My call last week for a more vigorous approach to restoring the Mackintosh building at the Glasgow School of Art received an almost entirely positive response from readers, who shared my dismay at the slow progress in restoring this fire-ravaged marvel. There were, though, one or two dissenting voices, who accused me of “excessive sentiment” and asked whether the desire to rebuild the building has “got anything to do with what art might be, needs to be, in the 21st century”? To which I’d say, if the art of the present would benefit from generous, adaptable and well-lit studios, such as the old building had, and proximity to some of the greatest design of the past, then yes, it does. And if the unknowable art of the future needs access to the newest technologies, that can be provided in a rebuilt structure. As for what my critic calls “sentiment”, I’d call it an appreciation of art and design – which, surely, is part of the point of a school of art.
Birthday brew
It is not often that one gets to celebrate in a national newspaper the work of Knud Munk (1936-2016), a brutalist turned postmodernist Danish architect fond of designing big bold cylinders animated by zigzags and stripes. But my friend the bass player, a son of Northampton, points out that this is the 50th anniversary of the town’s Munk-designed Carlsberg brewery, a project on which the architect had fun with its giant vats and jagged roofline. The BBC has also noted this important moment, reporting than an estimated 28bn pints have been brewed there. Although I can’t myself see the building’s alleged likeness to a longboat, it’s a memorable and distinctive landmark, unlike anything else in the country, that is still serving its original purpose. Northampton made an under-recognised contribution to 20th-century architecture, with a late work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a 1926 house by the German architect Peter Behrens that is generally seen as the first modernist building in Britain, and the slender vertical tube of the 1982 National Lift Tower. The Carlsberg brewery is a worthy part of this idiosyncratic heritage.
False tale of the city
The “15-minute city” is the perfectly reasonable proposition – if sometimes overhyped and vacuously expressed – that it’s good if the places you need for such things as work, education, leisure and health are within 15 minutes’ walk or cycle from your home. It is not, as a weirdly persistent band of conspiracy theorists claim, a threat to personal freedom by insidious global forces. This has not stopped the health minister, Maria Caulfield, becoming the latest Tory to repeat nonsensical internet scrapings about it. It means, she said in a campaign leaflet, that in her home town of Lewes people will be charged for driving more than 15 minutes from their home, which it does not. Everyone is used to politicians who make things up, but how, actually, are we meant to deal with them?
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Fleeting pleasure
At a time of much posturing about “beauty” and “emotion” in the design of buildings, How to Enjoy Architecture is a useful antidote. It’s a calm, wise, learned, undogmatic and quietly passionate new book by the architect Charles Holland, who designed the extraordinary House for Essex with the artist Grayson Perry. Architecture “is something material that is also about the intangible and fleeting pleasures of life”, it concludes. “It is a source of intense enjoyment that allows us to enjoy so much else as well.” This, rather than more bombastic pronouncements, comes close to the truth.