Since I've got the Royal Academy Friends card, the Systems Administrator and I went to the exhibition of Russian architecture, Building the Revolution. This closes shortly, so once again I'm dashing to see something at the last minute, and Cardunculus is not a helpful guide to planning your cultural day out. We'd been meaning to go since last November, when the SA's eyes fell upon the RA magazine article about it and lit up with genuine enthusiasm. But then we both had colds, one after another, and time ticked by, and we didn't go, until suddenly it was a case of this week or never.
We went to Piccadilly on the bus, which was a novelty for me. Indeed, I can't think when I last travelled on a London bus. I think it was in Oxford Street on one of the old Routemasters, probably over twenty years ago. My failure to use London buses doesn't reflect any snobbish disdain for them, merely the fact that I don't know where any of them go, and in the pre-Oyster days I was anxious that I'd get on the wrong bus, inadvertently stray outside whatever zone I'd paid to be in, and be hit with a penalty fare. Or else miss my stop, or get lost, or not be able to find the stop for the return bus going the other way. Tubes are easy. The action takes place in tunnels with diagrams showing exactly where the train is going. Bond Street will follow Oxford Street as night follows day. It couldn't possibly be anything else, while a bus could go anywhere. However, the SA cracked buses some time ago, and knows what number goes to Picadilly (23), and where it goes from, and that you only have to swipe your Oyster card getting on and not getting off the bus.
The view from the top deck of the number 23 was great, once we'd taken twenty minutes to get to get as far as Mansion House (I could have walked to St Pauls in only two minutes more than that). I notice all sorts of architectural details and bits of buildings that normally I'd have missed. Apart from being higher up and getting a different viewpoint, being on a bus frees up all the parts of one's mind which would otherwise be occupied with not walking into people, or crossing the road without being run over. We passed Charing Cross, and I realised that I couldn't remember which queen the monument was raised for, and that today was No Wikipedia day and I wouldn't be able to look it up easily when I got home.
The exhibition was interesting, although there's not much point in my saying that, as there's scarcely time for you to go, if you haven't been already. It featured pre-war buildings that reflected and symbolised the new Russian socialist society, with factories, communal living blocks, schools and infrastructure projects. There was a strong International Modernist aesthetic, the same movement that was at the same time influencing the British seaside in the form of the De Lar Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea, and the Midland Hotel at Morecombe. Indeed, the former was designed by the same German-Russian partnership of Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff who were responsible for some of the buildings in the RA show.
It is not an original thought that seeing where a society puts its architectural efforts tells you a lot about that society. In Medieval times people built cathedrals, in Victorian times railway stations, and in modern times banking headquarters and shopping centres. The Russian revolutionaries took industry and communal living very seriously. The Victorians built some grand mills, and the 1930s saw the construction of the Art Deco Hoover Factory (and Fort Dunlop was built at some point but it's No Wikipedia day and the Fort Dunlop site tells me a lot about the redevelopment but not when it was built. Or at least not quickly). But I can't offhand think when I last read a review in the Guardian's architecture pages of an exciting new industrial building.
An extra twist of the exhibition is that there aren't very many extant photographs of most of these buildings when they were new, so modest drawings of the time were displayed next to large, recent colour photographs of the buildings. Some are still in use for their original purpose, especially the schools and some residential schemes, and a vast radio mast. Some have been converted into artistic spaces. Many of the factories are derelict, some in danger of collapse. This is rather poignant, because of their historical significance, and because many of them are beautiful. Well, beautiful if you like the International Modernist look, which on the whole I do. Those rounded walls and balconies and internal circulation by curving ramps and spiral staircases like big abstract white sculptures, they're good.
If you go into RA exhibitions on a Friend's card nobody seems to give you a gallery guide, so I can't remember where the Russian city is, that still has its white concrete water tower, now defunct as a water tower but still functioning as an eye-catcher at the end of a long boulevard. They could twin with Colchester, if twinning weren't going out of fashion. Two towns united in their devotion to their derelict, iconic water towers. I was too mean to buy the exhibition catalogue. I generally am. There seemed to be lots left, with four days left to go, so I wouldn't be surprised to get one cheap later.
Then we walked across Green Park and St James Park and got a number 11 back. I think I'm getting the hang of buses. Also embarking on a new stage of my cold. The SA's was a two-parter, so that's not unlikely.
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