House of fun
hooted away like a frightened owl, and Eshun simpered in sympathy, the listener failed to pick up anything that was remotely amusing. What on earth has Potter Perry got to say about white identity? It was embarrassing.
Eshun then toddled off to Tate Britain to look at The Beloved by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. There he was guided through the history of the painting by a PhD student, who invited us all to “take learnings”. As P.G. Wodehouse might have said: I studied my mind; it boggled.
By now Eshun, without ever indicating what the core of “whiteness” might consist of, had settled into a rhythm he clearly enjoyed. He has a touch of the Beth Rigbys, being unable to pronounce the letter G at the end of a word. It is not a winning quality in a broadcaster.
From the UK we were whisked across the Atlantic for an American perspective, but the speakers, a journalist on the New Yorker and an academic, shed little light. There is something to be said about the polarity between black and white in American life, as the troubled racial history of that nation suggests, but we learned nothing.
Words were tossed about like conkers in autumn. We heard about privilege, colonialism and prejudice, but these terms mean nothing unless somebody is prepared to buttress an argument with reference to specific times, places and people. It is not good enough simply to assert that black people have far too often been on the wrong end of an ill-defined process called “whiteness”.
Wearyingly, we are asked to apologise for things done and undone, words said and unsaid. If we are middle class, as most 5DGLR KRVW (NRZ (VKXQ DQG KLV IULHQG WKH VK\ FURVV GUHVVLQJ SRWWHU *UD\VRQ 3HUU\ of us are, then the punishment is doubled. As students at St Andrews University are told, to suggest that all people should be treated equally may in itself be a sign of inequality. Oh Alice, look what you’ve done. Why ever did you fall down that rabbit hole?
By inviting listeners to admit their complicity in the disgrace of genuine prejudice and, yes, racism, Eshun failed utterly to make his case. The world is more complicated than he imagines, and he would do well to reflect on his failure. Sloppy in outline, lazy in presentation, and altogether too pleased with itself, this was a shoddy piece of work. However, with June Sarpong, the BBC’s “diversity tsarina”, keeping her beady eye on her charges, we shall endure many more gruesome experiences.
for those of a certain age, the sound of Brian Fahey’s band playing “At the Sign of the Swingin’ Cymbal” cannot fail to animate the ghosts of yesteryear. The tune was first heard in 1961, when Alan Freeman presented Pick of the Pops, and it continues to ring loud and clear every Saturday on Radio 2 at three minutes past one, when Paul Gambaccini (left) ushers us down Memory Lane. “Greetings, pop-pickers!” The traditional welcome always pleases. But Gambo goes one better than “Fluff ”. “Saturday”, he tells us, “is our day.” Indeed it is, and he is a splendid host. Running down the charts from the glory days of pop, he likes to say “that if it’s 1966, there must be the Kinks, the Small Faces and the Beach Boys”. Oh yes, there must! It’s like tucking into a feast of fig rolls and jaffa cakes, washed down with jugs of dandelion and burdock.
We don’t hear so many hits from the Sixties these days, and more’s the pity. An edict has gone out from the top, instructing presenters like Gambaccini not to live so much in the past. What a swizz. You can’t have a proper POTP without the first hour being devoted to a year from the decade when pop music came of age. Gambo, who knows this, is keeping his front pad next to his bat. His loyal, frustrated listeners c should make their views known. O one of the great pleasures of the autumn is the opportunity to see and study the Cosmic House on Lansdowne Walk in leafy Holland Park, now open to the public for 15 people a day, only on weekdays, subject to the fierce conditions for visitors required by the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (you can book on the Cosmic House website).
Cosmic House was designed as a joint endeavour, much of the original work done by Terry Farrell, who was responsible for the elaborate exterior, the central staircase round which all the other rooms revolve, and the overall ground plan.
Charles Jencks, the owner of the house, was the maestro of the ornament and symbolism. Maggie Keswick, his wife, was presumably party to it all and may have paid for it (her father was Sir John Keswick, chairman of Jardine Matheson). She very much influenced Charles in his interest in Chinese gardens, but perhaps did not have quite the same taste as her husband for cosmic symbolism and retreated to a less decorated room upstairs: “the symbolism stops at my door”.
Michael Graves, the American post-modernist designed two fireplaces, Piers Gough the jacuzzi in the basement, based on a Borromini dome (he claimed to have “put the borrow into Borromini”) and both Jeremy Dixon and Rem Koolhaas did designs for rooms which Jencks rejected.
Work on the design of the Cosmic House began in 1978, the year that Jencks got married. He had met Maggie Keswick whilst teaching at the Architectural Association.
It was the year after he had published The Language of Post-Modern Architecture,
his architectural manifesto which he published in seven different editions and was the key text of his life, determined as he was to co-opt every architect and every movement in architecture to post-modernism, including Norman Foster.
The house looks like, and was intended as, the visual corollary of his book, with all the strengths and weaknesses of a manifesto, where every feature, from the two doorknobs on the front door to the triglyphs of spoons on the kitchen cupboards to the design of the jacuzzi, is a sometimes over-elaborate combination of theoretical statement and joke (Jencks was very serious about jokes), all of it made out of MDF.
Jencks was in favour of ornament, colour, complex symbolism and abstruse architectural meaning. In the 1970s he was one of the key voices in rejecting modernism and introducing a change in architectural style, claiming credit in the multiple books he wrote during the rest of his life, although I have a suspicion that Léon Krier was at least as influential within the architectural community and architects
were themselves tiring of modernism and its consequences.
It is not clear where Jencks got his ideas. He had read English as an undergraduate at Harvard in the early 1960s and remained interested in literary theory, the idea of meaning in design, and became deeply interested in semiotics during the late 1960s, editing a book on Meaning in
Architecture in 1969, jointly with George Baird, who, like Jencks, taught at the Architectural Association. As a postgraduate, he switched to architecture.
Walter Gropius was his Professor at Harvard; but new ideas were beginning to swirl about, as demonstrated by the publication of Robert Venturi’s Complexity
and Contradiction in Architecture by the Museum of Modern Art in 1966 (Jencks claimed not to have been influenced by Venturi, but that is hard to believe as their attitude to ornament, mannerism and architectural meaning are so similar).
In 1965, Jencks got a Fulbright Scholarship to do a PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture, supervised by Reyner Banham, superficially a very unlikely mentor. But he must have been influenced by Banham in being so obsessively interested in contemporary architecture and how to classify it and, also, in believing that the best way to study architecture was to travel.
His PhD was stuffed full of ideas (a bit like the Cosmic House). It was published in 1973 as Modern Movements in Architecture, a key book in undermining modernism by showing the full range of stylistic choices available and by treating architecture as a menu, rather than a discipline dominated by social responsibility and functionalism. How has his house
worn and what is one to make of it after the near 40 years since its 1983 completion? It is hard to imagine living in it because it is so overloaded with symbolism. Each bookcase is in a different style to match the books and it is impossible to walk past one of the table lights without brushing off half a lampshade.
But in terms of helping to break through the orthodoxies of modernism with its introduction of game-playing, colour and ornament, its belief that design could be interesting and a subject of passionate after-dinner discussion, we all owe Jencks a debt of gratitude — even if he felt, with some justification, that this was inadequately recognised during his life time.
The Cosmic House is a monument to Jencks, left to a charitable trust to perpetuate c his ideas. It is a generous mausoleum. c Visit The Critic online for exclusive political commentary, features and book reviews. With insights from columnists like Joshua Rozenberg and Norman Lebrecht, and contributors including Alexander Larman, Josephine Bartosch, Robert Hutton, Ella Whelan and Jeremy Black, The Critic website contains a feast of essential reading for the inquisitive mind. www.thecritic.co.uk