Tour: Foster

Opposite the Temple in Nimes, the Maison Carrée, is a gallery given over to contemporary art, the Carré d'Art.

As can easily be seen, the gallery has been designed (by Norman Foster) as Architecture with a capital A, intending to echo the Roman temple opposite.And as the modest poster indicates, they were mounting a retrospective on Foster's architecture and Art (another big A) while we were there.

We didn't like the building.   To us it came across as the worst kind of sub-modernism; rather old-fashioned in the same way that a 1960s municipal civic centre is now old-fashioned.  Lots of glass and concrete and cantilevered stairs over voids.  A focus on Spaces (capital S) but with little real joy.  We would hate to work there.

This wasn't the only Foster gallery we encountered on the Tour.  We also visited the Museum of Prehistory of the Gorges du Verdun, in Quinson.  This had the great virtue of having real content, of course.

However, and again, the much vaunted Foster architecture, all sweeping concrete curved walls, did little for us at TANH.  It reminded us of some of those parts of Foster's Great Court, in the British Museum, that are somewhat behind the scenes and less-commonly seen.  The Education Centre in the basement beneath the main courtyard, for example, has the same love of roughened concrete and transitioning curves.  Exciting in theory perhaps, but cold and inhuman in practice.

The weekend before the Great Court was due to be opened by the Queen, we were working on some final IT stuff, and spotted some of the Foster's staff on one of the balconies.  They got some workmen together, and set them to work breaking up the stone slabs in front of the Reading Room.  They were quickly stopped by Museum senior management of course, before too much damage was done, but some slabs were broken and had to be replaced.

Their reasons were aesthetic, and about the look of things: the slabs they wanted to remove were a slightly different colour from the others, and they needed replacing with stone which was a better match.  The offending slabs were damaged, of course, before the workmen were stopped, so we suspect they got their way.  Apocryphally, we heard that the underflow heating and ducting systems were also damaged and never repaired, as a result of the designers focus on surfaces, but we don't know the truth of that.

It did amuse us, however, to see this just outside Foster's Carré d'Art:

Maybe it has become his new signature?  Along with the brutalist concrete, that is...

Finally, one other apocryphal story.
We heard that when the Chairman of the British Museum (a pompous title for a pompous man at that time) attempted to enter the British Museum for the grand opening of the Great Court by the Queen, with the then Sir Norman Foster, the latter was stopped by the gate guard.

'Do you know who this is?', asked the Chairman.
'Yes', came the reply. 'But he can't come in without a pass.  Temporary passes round the back, tradesmen's entrance.'
'But he's with me!'
'Temporary passes round the back, tradesmen's entrance. But you can come in, sir, you've got your pass.'

So the Chairman rang the duty security manager and complained about the 'jobsworth on the gate'.

'Sorry sir, but he's right.  He's doing his job. Temporary passes round the back, tradesmen's entrance.'
'But he's the architect of the whole scheme!'
'Exactly, sir.  Just a supplier.  Not even a member of staff. Temporary passes round the back, tradesmen's entrance.'

So Sir Norman went round the back to the tradesmen's entrance, and got a temporary pass.

And a couple of people from the Security team got bought free drinks on the strength of the story for weeks afterwards.....

Farewell, Stripy Jumpers...

Once upon a time we watched Time Team a lot, and an undoubted star of the show - along with the Lord High Robinson and Phil Harding - was Mick Aston, Professor of the parish, with his tatty, colourful stripy jumpers. 

So farewell, we'll miss you.

Top Five Regrets

I'm not sure quite what I make of this - it is a Guardian report from a few months back on a palliative care nurse who has recorded her 'Top Five Regrets of the Dying' in a blog and book.

They include a range of different wishes, including:

"I wish I hadn't worked so hard" (every male patient) - which is more about not giving all your time to work and spending more with family, children etc, and

"I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

But the piece does, I have to say, come across as a highly sentimental piece of writing. It grates badly.  So while I can see and agree with what is being said, the manner of it is a real barrier. At least for me.

Who and Henges

It does feel a little late to be posting this.  As I write we are only hours away from the resolution of the new Dr Who series.  The Tardis is exploding, Amy has been shot and the Doctor is being locked forever into the Pandorica by all his foes, in a secret chamber under Stonehenge.

But therein lies my problem.  Under Stonehenge?  Surely everyone who is anyone in the field of SF and fantasy film making has been there already.  Every evil villain, and some heroes, have burrowed beneath those stones to create their secret bases.  Secret?  Frankly, it's the first place you look if you don't know where your enemy is lurking.

So there is something of a credibility gap, for me, in the new series's denoument beneath the henge.  And although at one level, I realise that discusing the notion of credibility in relation to Dr Who is itself something of a stretch, in another sense the use of Stonehenge feels a little, well, too ordinary.

Or it did, until I realised there was a simple answer.  All of those lairs, hidden bases and secret chambers can indeed be found under Stonehenge.  They are all present, in their hundreds, and all available for use by any story that needs them. 

The diagram below explains how this works:-

When the writer or director realises they need to locate their incredibly secret complex below the henge this week - ignoring the fact that it is one of the UK's most-visited tourist attractions - they ring ahead and the appropriate Evil Lair is brought forth from the massive Evil Lair Storage Facility (ELSF for short: think of it as something like a huge version of those vertical car parks they have in Germany).  It is loaded onto the ELDV (Evil Lair Delivery Vehicle), updated with any specialist equiment - cyberman arms or whatever - and then conveyed on ultra-heavy duty rails to a point beneath the henge. It is carefully alligned  with the heel stone and altar stone (so the stairs to the surface are properly lined up), after which a mighty piston  raises the required Lair into place, so that it can fulfil its role in the story.

During the rare times when Stonehenge is not featuring in some story or other as the centre of the bad guys' plans, a default plug of stratified earth, containing lip-smacking Bronze Age and earlier finds is pistoned into place, thus keeping all of the archaeologists happy and contented.

Now, I know this is all rather Thunderbirds-ish, and might be seen by some to be overkill, but I can think of no other sensible explanation that covers all the known facts.. 

It also explains why the Government has cancelled the new Visitor Centre scheme.  Apparently all of the alterations would have risked the discovery of all of this technology - and the politician's own emergency Lair....

Joke

I don't believe the Romans had central heating.

I'm a hypocaust denier.

Henge and Hawks

Last weekend we went out West for the day.

Even at first sight, Stonehenge seems a contested space. After a journey down the (far too fast) A303, and parking up, this is what the typical visitor sees as they head for the entrance to the site.

Much of this reverberates with cod-history, mythology and romantic wish-fulfilment. It seems to me to have little to do with the ancient site and its uses. The bulldog seemed a typical icon, fuzzily-used and not clearly understood.
However, although having little support from what I can gather are the known facts of history and prehistory, it could be argued that they have as much right to believe their beliefs, and to use the site in their own (non-destructive) ways as any other visitors.

And this is what some of the latter look like:

This site was ancient when the Romans first encountered it.

The really difficult imaginative leap for me is to understand how much it has decayed, and been tumbled around, and how close (or not) the remains are to the intentions of the (various waves of) builders.


As Frances Pryor writes (in Britain BC), Stonehenge is set in a much larger and in some ways more complex landscape of barrows, ditches, causeways and other henges (the remains of woodhenge is not far away). One notion is that a broad ancient concourse lead to Stonehenge, with high banked sides so that it could not be seen until a corner was turned - after which suddenly it leapt out at the traveller, and dominated the skyline ahead.

Other books speak of how the stones are set so as to appear tapered, and taller than they really are from that angle of approach. It certainly seems to have been intended to dominate the area for many miles around.

Here one of the ditches or moats that still surround the stones can be seen.

The view above shows how the heel stone can be seen through one of the archways, with the so-called "altar stone" lying flat in front.

The key point is that the sun, rising, shines over the key stone, through the archway and on to the altar stone (and onwards to where the photograph was taken from) only on Midsummer's day.

There certainly seems to be something in the idea that the stones were laid out with due regard for the cycles of the sky and sun.

(The '4' in the picture just indicates the point in the audio tour where this view is explained. Which is why I can write about it now!)

The other way in which this World Heritage site is contested, I suppose, is by the car. The A303 stops being a dual carriageway as it approaches the site, but it is still very busy.
The guidebook still speaks of the plan to move the road underground, away from the landscape. All very well, I guess, but isn't that an aesthetic move rather than one that properly seeks to conserve the site? Personally, I think a better solution might be to route the whole main road away, and have a small carefully-routed visitor approach road.
The other thing that surprised me, given how inexpensive the tickets to the site seemed, was the number of people such as those above who decided to look at the stones from the chain link fence, much further away.

After the ancient stones, we moved a few miles back down the road to the Hawk Conservancy Centre. We arrived late in the day, and only had the chance to see a few birds flying.

This owl (apparently a Big Grey Owl) is seemingly renowned for having the flattest face of any owl, which makes it ideal as a receptor for sonar apparently.

It was extremely hard to catch the birds in flight in a reasonable photograph. This was one of the better attempts.
And this wasn't!
When the handler brought out four vultures to feed, this one parked himself just above our heads. A dangerous place to sit for those below!
There are also traditional aviaries, holding a really interesting range of birds.

The largest flighted bird.

Personally, I preferred the hunting birds displayed in the mews, such as this American Eagle.

... Frodo...
... and this sharp, stripped-down looking Harris Hawk
As something of a sideshow, the Centre also has a ferret run - these were great fun to watch.

At the end of the day they also staged a 'ferret race' (really, I suppose, just the ferrets' feeding time).

We didn't really have enough time to do the Centre justice. One day, we may go back.

I'll ask my secretary to remind me...

The trees around Nunhead on Tour 16: Hadrian's Wall and Vindolanda

One of the greatest treasures in the British Museum are some dull-looking thin wooden tablets. These were found during an excavation of a fort on Hadrian's Wall, on the Scottish borders. Many of the tablets are on display in the Museum's Romano-British galleries (room 49, The Weston Galleries). However, to see where the people lived who wrote the tablets, you have to go to Vindolanda itself. So on the way back from the Lake of Menteith that is exactly what we did.
The fort in the picture above is not original....

In a rather neat way, the great Northern Tour was thus bookended by major archaeological sites. We began, pretty much, with Cresswell Crags and ended with Vindolanda. Both with strong links to the local landscape, and also with the Museum.

In between, we did an awful lot of history. York, Durham, Edinburgh and Stirling, of course - but also smaller locales such as Inchmahome and Doune. Well it's all over now; so time for another Tour, I think.