Unfinished Business
There is a dialogue in architecture that is almost forgotten between the likes of the architects John Nash and John Soane, who were just born and died a few years apart from each other. While Nash worked for the Prince Regent master-planning the city of London, Soane followed a different success having a professorship at the Royal Academy, later coming together with Nash at the Office of Works to oversee the building and maintenance of the royal castles and residences. Between the two of them they were to spar and parry over the rudiments of architecture; a subject that still maintains a contemporary significance, since their works have sustained their place in London.
The implication of the Nash master-plan is that it provides the notion of a royal 'ceremony' in the intellectual narrative that maintains architecture. By example, as with any narrative, it challenges the notion of its interpretation and it is by no means final; waging a war with time to determine its progressive continuity. Paradoxically this situation seemed to have been entertained by Soane, that I have speculatively mirrored with his Stable block at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea; purposefully acknowledging the geometry surrounding the Regent's Crescent that presents the landscape as a place for the horses to 'graze'; the London Ha-ha; perhaps even a gesticulation of royal humour. I found the product of a pair of book ends quite fitting to mimic the extent of this voluminous story.
The Paradox is the Point, signed notably by All Soul's Church but equally appraised by the Crescent, that unifies a construct in the fabric of London to exonerate the notions of excess expressed by the governing society; for it was the idea of governance that was expedited by the honour of truth. Between these two men, one appointed by the King, the other a Freemason, architecture was quarrelled between gentlemen, with London as the sandpit, addressing issues such as the Economy (The Bank of England); Rule (Buckingham Palace); Art (Dulwich Picture Gallery); Triumph (Marble Arch). It presents us with a taxonomic dissection of the architectural imagination that purports to support the needs of a population starved of culture whether it had been drawn from the enlightenment of the Grand European Tour or expunged from the tomes of historical tenets of architecture set to collect dust for yet another century in some out of the reach library of iniquity.