Piccadilly, London

Interlude  

My obsession with the unregarded aspects of English architecture often brings me up against a small detail on a very famous building, a detail that seems to be unnoticed by most people. I’ve posted before about the unique telephone box in the entrance way to Burlington House, the grand home of London’s Royal Academy in Piccadilly. When I enter the building’s courtyard I also often pause at a place close by, to admire a set of relief carvings that encrust the stonework of the entrance arches. No one is ever looking at these when I go through – there is, after all, usually something else inside in the form of a major loan exhibition that’s waiting for their attention. But I think the carvings are worth more than a glance, even if the combination of animal and plant life with urns and ornament, plus cameo-like heads (not to mention classical draped figures in the spandrels of the arches), is hardly fashionable.* The work is certainly interesting if one bothers to look – if the urn in all its swagged and pelleted elegance is out of a pattern book, that bird with its opening beak, carefully delineated feathers, and inquisitive eye is a charmer. And the beast in the lower photograph is arrested and engaged me as I looked and tried to work out the relationship between head and massive paw and wings. I’m not sure who made these carvings – someone out there must know.†  For the rest of us, they’re a diverting free show for the eye, a prelude perhaps to the serious art inside, or an interlude on the way up Piccadilly.

* Perhaps I should say, especially because it’s hardly fashionable…

† Pictures of Burlington House’s architectural sculpture appear quite often on line, on photo-sharing sites, but I’ve not seen anywhere the name of the person who did these carvings. There’s an excellent post about the more prominent statues of artists on the same building at the Ornamental Passions site, here.

Piccadilly, London

Dashing for the post

Facebook reminded me today that one year ago I went to the excellent Ai Weiwei exhibition in London’s Royal Academy, an occasion that not only left me with enduring memories of the art, but also gave me reason to notice the very old telephone box in the entrance to the RA’s building, Burlington House.

Looking back through my pictures, I notice that I also have an image* of the wooden post box under the Burlington House entrance arch.† This is all that remains of the Post Office that was once in a room to one side of the entrance arch. The Post Office closed as long ago as 1940, and this box is a reminder that in the 19th century, post boxes were far from standard in form. Big cast-iron monster boxes, pillar boxes like Doric columns, and the elegant hexagonal Penfold boxes§ were all around in the 19th century, along with various other forms, and some of these old ones have still not been replaced with newer designs, much to our visual benefit. For Burlington House, with its classical forms and intricate Renaissance revival ornament (see the left and right edges of the picture), something still more different was fitting. So this very formal wooden box is complete with classical pediment, in which a carved crown is set amid scrollwork. Beneath, there are two slots, which are now marked ‘Franked Mail’ and ‘Stamped Mail’. Above the plate saying ‘Stamped Mail’ one can just discern part of the word ‘London’ beneath – originally these two slots would have been for letters to London and elsewhere respectively.

I have a hunch, and it’s only that, that the shape of this bespoke wooden box has a practical raison d’être. Not only is it made to fit neatly in the available wall space between the pilasters but it’s also not very deep (and wall-mounted, so that it does not occupy floor space). This is not a wide passage and it can get busy. Plonking a ready-made letterbox here just wouldn’t have been very convenient. Altogether, it’s an elegant solution.

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* My photograph contains a blurred figure walking quickly into the frame. I doubt if this figure is recognisable, but if you do recognise yourself and would rather not have your image online, please contact me using the ‘comment’ button below, and I will remove the picture.

† The sign above the box reminds us that the Linnean Society, Britain’s learned society concerning itself with biological sciences, is based in rooms above the entrance arch to Burlington House.

§ I plan to post more about Penfold boxes soon; 2016 is the year of the Penfold’s 150th anniversary.

Piccadilly, London

Space invader

An alien invader has appeared in the courtyard of the Royal Academy. It’s a scale model of one of the great unbuilt projects of Russian communism, the Monument to the Third International, designed in 1919–20 by Vladimir Tatlin and commonly known as Tatlin’s tower. The original was intended to be 400 m high and although known as a monument it was intended to house various functions of the Third International, also known as Comintern, the organization set up in 1919 to fight for communism in Russia and beyond. Inside the tower’s double spiral of twisted metal were to be four structures of steel and glass, each in effect a separate building. These inner structures – in the model they are made of wire – were designed to accommodate separate parts of Comintern. Each was to be a perfect form (a cube, a pyramid, a cylinder, and a hemisphere) and the three lower ones were meant to rotate at different speeds.

Perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that this monster monument was never built. The constructional challenges were immense and the amount of steel required was enormous. But not for the first or last time, an unbuilt structure started balls rolling. The idea of its intricate steel network inspired architects and engineers, and the tower (and its enigmatic designer) has enjoyed a long afterlife in books about architecture, histories of the Soviet Union, and even fiction. Now architects Dixon Jones have built this replica to accompany the Royal Academy’s exhibition Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture, 1915-–1935, which is on at the RA until 22 January. The tower looks rather odd against the Palladian-Victorian background of Burlington House. As I was trying to photograph it, I longed for a neutral background. But the contrast between the constructivist steelwork of Tatlin’s tower and the stonework behind is, I suppose, part of the point. It was always meant to stick out and in its new incarnation in Piccadilly it still does.

There are details of the exhibition here.