Basingstoke is cold and wet. Just passing through for a
week. Amazing how quickly we adapt to a new routine, new surroundings, new
climate. All the little details of life are different here, but it soon feels
like home.
Took a walk down to Top of the Town. So many buildings in this area still have
traces of the old oak framing that was once the height of modern technology.
Evidence of West Saxon origins, the old kingdom of Wessex. Ghosts in the walls
and in the language. Windows and doors blocked up and moved countless times.
Shifts in the vowel sounds. Old meanings forgotten. Words compressed.
The new artificial lenses in my eyes are part amazing, part frustrating. I can
see individual leaves on the trees at the other side of the park, but I need
reading glasses to type this on my phone. Life moves on. Each moment is
precious because it is connected through our memories and imagination to a vast
web of stories. For me those stories mostly revolve around buildings. They form
the backbone of my conceptual world.
A thousand stories could be told about this one image. From the lichen on the
plain clay roof tiles, to the coal-soot on the chimney cowls, to the security
cameras sprouting from the walls like mushrooms.
Good to be back.
Following on from yesterday's post about a Basingstoke
roofscape: (Top of the Town viewed through my new artificial lenses) I was
taken back to my 2017 visit, and an outing to The Vyne, a country house just to
the North.
The roof was under renovation, which gave me the privilege of climbing the
scaffold and seeing the innards exposed. Evidence again of a couple of
centuries of evolution in form technique and materials. A transition also from
the vernacular of master carpenter to the studied classical vision shared by
gentleman patrons and their chosen architects.
Plain clay tiles again, hand-made with matching hips and ridges. Chimneys from
the time when wood was still the primary fuel although coal would have begun to
compete on price in London based on transport costs. A house that changed hands
after the English Civil War, power shifting from the old catholic noble
families to the lawyers and merchants of London.
Perhaps that shift brought in a move to a purer classical style, demoting the
master craftsman and inserting sculptor-architects who shared their patrons'
passion for ancient Rome.
Typical UK weather, as in you never know what to expect.
Cool and crisp today but dry with bright sunshine at times.
The shopping centre at Basingstoke isn't ground-breaking architecture, but it's
a good enough mixture of fun and amenity to attract shoppers day in, day out.
Half the fun of shopping is the buzz of other shoppers all around. So it works,
which is far more important than architectural awards.
In the evening, an impromptu meet up with my old friend Kamran and a walkabout
in Whitchurch. I've beenp talking about the local tradition of heavy oak
framing in the last couple of posts. This gable end is a nice example. The pegs
that signal mortice and tenon joints are well expressed. I also appreciate the
natural grey of the wood.
You have to call this a vernacular, artisan tradition. Very different from the
paper designs inspired by classical precedent that gradually took over.
Architects with academic training and no experience "on the tools"
laying down the law for mere builders to follow.
There's no going back, but it's interesting to see the traces of this
fundamental shift, locked in to the building stock of so many small towns and
villages around here.
I never got very far, reading my copy of Lewis Mumford's
most famous book. Is that the book or is it me? That uncertainty has kept it
out of the suitcase trip to my retirement flat (so far)
I looked in vain for a copy on Kindle but bought instead one of his shorter
works. I found it an easier read and quite intriguing. An account of American
buildings making the transition from craft tradition to self-conscious
architecture. Presented as an echo of the same transition that took place in
England a century or so earlier.
"educated eighteenth-century gentlemen, (with) one foot in their own age,
and the other in the grave of Rome. (exemplified by Thomas Jefferson in the
USA)"
"It was the Revolution itself, I believe, that turned the classical taste
into a myth which had the power to move men."
"the work is not the product of a specialized education; it is rather the
outcome of a warm, loving, and above all intelligent... and precise interest in
classical forms."
The Vyne captures this transition rather well with its classical portico set
against more pragmatic earlier work. Was it the English revolution also that marked the end of the medieval world and the emergence of an "age of reason" inspired by ancient Rome. I used to wonder about the odd, hybrid forms of Tudor & Elizabethan architecture but perhaps they make more sense as creations of the old Master-Builder class, before the gentleman-architect came to prominence. Not that one is better than the other, just that both reflect the way that the society and economy of England was evolving.
Then, according to Mumford, their is a kind of recapitulation in American history with the transition from frontier society to urban civility also marked by a civil war.
It's an interesting framing
