book.