 Well, welcome everybody, and I say everybody, I think we have around 55 participants at the moment to this webinar. I'm Martin Foss, I'm Deputy Director for Grants and Publications at the Mellon and it's my great pleasure to chair this session, Authors of Architecture, which is our latest in the series, British Art and Natural Forces, this wonderful and very ambitious program that's been devised by my colleague I read with events which have already occurred and I know some of you will have attended those, which will be going on until really early December. The last one is the panel discussion on the 3rd of December, but plenty of events before that I think we have at least another seven after today's session so do have a look at those carefully, there's still time to sign up and so have a look at our web page and we'll see all the details there. I think we can get started because it's my clock says six minutes past 12. So shall we just run through, I needed to run through a few little housekeeping things before we get to the main business. So if you could just take a look at that, which you'll see on the screen now I won't go through absolutely everyone, everything. Essentially we'll have we've got four presentations for papers that each going to last 20 minutes and we're going to do them in two. So we will have the first one the second one, then we'll have 10 minutes of questions relating to those two papers, then we'll have another two and then 10 minutes relating to the second pair of papers, and then whatever time we've got leftover we can open it out to talk about all papers that that's the format so we'll, you know, we will keep it will keep it moving along briskly. We'll have another two to let everyone have an opportunity to say what they need to do. Use the Q&A box. If you want to ask and write a question I'll be looking at that and so Ella and my other colleague Danny. So keep an eye on that. So if you do have a question, we'll use that. And then of course use the chat box. If you don't want to make any comments or if you have any problems or you can't hear or see anything like that. Okay. I think everything else is self explanatory we are recording it, but that will be kept in the PMC archive, but we, none of us must take photographs. We're going to take housekeeping rules. And I'm joined by our speakers. I think you can see them are four speakers on the screen there. And Freya, Ewan, Alicia and Jonathan. And that's the order in which the presentations are going to take place. So, I think without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Freya Wigsall. She's finishing or completing her doctorate at the Bartlett University College London UCL features prominently today, as you'll see. And she's going to be talking about an interest or the widespread interest in shells, something we kind of take for granted, I think, in 20th century architecture. So Freya, shall I just hand over to you. I'm going to meet myself and suggest the rest of us mute ourselves. It's eight minutes past 12. Okay. Okay. Hello, everyone. I'm going to share my screen. Okay. Hi, everyone. So my title, Piling Up the Debris. It's not the most informative, but the talk is going to be about the Roche bed Portland stone cladding on the Economist building in London. The building was commissioned by the Economist magazine and designed by the British architects Allison and Peter Smithson, following a limited competition in 1959. And it was completed in 1964. It occupies a corner site between St. James Street, Ryder Street and Burry Street between Green Park and Piccadilly. And it's now one of the most written about British buildings. This scheme is made up of three towers of different heights, each with a different purpose. You've got the Economist office block, which is right here. I don't know if you can see my cursor. You have the bank building, which is in the corner here again showing you here. And just this sliver here is the residential block. And these are all around a central raised plaza. It was an orthodox layout. The conventional practice for a commercial building at that time was to fill the whole site with a low single tower. Sorry, a low building with a single tower above like this one, which is a contemporary build New Zealand house, which is just down the road. Instead with the agreement of the onus, the Smithsons and the Economist magazine created a design which gave each function a separate building grouped around an open, slightly raised public space of the plaza. Peter Smithson did all the exterior detailing himself and Roche Bedstone is the cladding for all three towers, the column cappings, the spandrels, steps, balustrades. And it was mixed into the concrete as an aggregate for the paving of the plaza. Roche was another unorthodox choice because at the time the Smithsons used it, he was completely unprecedented. So what's special about Roche, and this is a close up of the Roche on the Economist building is that you can see the evidence of the shells in it. There are thousands of organisms that lived 150 million years ago, which built up over time were compressed, and then have been dissolved into the limestone by acid ground walkers leaving these shell shaped cavities. There are some indexical traces that mark the stone, distinguish it from the much more common wit bed Portland, which comes from the lower geological bed in the Portland sequence and is consequently more compressed, making it softer to cut, purer and whiter. Traditionally Roche was regarded as unusable for anything except rough work like sea defences, and it was generally discarded and left on the sides of quarries. And it was thought of as an ugly stone stigmatized because of these cavities. Now the geologist, Eric Robinson, who has written a lot about stone used in London buildings has emphasized just how unprecedented the use of Roche on the Economist was. In the 1960s, when others were working in the horror of shuttered concrete, the architects, the smithsons discovered Roche. They found that in a modern building, in which it was simply an external cladding. The porosity was not a major problem, while the rough surface texture lent a definite character to the finish. So they use Roche extensively in an already innovative design. Other aspects of the design for a difficult setting won the McLean and prizes for the architecture as much would be accorded them with geologists for the largest surface area of Portland Roche to be seen anywhere in London, if not the southeast, including the Portland Island. For this reason, 25 St James's Street, the Plaza Walk area, and especially the shallow tread steps are places of pilgrimage in the capital. So the rest of my talk is really about why, why did the smithsons pick Roche when no one had ever picked it before, and what was it they liked about it, you know, what possible significance might it have for the building. It's my view that it's possible that the Roche bedstone, far from being a choice arrived at after the form of the building had been arrived at, a kind of decorative dressing, was in fact a choice made much earlier, and that we can see the buildings as a support for the stone, a structure devised to carry this very distinctive surface. And the Roche potentially says something fundamental about the project, something that's not been developed before. So there's several well known choices for the Roche that have been documented, both by the smithsons and others who worked with them on the buildings. So let's quickly look at these. So the explanation for the choice of Roche was to do with the developments in stone cutting technology. In the 1950s diamond wire saw and made it possible for the first time to cut Roche thinly, a change that is acknowledged by Peter Smithson. The technicalities may have been the clients and planning requirements for a stone cladding, one that respected the surrounding Georgian and Edwardian architecture in St. James's Street, much of which is clad in whip bed. The use of not the customary Portland stone but a hitherto unused variety by the smithsons might be seen as an innovative solution to the requirement, a kind of bending or playing with the walls while remaining within the brief. The other major rationale for the Roche put forward both at the time of the building and reiterated more recently was to do with weathering and city pollution. This is a photograph from the plaza facing the residential block before the stones cleaned in the 1990s. Peter Salter, who worked with the smithsons and later the architectural historian Jonathan Hill, who's going to be talking in a minute, have both made the point that cavities in the Roche stone collected set deposits from the surrounding atmosphere. But this was part of the controlled staining of the building that interested the smithsons. Salter emphasized how over time the facade which originally had little modulation of its structure acquired great visual depth understood through the control of shadows of soot and the scouring of the stone. Likewise, more recently, one of the assistants on the economist Timothy Tinker has also flagged the effects of staining, noting that conventional whip bed Portland stone did not, did not weather well and the whole art of cleaning buildings in the early 1960s was in its transparency. So these very practical reasons, technology, whether the need for cladding one actually but also reflected the light into the space of the plaza. What none of them do is refer to the Shelley characteristic of the stone this scarring, which Robinson says gave the Roche its definite character. Later on in the 1990s Peter Smithson referred to the shell pattern in the Roche as pretty imbuing it with a kind of ornamental or decorative quality and suggesting that this was part of the appeal of the choice for him and Allison. And more recently still their assistants Timothy Tinker and also George Kasabov have also separately said the Smithsons chose the stone because of its liveliness and because it was honest, because you could see with the naked eye the organisms that had gone into its making. That then is the sum of what we know about why the Smithsons chose Roche bedstone and and the story might might end there and that might be the whole thing. What I want to do now is put forward to other possible suggestions about why the Smithsons might have selected the stone suggestions that have some implications and how we might see the buildings more generally, and which in particular draw upon the natural. And these ideas come from conversations taking place in the independent group of which the Smithsons were members, and particularly between the Smithsons and their friends the artists Eduardo Paulotzi and Nigel Henderson. So my first suggestion about the economist Roche has to do with the idea of a carapace or a casing an external casing. In the 1950s, Paulotzi was making a series of sculptures that he described as things, not figures things. Made of bronze these sculptures were hollow and the surfaces were marked with the imprints of different types of throw away obsolescent matter. These were toys broken utensils bits of machinery, which Paulotzi had cast into the surface of the bronze, a process he described as damage arrays destroy deface and transform, and the effect of which the critic Lawrence all the way like into a wall of fossils. These finished objects, these fragile things made out of the impressions of life's cast off were also described in a language of violence and destruction. And this is a quote, something frightful had happened to them, they may have been blasted by a Russian or bomb or buried for decades and resurrected by accident. That's the story and how foster has suggested that although, while at one level, we can read Paulotzi figures as symbols of destruction, we might also read them as symbols of survival. Foster argues that the matter that makes up Paulotzi sculptures can be seen as analogous to a hypothesis Sigmund Freud puts forward in beyond the pleasure principle, in which Freud argues that in order to survive. An organism involves a protective shield out of the stimuli it receives from the world, a kind of necrotic crust or shell that allows an organism to protect the nervous system at its core. I think it's, it's possible to make an analogy between Paulotzi figures and their textures and the Roche on the economist building in so far as we can read the Roche as a protective casing. The Roche is like Paulotzi's necrotic crust, which was made through a man made method and through the accumulation of man made castoffs. The Roche is of course made through natural forces, and through the build up of natural castoffs. The suggestion of a casing of a natural equivalent to Palazzi sculptures works particularly if we think of the economist Plaza, not as an outside space, but an internal one, one that provides a kind of enclosure against the surrounding space of the city. The Roche then becomes a crust or shell around the interior of each tower, and also around the space of the Plaza, providing that is a shield of all of fossils between the Plaza and the city. This is what I took last week of the Plaza facing Ryder Street and this here is Whitbed that the building you're looking at. I'm not suggesting the Smithsons knew about Freud's arguments. There's, there's no evidence that they did, but the aesthetic it links to might have infiltrated that material selection by a Palazzi. The Smithsons will ongoing be very preoccupied with human association human structures and change. I've read about a few quotes of things they said over the years. As they wrote in 1970 in order in missing light, the first principle of town development should be continuous objective analysis of the human structure and its change. Earlier in 61 they spoke of the need to reidentify man with his environment that could no longer be achieved by using historical forms of house grouping the streets, squares, greens, because as a social reality, they no longer existed. In 2006 they discussed how that architecture was committed to some sort of social dialogue. So that's, that's my first proposition, a carapace, a means of creating a protective human shield or space by means of an aquatic crust formed not not like Palazzi sculptures of industrial human debris, but have naturally created debris, the shells of mollusks that died millions of years The second idea I want to propose about the Roach is about pattern and a hidden order, and again this resonates with artistic concerns happening during the period immediately prior to the Economist Commission. I confess I haven't, I haven't found a clear way of talking about this but I'm going to give it a go. The idea of a pattern comes out in relation to the concept of the as found, and it's a concept the Smithons described in 1990 as a new way of seeing the ordinary. And it's included an interest in the patterns to be discovered in everyday life. It's, it's a concept they say they got from Nigel Henderson, who in the 1950s was photographing and this is very well known, photographing the environment around his home in Bethany or green, including the marks and traces of wear and debris and patch ups, such as the arbitrary patterns that form through damage done to external walls. And underlying this idea of pattern and the as found was an interest in process. And this is a quote, the correspondence between appearance and actual material construction, but there was also a more elusive idea of a hidden order to things. At this period, at least up until 1956 the as found according to the Smithons latest statement was preoccupied with the discovery of a reality beneath appearances. An idea derived from James Joyce's epiphany, or in Henderson's case, the surrealist indebted indebted concept of selective accident. A chance set the found phenomena, bringing about an order which you might ideally wished invented to create from scratch. Looking closely at the exhibition, Parallel of life and art and exhibition Henderson Pellopsie and the Smithons collaborated on the 1953. In the architectural historian Irini scale bear has argued that many of the ideas present in the exhibition, and the as found had been derived from the Parisian avant garde figures such as Tristan to our debut for a and on the new show, who sought to dispose of governing ideas of form language and beauty. Others were mediated through Pellopsie and Henderson and others, both of whom had been in Paris in the 1940s. In particular, Scalvett notes how for the prison artists, works of art were cast off from the ceaseless flux of life. They were signs or impressions lifted from the formlessness of matter, and they encouraged the Smithons to think of architecture as a debris of life. It's not quite elusive ideas, but I've got this drawing here by Henri Michel, and there is a kind of hidden order here, some kind of code that's inaccessible. The components that make it up the ink markings, the signs, and the way they've been distributed on the page. There's a, there's a kind of structure to it but it's not one that makes sense in terms of the conventional ways. I understand it that we organize things or any of the signs and symbols that we use. Now again, the Smithons never make a direct link between the as found or the Paris avant garde and Roche, not even do they connect it to process, although Tim Tinker did. But again, I think the aesthetics it links to are all very resonant with Roche. Skelberg's focus on the art game, he's focused on artificial manmade things, not the patterns and subliminal associations that can be created through natural forces and natural chaos. But Roche, if we look at it does have a close indexical relation to the substance from which it was made. We see in the final substance of Roche the imprints of the organisms from which it was created. Shells, the remains of organisms cast off from life pile up on a beach, or in the bed of a limestone in a random way, without any order to their arrangement, but the creating in that process, a new pattern, a new order from the seeming chaos. The shells are dissolved or transformed to then become traces, signs, impressions, but not things. And they are a literal take on an architecture as a debris of life, which is then built into more through the build up of ephemeral waste, the marks of pollution, crisp packets, cigarette butts. To very quickly wrap this up. In the 1960s, a world of rapidly advancing technologies and obsolescence, the economist takes as abruptly into a pre human world, and its own order and its own pattern. And the Smithsons perhaps use this to curate a necrotic crust, a type of shell with which to protect the modern human from the consequences of industrialization and urbanization. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much indeed for prayer. And that's fantastic. Sorry about my phone ringing in the background if anybody's wondering it's not your mobile, it's my phone over there. Hopefully the stop in a moment. I'm going to move straight on because when that was beautifully timed. 20 minutes, you did it in 19. So, thanks so much. I'm going to move on now straight forward to you and Robson. He's finished his PhD in 2019. Yeah, UCL and it was entitled a cathedral encountered stories and storytelling in medieval Durham. And I understand that that PhD from that thesis present presentation comes out of it. I'm very particularly looking forward to this, because it's a, it's a cathedral I know well even featured in our school song proud downs touch right so over to you, and you've got to 20 minutes. Thank you very much, Martin I hope you'll share that song with us later on. And hello everyone. I hope you can all hear me and by now and see the title slide at the PowerPoint I'll just steal a brief moment to offer some additional and sincere thanks to everyone. Thank you to the support team at the PMC, as well to Ella to Danielle to Anna for putting this program together thank you very much indeed and Freya that was such a fascinating paper and looking forward to the discussion. And if all the papers I've given recently I've actually been particularly looking forward to this event and to this panel for reasons that I actually might briefly summarise as a way of getting us started of laying a, if you like a little groundwork in terms of, excuse me methodology. Let's get to the main subject at hand. In this case, Durham Cathedral and the Old English poem to sit you don't know me, which will serve as a kind of lens through which we can look at it. In the original call for contributions the emphasis on the natural world on biological and ecological bodies of knowledge was inviting enough, but the repeated use of the term encounter one that features in my thesis, just mentioned in the blurb were really sharpened my interest and that's to say and I think I can quote verbatim here the encounter between artistic or our historical practice, and the forces of the natural world as well as the placement of such encounters in both contemporary and historical perspectives. And as much as this or something akin was the intention it put me in mind of Keith moxies analysis of the encounter in his book visual time from 2013, and the slightly stricter limits of the terms much older relatives, the Latin words in contra meaning in front of or contra against both of which define encounter fundamentally as you might imagine by a sense of two or more parties coming together. And this of course is to stress human proximity to an object or in this case, a building that presence and engagement a key that bodies might matter as much to the analysis, potentially, as buildings and this is this isn't just an opportunistic possibly even anachronistic gloss for the medieval world but something we know from the broad dissemination of Aristotelian texts and ideas in particular to be widely understood in medieval Europe at least, at least from the late 12th century, aesthetic experience interpretation knowledge belief, all were not only felt, as well as rationalize simultaneous and something we know about humans today of course from studies of mind and physiology but very obviously played on and with in the medieval world by conscious arts and architectural decisions. Now in terms of the visual zeitgeist surrounding the northeast of late 11th and early 12th century, England for want of a better phrase this already poses something of a challenge because not only historians of the period suffered more than most from a fragmentary and or compromised architectural record we've also been left to deal with a matching paucity of written sources, not least those relating to architectural Iqfrasis, how a building like Durham might have impressed persuaded delighted intimidated frightened even annoyed. And while this isn't to apologize per se, it's more to make a point of emitting a certain sympathy for what is sometimes called the hermeneutics of suspicion or what Rita felsky, once famously called the less visible and sometimes less flattering realities of arbitrary construction you will I hope get a better sense of all of this when we turn to our poem. But for now, we will just take a closer look at the cathedral. As this image can will show, despite being squeezed somewhat precariously between a quiff, a cliff, a brov, a brov, the river where to its west and abrupt Lancelot to the east, the cathedral complex that Durham was built almost to the largest dimensions, its sites would permit with walls exceeding sometimes three meters in thickness and a final length of more than 400 feet it can actually be counted among the largest and most ambitious structures, not only of its generation but almost of any following the decline of the Roman between the late fourth and early 12th centuries in fact only three buildings and the entirety of Western Christendom could rival the size of Old Saint Peter's in Rome, whereas in England ground was actually broken on nine such giants including Durham in less than a generation after 1066. And so this then is at least one measure of the profound visual impact and transformation brought about by events in late 11th and early 12th century England and unprecedented and almost military industrial mode of construction. Like many of its southern counterparts Durham will have spoken unashamedly in the voice of dominance expanding eclipsing coercing and thereby conquering and yet, despite having the plan, the massive proportions and the elevation of a more or less historic Norman cathedral, Durham's interior fabric was also exhaustively dressed in a curious and to that point in time exceedingly precocious kind of carved veneer. Possibly scarcely any surface from the vaults to the arcading to the peers that was not extravagantly embellished in some way, whether by chisel or by brush and interesting bold linear imagery abounded chevrons zigzags lozenges and spirals many of which you can see here in fact by almost every standard, not only of design but of execution, the proficiency of jointing and angling the consistency of slab dimensions, as well as the sheer finesse and precocity of its ornamentation. The maintenance work at Durham to paraphrase Eric phony one of the great authorities on the subject must have looked as if it belonged in a different age. The great change, precisely, however, has long been a matter for debates numerous prototypes among the relatively sparse and scattered remnants of pre conquest architecture have been proposed the small parishes of Wittering Stowe great Paxton, St. Bottles and the nearby Abbey of St Mary's York and I hesitate to neglect them here, but in the interest of brevity it will suffice I hope to say that there is still something like a broad, if sometimes quiet consensus that very few, if any of these connections can be thought to be definitive and certainly not singular influences on Durham's plan or execution. In any event this type of question may only go so far, I would submit, in terms of my, our primary interests here how these carvings actually function how they spoke how they were encountered in practice and in situ and the pursuit of these admittedly large and challengingly elusive ends we can actually turn to the work now of an anonymous poet in all likelihood, a monk living and working on site, precisely at the time of the cathedrals construction. Writing in or around the year 1104. That's to say the year of the translatio of St Cuthbert's body into Durham, and its first East End, the old English poem to sit you to now me blended space and nostalgia with an abundance of natural forces. It's famous throughout the Kingdom of Britain, built on high the rocks around it's wondrously grown up the where runs around it's a stream strong in waves and within it dwell many kinds of fish in the thronging of the waters, and there has grown up a great woodland enclosure, dwelling in the place on many beasts in the deep dales, beasts without number. And with these first eight of the 21 relatively brief lines are poet monk brings a lush and plentiful image of Durham interview it's unclear whether the famous Oceani insular the island in the Atlantic Ocean that be first described in his Distitue Britannia as being quote, remarkable for its rivers abounding in fish salmon eels and plentiful springs is being consciously evoked here does seem likely in any case not only is the situ here if you like inseparable from the city. The author seems very obviously to be investing in the poem right away with a series of strong visual connections to the northern landscapes of the past, the natural protection afforded to the cathedral through its combination of rocks, water, the great woodland enclosure was essential throughout its early medieval years of course not least when a much less powerful pre norm community had to deal with the repeated threats of Scandinavians and to know lesser degree. The Scots, but the specific and persistent praise of the landscape here was also very probably indicative of some of the long literary traditions associated with Cuthbert own her burner Saxon heritage. In early medieval Northumbria Southern Scotland and certain parts of Eastern Ireland, for instance, it was more than customary for new monastic foundations to seek remote locations like this but also specifically wooded ones to St Patrick one of Cuthbert's primary missionary ancestors found that his great church in the wood of Falkloth the hermit Marvin lives alone in his cleats or bothy in the woods got black also known as got lack of Crowland took to the land of the fence and as the extra book describes it a remote island in a wood reveal to him by God. St. Deglum built a secluded cell for himself next to the sea with quote trees close about it and even as late as the 12th century. Jeffrey Burton recorded in his life and miracles of St. Maudwena that the saint has sought out a secluded hermitage for herself, specifically on an island in the river Trent a place she quote loved, because at the time, it was a complete wilderness full of woods wild animals and desolate solitude. Now, the extent to which this issue don't only also brings to mind not just Durham's verger mellows as Nicholas pepsner once described them but it's thronging waters it's it's many kinds of fish and it's beasts without number is actually an unusual marriage with the natural environment to a number of recent studies in eco criticism have unpacked the ways by which many medieval sources made a habit of masking the relationship and cooperative potentials of human and non human environments this was done either by mitigating descriptions of the landscape through the use of top or otherwise mundane and formulaic prose or more commonly by emphasizing the essential oven us and danger of animality beyond civilized borders. By contrast, our poet here seems not only to actively caught but to eulogize the natural and perhaps even of the cathedrals surroundings. In the second half of the poem, we can note another kind of abundance to the uncounted relics of Durham's most revered historical figures at the heart of the descriptions is at the heart of the new cathedrals at the physical remains of Durham's renowned holy characters Cuthbert the gracious and most blessed flanks an extraordinary cast including Oswald, Aidan and Bede many of whom also resided quite literally within the saints embrace inside his tomb. Thus, you know, a repeated interest in containment seems to emerge. Successively, the Kingdom of Britain as a whole, the River Weir, the Great Woodland enclosure the cathedral itself Cuthbert and then finally Durham's relic collection, and it is that special relation and play between sight and frame that interests me most and physical vistas but in this instance, each successive space can be thought of as a kind of socio cultural construct from nation to region to city to saint and ever reducing ever richer distillation of a felt place and building is brought together. So during cathedral this is to say, is encountered by contemporary eyes as being inextricably tied to the natural spaces that surrounded it seems to have the uncanny potential to borrow from you honey plasma to revive the poetic dimensions already present in a natural place. Indeed, our anonymous poet was far from the far from the only medieval source to single these natural spaces out for special appraisal. Writing, not much later on the subject of Durham's foundation another monk in residence, Simeon, was it repeated pains to stress in his libelus just how remote and uninhabitable, the first multitude who stumbled upon the peninsula, found it to be in the year 995 and although Simeon would not of course have actually can boast a record of human archaeology that stretches back nearly for millennia and yet he repeatedly makes the claims the effect that landscape was wild, unkempt and quote covered on all sides by very dense forest. And Simeon here then was likely providing a calculated and propitious analog not just to the monopoly of saints retreating to the wilderness, I listed earlier but to beads, eight century descriptions of Cuthbert own ever more extreme withdrawals into the wild during his lifetime echoing the latter's description that islands of farm being quote ill suited for human habitation Simeon recounted at length how this first multitude of Durham marshaled by their Bishop, yielding found their own island to be quote not easily habitable. That is until with the help of all the people of St. Cuthbert who quote cut down uprooted plowed and so until at last they had built it and now famous quote first little church made from branches. And so Durham's earliest community was being portrayed in the self same image of intense labor and humility, with which Cuthbert was associated in his lifetime and from which the special space and natural topography of the site at Durham in turn became inseparable. Another history of Simeon's origins and progress of this church might have described a region beset by recurrent trauma and upheaval by repeated Viking invasions by conquest by the near genocidal harrying of the north and most recently by the sudden and somewhat radical dismissal of the ancient community of lay clerks at Durham in only 1083. To the contrary, however, both Simeon and anonymous poets were clearly making the case for something like stability and continuity. Simeon in particular offers an almost seamless teleological narrative within which the rule of the new Norman elite is merely the logical restoration of a kind of natural order. Now by way of conclusion and sort of tying this all together my central contention here and I will brace you all if I may, insofar as it necessarily entails an aspect of speculation, albeit I hope not without good reason is that the decorative schema of this new Norman cathedral perhaps ought to be thought of in an early post conquest world as complicit to some degree in much the same messaging operation. But another way were these bold linear carvings more than simply decorative did these strange yet almost familiar forms and speak in the same protracted rhetoric of reconciliation and revivalism as Simeon's libellus where they to perhaps a pawn in the same traumatic and contrived renegotiation of the past with the present. Many of the most popular decorative motifs to survive from 7th and 8th century Northumbria the years during and immediately after Cuthbert's lifetime feature masses of interlaced foliate patterns the carpet page opening the gospel of st. Matthew in the late 7th century lindes farm gospels is a classic and accept exceptional example as is the St. Cuthbert gospel itself unexpectedly found or so the story goes when Cuthbert's coffin was reopened at Durham, precisely in the year 1104 and in the bold plastic articulation of the raised interlace on its upper cover and especially in a schematic square settings of its lower cover it is easy I think to get a sense of a shared tradition. This type of insular craftsmanship was renowned above all else for its rejection of human form and the concentration in particular on the interaction of line pattern and surface texture something that the masons at Durham were clearly quite familiar and contemporary with all of these old images more over was the spread in northern England of so called hogback tombs. It's been argued that these structures were indicative of genuine 10th century timbered lordly halls complete with bode sides and wooden shingles Charles Kelsey has written actually that quote the carved oval shapes represent little wooden tiles that interlaced lines waddles or ojus which is to say sticks from which structures like for instance Cuthbert's first little church made from branches may have been made. Finishing up now hidden in plain sight then were several of Durham's more unusual mason reforms it's many chevrons zigzags and lozenges actually once designed to evoke a much older. Herberno Saxon tradition within which Hume thatched or timbers churches were not so much outdated alternatives to stone but pronounced statements in their own right of core insular identity actually I don't want to finish by implying so much that to any given medieval Northumbrian would or the illusion of would may have been preferable to stone or vice versa either would be I think an all too sweeping conclusion and exceptions to both in any event could be easily. find nor am I especially interested in floating any of these images necessarily as a definitive prototype the point is broader. And in part marries with one that Lisa Riley made in her emergence of Anglo Norman architecture article as long ago as 1997. I see the work of nostalgia here, a somewhat paradoxical process which simultaneously forged connections with an often fictitious past in order in some way to supplement the present, simply on account of the fact then that perhaps then as now they couldn't more faithfully restored maybe even in some sense because they never really existed at all that the scattered remnants of the pre conquest past may have been the ultimate enablers of an attitude generated at the nexus of art and artifice in 12th century architectural impulse, thus I think has to be seen and understood dialectically in relation to history, it is an affective rather than mnemonic mode of thinking and feeling. It is driven by emotion as opposed to pure memory, thus it is not so much the little literal materiality of a building like Durham, the specificity of its forms or even slightly prototypes that really mattered but the way those who encountered the cathedral and were made to feel. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, and that was that was wonderful so evocative and beautifully delivered and so thoughtful. We've got. I've got at least one question here. I was listening to your paper and I was actually reminded by my account or senior in the forest of our tongue in trees books in the running Brooks and sermons in stones. And it is remarkable about Durham and you know we take it for granted, many of us just pass it on the train but it is this extraordinary way it's enclosed in this forest setting. Beautiful. I'd like to thank both of you have got some time for questions I do actually have one on the screen here which if I may read this out it's. That's a written question and it's from an anonymous attendee from from Durham hello from Durham. And the questioner says in Durham Cathedral there are several columns surrounding the shrine of St. Cuthbert that are fossil filled similar to the roach stone that Freya discussed columns are not Norman I don't think but nonetheless I wonder if this is a way that you and Freya's papers might speak to one another. Oh jeez that this isn't really a question, but if either you and Freya have any comments I'd be fascinated stones with fossils. Well I can start by saying that the anonymous person in question. He or she and I are perhaps kindred spirits because that's actually exactly the notes I made. I made while Freya was speaking those columns it's local frosty marble I think if if we're thinking of the same thing there is also some black limestone in Durham which I actually look this up in advance has some fossil corals from and you'll have to excuse the pronunciation here from the carboniferous period, I think if that's correct prayer you might weigh in on that. But yes that that's certainly one of the more immediate connections between the two papers. Thank you Fred you have any comment on that at all. No. I'm not a geologist. Not that you should. Can I ask a question I about roach and because you know it's it's it's it's from Portland isn't it so it's an English, it's an English stone and I'm we're used to was that to that play any part in the fact that it was relatively local as opposed to using the 13 which is also, you know, a stone that's well Roman stone that's used it does have fossils in it and does have that strange that wonderful kind of texture. Yeah, I mean it's very similar to travertine. Some of the replacements that got made in 1990, they replaced which for travertine inside the building not outside. It's the history of why the Smithsons chose it is not clear. I think I've exhausted all avenues but but the thing I have that does get said by the assistance is that they, the Smithsons came across it on trips to Portland. They saw it. I don't know if that gives it any kind of aspirations to nationalism, but but it was a local stone. I also looked into whether they have seen if there was a history behind uses of travertine if they've seen something like Eugene Moretti's buildings in Rome, and if that had had any effect on not necessarily why they use Portland stone but how they detailed it but I don't know if they came up with anything. There was a broad interest in materials I think they liked it because of its novelty. And as I, as I've suggested, because of how it looked, these, these marks, it might have been cheaper than travertine I don't know. I was thinking when you were talking for air because I was thinking about often associate the economist building with up along pavilion lessons house in Wiltshire that they worked on obviously roughly the same time. But fontil, as I'm sure you know there's, they chose fontil because the ruined fontil Abbey, and the picturesque landscape there with grottoes and other forms. And it's also very easy to get from fontil down to the sort of Jarrett Jurassic coastline and where Portland is. So I'm sure it was I'm sure there was a local association but I think that I would guess because of the fascination with the picturesque that was also one of the reasons for choosing the stone. It's again it's not the fun of talking about the building is things aren't clear from what the Smithson says you're free to speculate. I'm not. The problem with the picturesque reading is, is the argument they liked it because it was honest, you could see how it got made, and, and how they detailed it. They didn't talk but they did something called a Brechtium trick. Peter Smithson left two inches off the bottom of every column so you can see that structurally the building was made, it was built of concrete not of roach. And those are undercutting you sense of illusion or image that you get from the picturesque. See, it's, it's a kind of yes and no I always find but that's that's what's funny about it. I know Rainer Bannum saw it very as very significant but they have chose Gordon Cullen to depict the economist building. Yeah, yeah, and I'm thought that this indicated their collapse into the picturesque which goes for him was a really negative change in their work. I know that it was a classical building he said yeah. I have a couple of more questions up here before we move on. First is from got here from the written question from Adam Coleman question for Freya. Is it possible to talk about the Smithson's use of Roche in relation to other materials used in other schemes during this period. These concerns being expressed elsewhere in their practice or is it distinct. The only thing I've ever come up with that's when there's not even me someone suggested that maybe it could be like into St Hilda's timber cladding, the framework around it. I, I think it's distinct partly because I would always make an argument for it that it's not just a material. It's, it's, it's ornament, at least as they use it on on the economist. So that separates it slightly from other things. Other people using it. No, I know a few buildings that started using which port in stone pretty quickly after the Smithson's did it. There's a building in Edinburgh that starts using it in the late 1960s. Quite a lot of building since in the UK, but this is the first the economist. Okay. Thank you. This is a couple of other things we're going to move on in a moment. I have a question or observation by Romy Rome weather here, and it says, Freya, as far as the costs go for the 1960s, what would mean what may have been saved by using roach cladding other than tradition rather than traditional cladding. I asked this before, and I've tried to find out honest. Yeah, I've tried to find this out. I'd really like to know. And because one argument is that might be cheaper because it's the higher bed, then with that is that is the is the bed directly below so you have to query less bar down. But then it might be more expensive because it could have been harder to work and a lot of stone cost comes in the process, the processing of the material. I don't know. I have emailed and I have wrong Portland Bill quarry and I just haven't found that out but I'm going to keep trying. I don't know the answer to that one yet. One more maybe just fit this one is from Emily Smith to all panelists question for you and wondering if the patterns could be making reference to talk about don't obviously the patterns could be making reference to natural mark Celtic patterns especially as you mentioned the link between religious buildings and being in areas close to truth. It's a good question. And I hesitate to unpack it a little bit. The term Celtic, of course, is ever so slightly problematic. There weren't really as far as we know a definitive set of people with a definitive or recognizable or reproducible visual culture that refer to themselves as the Celts but I'll take it as a sort of given that I know the point that she's driving towards. I think certainly in respect of if you like a kind of Irish Christianity. In England, particularly in the north. That was different separate and arrived differently and separately than the Augustinian mission did in 597 in the south. Yes, I think it must be bound up within that kind of tradition to a greater or lesser extent. Thank you. We'll move on. I'm going to satisfy you here. I'm not going to sing the school song, but I'm going to give you the words, which I can remember. Sadly, by the banks of silvery we need Prath Dunelms towered shrine rest the body of our patron hard by beta sage divine, yet his spirit still buys with us all and dimmed his virtues shine in the walls of old St. But the old school by the time because our schools in Newcastle by the time not by the way that we had to make it right. So there we are with that. I will move on. Thank you both so much. Well, I'm sure there'll be a few more questions before we move on but I got to move on now to Alicia Weisberg Roberts who's getting the third paper. Alicia, we're going to move out of England. We're going to move to terraforming Hong Kong. Alicia has a distinguished career, working at the V&A, the Yale Center for British Art and the Walters, and also the University in Hong Kong and she's an expert on all sorts of things, 18th century and early on Mrs Delaney because I'm familiar with Horace Walpole and various other things but she's going to talk about something rather different today so I think with just turning one o'clock I could turn over now to you, Alicia to talk us through transforming or terraforming Hong Kong 1840 to 1860. Thank you very much Martin I'm going to try to do this smoothly. As we all do. Ah, okay. And this is now terraforming Hong Kong in the 1840s. So, full some apologies to anyone who has turned up for 1857. We're not going to get there. Discussions of climate appear in virtually all of the genres of writing produced about Hong Kong in the first half of the 19th century, whether records of naval voyages newspapers and gazetteers ethnographic works, travel logs, personal journals, or even poetry. And see if we can advance. Given that much of this material was either generated by or sought to inform maritime trade. This could seem over determined, but in this period the idea of climate was being used to interrogate much more than the prevailing weather conditions. It was quite when Hong Kong became a British possession. The concept of climate and Britain's Imperial project were closely intertwined. As many scholars have argued the accumulation of empirical data about the natural world was both a result and a technology of imperialism. Following Alexander von Humboldt's elucidation of climate as a global phenomenon. A belief in ecological malleability deeply penetrated British scientific networks of formal and informal empire. Among other far reaching consequences this led to an understanding of climate as not only a latitudinal phenomenon, but also a matter of terrain, elevation exposure geology and hydrology. In fact, Hong Kong was the subject of the first contour map published by the ordinance office, predating any other British territory. By the way, a much older model of climatic determinism and moral ethnography persisted. Derived from Aristotelian and Hippocratic precepts via Montesquieu, it continued to underpin attitudes and decision making in military policy diplomacy and in public health and safety. According to Hong Kong's foundation we see a confluence of three ways of looking at climate as an accumulation of data collected over time as a function of geography and topography and as a physiological and moral influence. This paper will explore the ways climatic theory shaped the built environment of Victoria as the settlement on Hong Kong Island on the north shore of Hong Kong Island was initially known and how this informed its representations. In the 1840s onwards narratives about Hong Kong repeatedly emphasize its inhospitable character, the better to describe a miraculous arc from Baron rock to model imperial city. This characterization has lately been challenged by scholars, either writing from the viewpoint of environmental history, seeking to chat or seeking to challenge colonial teleologies, or both. It is certainly worth remembering that the very earliest Western reports of the island are of the availability of fresh water and the navigability of its natural harbor. However, the development of Victoria was repeatedly interrupted and redirected by outbreaks of disease piracy and catastrophic typhoons, all linked to the idea of malign climate in the contemporary imaginary. Each seizure of Hong Kong had been accomplished with violence and at great expense, and the vicissitudes attending its construction imposed further expenditure of both lives and funds. These investments were justified in British eyes at least by the vastly ambitious but hitherto elusive goal of opening China fully to European trade. To justify the costs and fulfill the hopes that attended its establishment, Hong Kong needed at a bare minimum to be able to support a permanent year round trading settlement. The territory had to be rendered habitable for colonial subjects, and also had to be seen to be habitable. I should say at the outset that many aspects of the imperial enterprise in China were predicated on the much longer colonial experience in India, and not only on the level of official policy. Many of the art of the agents of informal empire in Hong Kong, merchants, police, journalists, engineers, missionaries, artists had cut their teeth on the subcontinent and others would continue their careers there after leaving the China coast. Many were born in Guangzhou Bombay Baghdad and Glasgow and would never and would live and die without ever setting foot in London. The colonial development of Hong Kong can thus be seen as integral to that of Sri Lanka and the Antipodes. The built environment of the straight settlements illustrates closer dialogue still. As civic commercial and military interests scrambled for strategic advantage. They proposed and deployed interventions drawn from a latitudinal section of imperial possessions, including building types from Penang, Madras, and Kingston, Jamaica. I will not have time in this paper to do more than allude to some of these connections, but I want to mention this here as it is important, both for understanding the material I'm presenting today, and to my larger project. Historians of the British Empire have long questioned and sought to move beyond a center periphery model for understanding colonial interactions. The technical models, including Ballerstein's world system and Latour's centers of calculation have appeared successively and suggested different and productive ways of connecting sites at Empire. In this paper and in my project more broadly, my approach is to frame the British Empire as multi nodal, weekly send a weekly centralized system in which operations and information linked the metropole and it's far flung dominions, but often did so indirectly. While agents in these peripheral nodes often interacted through networks that might own only incidentally connect through the center. Today I'm going to look at three sets of images produced between 1844 and 1846. This was a watershed moment in the representation of the territory, when the depiction of Hong Kong broke out of a long tradition of depicting China through the very limited and liminal spaces available to European observers. While this differentiation can be seen as a consequence of the British possession of the territory. It is important to note that it begins before that outcome was assured. And while a number of other possibilities were in play. As has frequently been related. Charles Elliott's choice of Hong Kong as a treaty port was regarded as eccentric and his personal political fortunes were irrevocably diminished by it. So if there were interests on the China coast and politicians in London would have preferred the island of she's son, modern day she's son, which was captured twice during the first opium war, but restored to China in the Treaty of Man King. The letter was larger than Hong Kong Island and convenient to the mouth of the Yang see with its tantalizing promise of trade with the Chinese interior. In an advantageous trading position, climate rendered Tucson unsuitable for permanent occupation troops guarantee garrisoning the island were repeatedly swept by rising waves of sickness, making holding the island unexpectedly costly. Hong Kong to would suffer pestilence repeatedly from the Hong Kong fevers of 1843 and 1846 to the great plague of 1894. It was already a British possession, and its climate would have to be ameliorated, rather than summarily abandoned. Christopher Cowell has written extensively about the impact of disease on the building of Hong Kong and has made a strong case for thinking of attempts to thwart sickness and improve public health as key factors in shaping the city. And this is a, I think empire and disease is going to be a topic later on in this conference. In 1884, Hong Kong was in the midst of its third wave of building the precessionary tense of the Kowloon encampment, having given way to match shed structures, which were being replaced in turn by stone brick and timber edifices. This building boom was set in motion well before the territory's political future was assured. This was before the Treaty of Man King on the 14th of June 1841, an auction of prime lots was held with the stipulation that buyers would have to build to a minimum value, a minimum appraised value of 1000 pounds on each lot within six months of sale. In addition to the naval and ordinance mapping campaigns that had already been initiated. The auction provided an important context for the early cartography of Victoria. During insider trading and various informal methods of conveyancing disputes around the first land auction would be a feature of legal life in the colony for decades to come. The island's topography which included little flat land and drastic changes in elevation drove intense and continuing competition for salutary sites. In four years of frenetic development that followed a number of trading firms that had operated princely principally out of Canton and Macau joined Jardine and Matheson and the British superintendency of trade in relocating their headquarters to Hong Kong. They sought maritime but they sought marine lots for their go downs and secure helpful sites for their houses. After the abandonment of the malarial expanse of Happy Valley in 1843, these building projects were concentrated in two areas, the central district around the newly laid out Queens Road and spring gardens, sometimes also referred to as East Point. Leaving aside views of the island as a whole, these areas provide the principal subjects of most views of Hong Kong in the 1840s. What we saw the fortune during this initial building boom was the young Devonshire architect, Edward Ashworth, who arrived in Hong Kong by way of New Zealand and Australia. He was sketched and kept journals throughout his voyage provides us with some of the earliest street views of the city. After Ashworth returned to England in 1846, the observations he made in Hong Kong and Macau formed the original portions of his entry on Chinese architecture, published in 1851 as a detached essay for the encyclopedia of architecture issued by the architectural publication society. In this text we can see some of the ways in which climate was shaping the built environment. Despite the essay's title, Ashworth was unable to personally observe any Chinese architecture outside of Macau, the Canton factories and Hong Kong. And he was aware that what he was seeing was already hybrid or in his words very barbarous seeming to caricature the works of Christopher Ren and Inigo Jones. In an attempt to identify and isolate Chinese architecture within the melange of styles that he recognized in Victoria. Ashworth devoted a large proportion of his illustrations to the house of the Hong merchant Chinom, which he described as the only good Chinese mansion existing in Hong Kong in 1845. When the picturesque screen was pulled down to give place to three shop frontages. In both his visual and textual portrayal of this building, he played paid particular attention to the lattices screening walls and parapets that promoted and controlled airflow and access to the interior. In the interval between the first and second opium wars trade increased in Hong Kong, followed by the other treaty ports, and the relative importance of Canton was reduced. In the end, the English presence in Macau diminished. In early 1846, either at the behest of his relocating patrons or in search of fresh ones. George Chinnery, at the age of 72, made his soul voyage to Hong Kong. In 1848, Chinnery wrote that he had spent only six months there only, all the time so very unwell, not to say ill, that I had the power of doing but very little. Nonetheless, he could claim to have produced 15 views of Hong Kong, large and full of detail. Which could be sold to Daglar as they had been bespoken by particular parties whose names were written. Again, I'm quoting Chinnery here in their own handwriting on the several pages of their respective sketches. Sadly, none of Chinnery's currently known drawings of Hong Kong seem to correspond with the 15 referred to in his communique. Although they do fit within what we know of his drawing practices more generally. Chinnery sketched daily worked up compositions from various studies, kept a stock of fair copies on hand and produced collections of sketches as well as finished compositions to order. As an ensemble, they also give us a fair idea of who the particular parties mentioned in Chinnery's letter might have been. Some show the site developed by Jardine and Matheson at Spring Garden. Others focus on the premises of their commercial rivals, Denton Company. Chinnery sketched both locations and the Denton Company go down is here. If that is indicating something. Chinnery sketched both locations from nearby heights and from boats offshore utilizing compositional strategies, which had become a trademark of his views of the prior and inner harbor of Macau. He provides a more intimate view of the Denton Company residences at Green Bank. We know that during his time in Hong Kong, Chinnery stated in the smaller of the two houses on the property. This happened to be the earliest permanent European dwelling on Hong Kong Island. It had originally been erected by William Kane, the chief magistrate on the slope below the fortified magistercy compound in 1841. The construction of a barren of numerous Indian campaigns used local Chinese craftsmen and materials to build a single story house with deep verandas on three sides, a bungalow in other words, albeit one topped with a chinoiserie roof. Wilkinson Dent, who acquired the bungalow from Kane along with the rest of the property used it as a residence and a place for entertaining guests. A few yards northwest of the bungalow, George T. Brain, a partner in Denton Company constructed a true story flat roofed house in the classicizing style that was rapidly becoming typical of Victoria. George Brain had arrived in Macau via India in 1838. As he told the parliamentary select committee in 1847, he was placed in special charge of Denton Company's opium trade. He would later be succeeded at Denton Company and at Green Bank by his brother Charles Joseph. Opium was not the brains only botanical interest. From 1843 Green Bank served as the southern Chinese base for the botanist and plantsmen Robert Fortune. Fortune had been sent by the Horticultural Society of London to collect seeds and plants of an ornamental or useful kind and not already cultivated in Great Britain. And to obtain information upon Chinese gardening and agriculture together with the nature of its climate and apparent influence on vegetation. Denton Company provided fortune with letters of credit accommodation and access to their gardens in Macau and Hong Kong and eventually also in Shanghai. Fortune's intention was to use Green Bank as a place to test and promote his recommendations for the afforestation of the island. The specimens he planted there included painted bamboo. The Indian Neem and the Chinese Banyan, the Chinese Banyan and the Chinese Pine, and correspond closely with those that he later advised Governor John Davis to plant in order to ameliorate the hostile climate of Hong Kong. And an arborescent species which chinery would have encountered in the garden at Green Bank would subsequently be widely planted in the hopes of providing cooling shade and initiating the miasmas, which were still widely believed to cause malaria. There is a great deal of overlap between chinery's drawings and the most widely circulated views produced in this period. The set of lithographs drawn by the architect, overseer, of Rhodes and superintendent of convict labor, Murdoch Bruce. This is not surprising given how close in time they were produced, a matter of months, and the high likelihood the two men would have encountered each other during chinery's sojourn on the island. Bruce was a shaper portrayer and ultimately a victim of the climate of the South China coast. In the summer of 1846, his print series was promoted promoted in the pages of the Hong Kong register. The series of 12 views that were duly published by the London Liverpool and Glasgow based lithographers, McClure McDonald and McGregor are the most comprehensive and most frequently reproduced images of early Hong Kong. In this page, they are however very little studied in their own right. In an article that forms an honorable exception, the architectural historian Alex Bremner points out that many, that in many respects the views reflect commonplace and normative picturesque conventions, while presenting an idealized but also racially stratified picture of colonial society. This is certainly important for interpreting much about the ways in which the views are populated. However, I would argue that it misses a core theme of the series, one which both closely concerns the topic of climate, and which Murdoch Bruce can be seen to have doubly authored the roads themselves. This image is foreground building, digging and grading, placing particular emphasis on the work that he would have overseen. As in Shinri's view of Green Bank, this is often accomplished by inserting laboring figures into the scene, as we see in the foreground here. In the middle of this image we can also see a building being erected within a bamboo scaffolding and being plastered as it rises in precisely the same manner as Ashworth describes in his text on Chinese architecture. Bruce's focus on the transformation of terrain is also expressed through his selection of sites and viewpoints. As one might expect, these encompass the first and most developed streetscapes of Victoria and the governmental and civic landmarks that closely abutted them. But they frequently juxtapose the new edifices with the raw outcrops and granite megaliths from which the city was emerging, whether by excavation or augmentation. In 1846, when Victoria occupied only a little more than a narrow strip along the North Shore of Hong Kong. Bruce made the settlement look like a monumental undertaking worthy of the towering peaks that rose above it. Unlike Shinri or even Ashworth, we have very little biographical information about Bruce. Other than the scattered official notices, the most substantial reference occurs in William Terence retrospective memoir of 1861. Bruce is introduced in the context of the fever of 1843. Writing on the Hong Kong fever to we are reminded of having omitted mention of a character somewhat blasé in those days vis Murdoch Bruce, one of the overseers of works under the land office under the land officer. Murdoch was knocked down by the sun and the doctor directed that he should be divested of all superfluous hair, shave my head if you like said the vein Highlander, but I will die rather than you shall touch my whiskers. Like Ashworth Bruce would have learned to draw as part of his architectural training, and likewise seems to have been determined to turn his skill to profit and self advancement. The remainder of the account describes Bruce's overweening ambition and grisly colonial fate. Filled with an idea that he was made for better things Terence right Terence writes, he followed Sir Henry pottinger to Madras and tried to gain his patronage, presumably wishing to advance to a higher office. Bruce may have hoped that Hong Kong illustrated with its emphasis on his own role in the creation of Victoria would have done would have done him credit in this connection. The last Terence reports that he met with a rebuff that which drove him crazier than he was before, eventually, and eventually he died in the straits of starvation and disease. Consolingly, but also somewhat inaccurately, Terence concludes that the name of Murdoch Bruce in connection with the book of lithographs will be remit of the principal buildings in Hong Kong in 1844 will ever be remembered. His views have certainly long outlasted the memory of their creator and have gone on to act as a visual as visual standings for Hong Kong's early colonial history in many contexts, especially in so far as they thematized the ways in which the construction of the city involved the literal shaping of the landscape that encompassed it. They can be seen as performing a task similar to the useful myth of the Baron rock, representing Hong Kong as a territory to be simultaneously seized and created. I hope that I have been able to demonstrate that they and other early representations also in code ideas about the precarity and contingency of the imperial enterprise in relation to climatic forces. Thank you. Thank you very much Alicia. That was that was lovely. Very, very sort of suggestive and all sorts of different ways. It's really microcosm of what was going on with the Empire. It's one particular place and the talk more perhaps about the idea of climate and how one controls shows that we to impose this structure with technological and aesthetically going to move straight on now because it's doing very well. I would like to last speaker Jonathan Hill, Jonathan is Professor of Architecture and Visual Theory at the Barclay School, where he directs the Emma Phil PhD architectural design program. He's very well published. And it's, it's a pleasure to have you with us today Jonathan and your paper is entitled. Thanks very much for the introduction. It's been very, it's very nice to be here. Actually, the title is actually the landscape of climate, John Evelyn and Brenda Colvin. That was an earlier title. So I'll just try to share my screen. So hopefully you see the images now. So the climate and the weather have stimulated the architectural artistic and literary imaginations for centuries. And in 1661, John Evelyn complained that a hellish cloud of seacoal blanketed London. Evelyn's Fumafugium was the first book to consider a city's atmosphere as a whole, as well as the first to propose mitigation and adaptation as responses to anthropogenic climate change three centuries before these principles were widely accepted. And offering what he called a remedy for the nuisance, Evelyn suggests that a number of practical and poetic measures can be instigated. Cold burning trades are relocated beyond the city. And the edges of London are forested with trees and planted with fragrant shrubs, so that wood replaces cold as the principal fuel, and the city is sweetly perfumed, promoting associations with the garden of Eden. And just three years later in 1664, the institutional home of English empiricism, the Royal Society, produced its first official publication, and that was Evelyn's silver or a discourse of forest trees, and marking a more sensitive attitude to the modification nature than before. Evelyn acknowledged the effects of deforestation on climate and the need for foreign forestry science conservation and sustainable development. And this is obviously the frontispiece to Fumafugium. Now Evelyn's empiricism was one of the many catalysts to the transformation of the English landscape in the early 18th century. And the picturesque I think is a deceptive term, because it emphasizes one aspect of that landscape to the detriment of its other qualities, such as the importance of the senses and the seasons to design experience understanding the imagination. The picturesque was productive as well as pleasurable, and the early 18th century estate was conceived holistically in social aesthetic, agricultural and ecological terms. And this is actually an image of William Kent's garden at Rousham in Oxfordshire, which was created between about 1737 and 1741. Now I'm going to sort of move forward into the mid 20th century. And during the Second World War, Kenneth Clark actually has said, following the wartime bombardment of London, bomb damage is picturesque. And Clark's stoic embrace of ruination was in line with a burgeoning 20th century romanticism. And in 1944, he, T.S. Eliot and John Maynard Keynes joined together in writing a letter to the times in which they state that a ruined church would be an evocative monument to wartime sacrifices. As in the 18th century, the ruin was a temporal metaphor representing representing potential as well as loss, an environmental model, combining nature and culture. And the subsequent publication, which this image comes from, and the publication has a rather direct title, which is Bond Churches as War Memorials, and that was published in 1945. And in that book, Brenda Colvin complicates, complements the recognition of the cultural value of a ruin with a corresponding call for an enveloping nature. She says this, with a little imagination, one might visualize a London left to nature's healing hand hidden under a great forest of sycamore. And two years later in a book called Trees for Town and Country, she proposes postwar reforestation. In that book, she recalls the landscape planting of earlier centuries, notes that 23 of the 60 trees in her book originated in Britain and invokes a silver allegory of liberalism. This is what she says, although introduced to Britain by human agency, the Spanish chestnut grows well on light soils and suits our landscape. It has become so well integrated that the eye accepts it as a native tree. The expansion of UK higher education in the 1960s offered the opportunity to build on this debate. And at the new university of East Anglia, the focus of the campus is Elum, Erlum Hall in Norfolk, which was once owned by a descendant of Francis Bacon, who was the father figure of empiricism, and Erlum Hall is surrounded by an 18th century founded by the River Yar. The new 1960s university's commitment to self improvement was indebted to empiricism, and then the landscape settings reaffirmed this association. In the decade known for cultural and social experimentation, an 18th century parkland was appropriate to new welfare state university, precisely because of its association with British liberalism, and its reassertion in the 1940s and 50s as a token of national identity. In Norfolk such a site had special resonance, because the country is known for some of England's grandest 18th century picturesque estates. So while 18th century England advocated liberalism, only a small proportion of the population was allowed university education, the right to vote, and access to a picturesque state. In contrast, the 20th century welfare state aimed to open these rights and pleasures to all classes. In 1969, Kenneth Clark struck an optimistic note at the end of the concluding episode of civilization, his seminal BB series on Western art architecture and philosophy. And this is what he says, I'm at one of our new universities, the University of East Anglia, one mustn't under overate the culture of what used to be called top Peter people before the wars. They were charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans. They knew little about literature, less about music, nothing about art, and less than nothing about philosophy. The members of a music group, or an art group at a provincial university today would be 10 times better for informed and more alert. So he took it to the new University of East Anglia, which was Dennis last time toward Norfolk to try to understand the context for his design. And in a blue exercise book he noted local people and places. While his wife Susan recalls that Norfolk then was such a backwater. It was like going back to the 18th century. And that's a quote from her. In a key design decision with picturesque connotations last decided the various architectural elements were as he said to be disposed on this site with with loving care for the configuration and contours of the landscape is prospect and aspect impressed by the 18th Hockam estate on the North Norfolk coast. He mirrored its spatial sequence, beginning with a tree lined linear Avenue that runs due south until it reaches a nodal point that reveals panoramic panoramic views and leads to picturesque roots across the university and towards the water. So while Hockam this sequence actually faces north. Last and simply inverted it so it faces south. Proposing the full extent of the university in 15 years time lessons UEA development plan of 1962 which is on the screen now has three scales, and it's very unusual for an architectural drawing in that it doesn't just have a building scale. It has a one to 1250 drawing scale. It has a walking scale of three miles an hour, and a cycling scale of 10 miles an hour. To address the eye is drawn to a monument or a natural feature, but the path is not direct or singular. Even when the visitor is static movement is implicit because any view is understood in relation to other potential views, and it's but one part of a complex arrangement. Arranged across the slope UEA offers a bleak fuse that associate physical movement with the strides and leaps of the imagination as last and make clear. And he stated that every moment of walking is a moment of thinking. And this is another quote from last and he said I became interested in designing buildings which responded almost ecologically to unique and specific situations. And last and consequently recommended Brenda Colvin as UEA is landscape architect Colvin is a very interesting figure because she was present at the Institute of landscape architects in 1951 and was the first woman to head a UK design or environmental profession. And she appreciated Evelyn's advocacy of forestry science and sustained development and asserted asserted that the planting regimes were responsible responsibility inherited by the post war welfare state. Maintaining and expanding the site's rich diversity of natural habitats, Colvin conceived the integration of landscape and architecture in terms of the interdependence of nature and culture, associating physical processes with metaphysical dimensions. And questioning the degree to which any landscape can be described as man made. She wanted the UEA landscape to be a self conserving system as far as possible. Colvin gently sculpted the rising ground so that the residential cigarettes appear to ride directly from the land like the rocky outcrops that Laszlan intended. Near to the university buildings, she recommended that fine grass would be closely mown, well further away it would be of a rougher texture and left long and sighed only occasionally, contrasting a cultivated lawn to a wild meadow. And Colvin suggested that an existing chalk pit could accommodate the open air elliptical amphitheater depicted in Laszlan's 1962 developmental plan. And she proposed that a further emblem of the picturesque, a viewing prospect should be sighted on a newly sculpted hill immediately to the north. And to the south, she proposed a wilderness would include a large lake, waterlogged reed beds and willow plantations. This is one of a rather beautiful series of images that Laszlan actually commissioned for UEA by Richard Einzig. And it's a very interesting image because across the marshy meadow, UEA's craggy silhouette is seen in the misty evening light of the vast Norfolk sky scattered with high drifting clouds. And to the left, the sparse village of a large tree frames the view, very much in the manner that Claude Lorraine would frame his subjects through left to centre, overhanging leaves and branches, inspiring both 18th century and 20th century advocates of the picturesque. And between the ziggurats and the tree, if you look very carefully on your screen, you might be able to see two small figures, one walking and one cycling. And this clearly is a reference to Laszlan's 1962 development plan. This is actually an image of one of the things that Laszlan was intrigued about when he researched Norfolk was the landscape architect Humphrey Repton. And this is actually a photograph of Laszlan peering at Repton's tomb. Now, one of the things that interests me about the work of you of Colvin and Laszlan at UEA is, and obviously their reference to Evelyn and to the picturesque, is that despite this long and inventive environmental history and the birching ecological movement in the 1960s, anthropogenic climate change was not widely acknowledged by scientists until the mid 1970s. Leading, I would argue, present day architects to often forget the past and instead deploy a debased technocratic empiricism devoid of the poetic and practical implications of Evelyn Colvin and Laszlan's research. We need to simultaneously apply historical understanding to landscape design and climate research, studying their interconnected histories to better appreciate the future. Now climate always changes, whether by anthropogenic or other means, and some critics of global warming imply that the current situation is an ideal that must be preserved and adopt religious metaphors in which environmental catastrophe is punishment for human failing, even though climate change is mostly incremental and not sudden ideas about climate obviously express wider societal values, including attitudes to nature, ethics and governance. And one of the people who I found very interesting this concept context is the climate research scientist Mike Hume, and he observes and emphasises that of course science is itself a cultural pursuit. Now he's actually a member of the Hartwell group of climate research scientists include Hume, Winprince and Steve Reiner among others. And they have adopted the term wicked problem to conclude that climate change is so complicated, it is beyond our ability to comprehend comprehend and solve. It was designed by horse Rittle in 1967 and then published in a paper with Melvin Weber in 1973. The term wicked problem initially referred to planning, not climate change, which suggests that architecture is also a wicked problem. And according to Rittle and Weber, this is a quote from them. Social problems are never solved at best they are only resolved over and over again. In a similar vein, the authors of the Hartwell paper from 2010 write that and this is a quote from them, rather than being a discrete problem to be solved, climate change is better understood as a persistent condition that must be coped with and can only partially managed more or less well. The dangers of global warming are real and need to be addressed when and where possible, notably because their effects are unequal, often causing greater harm to poorer, powerless communities. But climate change may encourage cultural, social and environmental innovations and benefits, whether at a local or a regional scale, including greater appreciation of the earth and criticism of the isolation policies of corporations and nations. I found it intriguing that among the Hartwell authors who were all climate research scientists, one of their most common references is to the 18th century gardener Lancelot capability Brown. And they use him to suggest that an oblique approach may be effective in climate policy and landscape design. And they refer to Brown, because obviously he's so widely known, but really I think the, that William Kent was far more important development of the picturesque than Brown here and Brown was obviously an assistant to Kent. And their reference how is to get it towards Kent, and they write this. This is referring to to Brown, his advice would be to approach the object of emissions reduction by other goals, writing with other constituencies and gathering other benefits. The gardener and the landscape designer are rewarding models for contemporary approaches to climate change, biodiversity and architecture, because they acknowledge that we do not control nature and must work with not against it. In France, a landscape may appear to be subject to human order, but no more and no more natural than any other cultural artifact. But despite the reduction of wildlife habitats and proliferation of pesticides, each landscape and each building are teaming with creatures that are subject to their own rhythms and intertwined in a complex network of relations with other life forms, including humanity. Equally, we need to remember that people are natural, as well as cultural beings. The term Anthropocene is unhelpful, because it is Anthropocentric, and the co-production of multiple authors, human, non-human and atmospheric is an appropriate model for architecture and landscape in an era of increasing climate change. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Jonathan, and beautifully timed as with all the other papers and interesting final thought about the validity of the term Anthropocene, which is being used extensively now, perhaps not as thinkingly as it might be. Okay, it's coming up to quarter to two. Let's divide it up and have the first questions. We've got a little bit of time left, specifically geared towards the last two papers from Alicia and Jonathan. So I'm going to look at the Q&A there. But I think you can also ask a question as well. I think that's correct. Dania and LRF, I mean people can actually ask a question verbally. Yes, that's right. Yep, so you can do that just by signalling that you'd like to speak, or if you prefer not to, you can pop a question in the Q&A and I will see it as it comes up. Okay, while we're waiting, let me ask a question, because this has always been fascinating about materials and concrete, and last and I always associate with this use of rough, textured concrete, and obviously I'm UEA slightly, but the National Theatre we all know very well. So those rough, those planks are wood that are the imprint of the wood on the landscape. And I was fascinated to maybe just say a little bit more about the type of concrete used at UEA and with Brenda Colvin. Because it is, you use that word picturesque and I mean that's something that, you know, that goes back to the Gothic and the picturesque in the 18th century, deliberately rusticating materials. I think that when I was doing the research on Lastin, Lastin had died, but I spoke to his wife, Susan Lastin. And one of the things that I found very memorable was it made maybe think every time you now go past the National Theatre and see the flytow. I think it's really good to remember her words, but she said that her husband was frightfully romantic about Rain Street concrete. And I think it's a rather beautiful quote. And he was very interested in the decay of concrete and how it actually was weathered and worn. And he described the, the buildings, the sort of decay of the buildings at UEA as the like, it was like the character that you got from the lines on her face. And very sadly, UEA has actually reacted by putting a fungal inhibitor over all the buildings there. And when I was doing research, actually, one person who was very interesting and helpful was actually the person who's head of facilities at UEA. And he sort of recognized the conflict that they were facing because, and he implied that actually the, some of the heritage bodies were encouraging the presentation of buildings with the use of the fungal inhibitor. And obviously it's a complex sort of argument, but one of the things that I spoke to with Susan Lastin, which she said about how horrified her husband would be, the fact that the buildings were actually cleaned and repaired. And Lastin would have wanted the decay to be left evident. And actually, if you go there today, you see this rather sort of strange sort of magnolia, sort of splurge or sort of covering the buildings. Yes, it looks less like an inhibitor than some sort of weird fungus that's actually sprayed on it. It's very attractive. It's very weird to look at it. Yeah. Going back to Lars, I remember Lars himself talking about how he liked to stroke the walls of the National Dundee and then the interior of the, and the texture, which you saw led me and I never actually looked at it that way to become much more of an admirer of the texture of the National Theatre. I've got a question here from Romy Wrongweather. A straightforward question that says, is the ziggurat architecture still in existence? I'm not quite sure whether that means generally or at first UEA. I mean, certainly the UEA buildings are there, but as I say, the strange thing is that you will. It was very interesting. One, obviously I saw the buildings about 10 years ago, 10, 15 years ago when they were really decayed, magnificently decayed. And then the university started to clean them. And there was this rather strange moment when one of the ziggurats had been cleaned of all the fungus and had been sort of painted with this sort of magnolia, strange magnolia covering. And then another one was decayed so you could see one and against the other. Well, I think now they've all been repaired, sadly. What you'll see today is not really what Laster intended. No, quite. Do you have any other questions? I have no more questions written questions on my screen. I have one that refers to earlier, but I think I'd rather stick with with the present at the moment. Perhaps I could ask Lisa a question about technology, because it's mentioned in passing the technological kind of input into Imperial. To what extent was was Hong Kong a kind of experimental station, I don't know in terms of what was happening technologically at that key moment in the mid 19th century is typically you should have few structures which perhaps demonstrated that but I wasn't quite sure just looking at them. Well, it's certainly it's certainly an experimental kind of entrepo botanically in terms of and also in terms of public health. They really is a kind of a great kind of round of different different kinds of structures that get built in order to try and deal with malaria, essentially. So many schemes are put forward in terms of the kind of materials of buildings. Usually what they're dealing with is the cross application of materials that come from other sometimes come from other places in the Empire or sometimes are described as native and people are very interested in the different forms of these and whether they might become commodities that can be moved around in their own right. There is a lot of there's also quite a bit of building that is very temporary. So in that sense there's also a lot of experiment with materials in that in that sort of things are put up and knock down and other structures are put up. So is there I mean, can is there a great deal of money going into this or is it or is it the sort of elements of the transience as you just said there as well. Both. Yeah. So, so some some things are put up at great expense and other things are are subject to quite innovative economies that the standard house type is a lot of the houses that are built particularly for the Chinese communities in the period immediately after this are the timber is shipped from Singapore. And they're put up like prefab structures essentially. Okay. I'm just looking at the Q&A there. Is anybody else want to say anything specific to these two papers that we've just listened to. Otherwise we can open it up to all four papers. I had a question from earlier on, and this is from Juliet Carey. This just came in just before we started and this one's for Freya. And Juliet's interested in looking at which is as it might be worth looking at mid century British sculptures interest in native stones chosen in preference to Italian stone and obviously she examples Henry Moore. That's an interesting question I think it's a really helpful suggestion. Thanks. I've only read this from our historians coming to my networks but certainly if you follow the Pelosi line someone like Henry Moore has such a major emphasis on the kind of form and a clean surface that back. He may be going down a slightly different road, but it's, I think looking at other sculptures is good. I think she also had a question about travertine. Can I answer that? Yes, yes, that's right. She says my comment was made I proposed the question of why not travertine. And that's, you know, when you're going back back to, you know, why not travertine. Yeah, I thought about this bit more. I mean, I think there is the, the sort of things you touch and also Jonathan pointing out about weathering. So the initial travertine weathers as well as Roche, and they were concerned with the weather. It sounds like postal architects were thinking about whether in the effects of climate and weather on on on stone, not just from a conservation point but also from a visual aspect. So I don't think travertine weathers as well as Roche, which is incredibly hardy as I said in my book it does get used for sea defences. It's smooth, smooth surface doesn't I mean. Yeah, you just got cavities in it. You said it was also used as aggregate. Yeah, I was interested in it. Yeah, I got used as an aggregate in the concrete for the for the for the paving for the floor. Yeah. Yeah. I guess also Jonathan's point about maybe it being local. I think it might be devil's advocate by suggesting that, and, you know, if vision is self historical than the Smithsons like this stone at this particular moment because of a kind of feed in from France. So I'm being a bit cute about suggesting that maybe this is, this is, you know, this is a French thing. But yeah, those, why not travertine weather local stone and there may have been a cost factor. So I would use crab travertine to build aqueducts. Yeah, yeah. Much much much earlier in ancient history. Yeah. So I, the building that I'm most familiar with, just because of the Yale connection is the Yale center of British art. The interior is a course of covered in travertine. And one of the biggest use that they had was it was obviously not weather and it wasn't the outside was was the actual grease and the oil and materials that got into the travertine. It's apparently very difficult to clean once it's actually, you know, within the surface of the, of the of the site limestone itself. Anything else, anybody, because any of the panelists want to say anything more about either their own or anybody else's contributions today. And we feel that we're getting to the two hour mark. Alicia, yeah, if you unmute yourself, unmute yourself, can you pressing the wrong button. This is a question for Jonathan about about trees with which you started in the urban context. And I'm wondering about some of what you were saying about the ways in which the the built parts of the of these of the none of the Norfolk campus were aging. And it's a, you know, perennial kind of problem of garden restoration. What do you do with the trees that have gotten too big and are now romantic rather than picturesque. And I wondered about the aging of planting in these, these 60s era landscapes, and how that if you if you either have any ideas about how that is being dealt with or is being conceptualized. If you unmute yourself. Yeah, thank you. One of the things that I really enjoyed was going to the Colvin and Moggridge archive. And Colvin and Moggridge, the firms is still practicing and Brenda Colvin is not alive but Moggridge is, and they have a very interesting sense of archive and it was one of the first things they did when they were when Brenda Colvin pointed to role UA was to do this very extensive survey of the site for the university. And it's very interesting because it's a sort of, it's part, it had a funny history was a sort of picturesque parkland and that picturesque field and then became a golf course so it had this rather. And of course, partly but was on the reasons why some of the trees survive. But I think there was an awareness of the enjoying decay trees ruin trees in the same way as enjoying a ruin church. And I always think it's, it's revealing that you know William Kent actually proposed the planting of dead trees for Kensington Gardens. And there's such a strong sense of the awareness of time in that that I think it's on one level, I think that Colvin and Moggridge appreciated the passage of time but they did sort of see the landscape as a sort of marker of time. And Brenda Colvin actually wrote, she did a privately published little book very late in her life. And sadly, it's never been published one wonder in the world. That is very much about this idea about humanity trying to step back from its role of dominance in relationship to nature and allowing nature as far as possible to take its course but realize how involved in that process we are. And I think it's one of the things that my architects personally have a lot to learn from our landscape architects, because landscape architects tend to be far more aware of time than architects do. And architects tend to still design for an ideal particular moment in time, while a landscape architect, if you said that to a landscape architect, you know, beside your ridiculous statement really. You know, I was thinking whenever I go around the circus in Bath, with John Wood's great idea was that you'd have this this area where it would be sports and play and you know all sorts of healthy athletic games and now it's full of these huge massive playing trees. I always had this terrible joke I used to say to students about how you couldn't see the wood for the trees. I won't push that. Two minutes to two. So, unless Danny or Ella, if there's anything else that we need to say. I think that's the final question of possible. Yeah, yeah, piping up. And I was, I'm really interested in Jonathan's comments on landscape architects, and I was just wondering if you could tell us about any kind of continuity or between the likes of Colvin and, and the kind of modernist landscape architects, Christopher Tunnard and Jeffrey Jellicke. Is there some continuity? Is there a real, is there a real discourse between those practices? Is that something you could comment on? I'm less aware of, I mean I know a bit about Jellicke's work and I know Tunnard's work, but I think that Colvin's a very interesting figure. Because I don't think you can really necessarily classify her as a modernist. Well, you can sort of take certain sort of landscape architects of that era and say, yes, they were categorically modernist. But I think Brenda Colvin had a much more longer historical understanding. One of the things that I find very interesting about that period of time, I would, for example, I would describe Dennis Lastin as a pre-modernist, a modernist and a post-modernist. And I think it's possible to see Colvin in the same light. And actually Nicholas Tessner described Lastin and Le Corbusier as post-modern in the mid 60s, 10 years before Charles Jensen. Thank you, thank you. Thank you all. And I just like to thank again our four speakers, Freya, Ewan, Alicia and Jonathan. That was a tremendous session and four excellent papers. And just to remind you, do go to the website because we've put a packed agenda for the Le Chat natural forces coming up over the next month. And also next event is on the 22nd of October. It's Thursday apocalyptic conjunctures, the weather of art history, and that's Andrew Patrizio is giving a keynote there. And then I won't scroll through everything else, but uses plenty of activity, which takes us right the way into early December. Who knows where we're going to be at that point. So thanks for attending and thanks to our speakers.