THE FAMILIAR PHRASE has a person in difficult circumstances being “between a rock and a hard place”. The Namibian town of Lüderitz is stuck between the dry sands of the desert and salt water of the South Atlantic — this is the only country whose drinking water is 100% recycled. Life in this almost-pleasant German colonial outpost on the most inhospitable coast in the world has always been something of a difficulty, but the allure of diamonds has at least made it profitable. One such adventurer who came from afar and made his fortune in this outer limit of the Teutonic domains was one Hans Goerke. (more…)

AMONG THE MANY peoples who, through the various vicissitudes of history, have found their home in South Africa are the Huguenots, or French Protestants. These people have always had a certain fascination for me, having being born so close to New Rochelle, the city in the New World founded by Huguenot refugees. The city’s public high school is a rather stately French neo-gothic chateau in the middle of Huguenot Park.

My own alma mater — a smaller private school in New Rochelle — counted Huguenot descendants among its first students and there was at least one remaining in my own school days. Street names such as Flandreau, Faneuil, and Coligni betray the French heritage of the city’s founders, and Trinity Church still has the old communion table brought over from La Rochelle. (more…)

Unbenowst to me until recently, there are plans afoot to rebuild the Saxon Palace in Warsaw, though they have been — temporarily, I hope — suspended for lack of funds. The palace was almost totally destroyed in the Second World War (“The War Poland Lost Twice”), and the surviving part of the central arcade was turned into the Polish Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, now an obligatory stop for all foreign heads of state visiting the Polish capital.

The plan also provides for the neighbouring Brühl Palace to be rebuilt, to serve as the headquarters of the National Bank of Poland. Let’s hope they also decide to demolish that ugly modern monstrosity (to the right in the illustration above) that mars Piłsudski Square.

ICA&CA 2009 Fellows’ Summer Lecture Series

One of our greatest institutions here in New York is the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America which does such splendid work in propagating knowledge about and training in classical architecture and its allied arts. Every summer the ICA&CA presents a series of summer lectures, the first of which takes place next Wednesday. This year the series will be held in the library of the General Society (f. 1785), New York’s last remaining guild, whose 44th Street headquarters house the Institute’s offices.

Not even the peaceful hills and dales of the Hudson Valley were left untouched by the liturgicalism of the Oxford Movement

SUCH WAS THE influence of the nineteenth-century “Oxford Movement” in the Church of England that it engulfed the great preponderance of the Anglican Communion. It is surprising when you consider that Anglican priests and even a bishop were jailed in England for such scandalous acts as calling the Communion service “the Mass”, wearing vestments, and putting candles on the altar; these are now so widespread in the Church of England to be commonplace. But the Oxford movement also spilled out into other Protestant groups as well. The liturgical movement changed the Church of Scotland in the 1900s, and many of the Kirk’s medieval church buildings that had been converted into pulpit-centered preaching halls were reordered in a way emphasizing the “Communion table” that was an altar in all but name. (Those who can find before & after shots of the ‘Toon Kirk’ of Holy Trinity in St Andrews, Fife will notice this marked contrast).

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Daniel François Malan, fourth Prime Minister of South Africa, is seen here taking breakfast with his family on the verandah at Groote Schuur, the official residence of the PM. (At right, the same view today). Groote Schuur — literally “great barn” — was purchased by Cecil Rhodes and transformed into the paragon of the South African style of architecture by his architect Sir Herbert Baker. Foolishly, the office of Prime Minister was abolished in 1984, when the ridiculous 1984 tricameral constitution was adopted. Groote Schuur continued as the Cape residence of the State President of South Africa under P.W. Botha and F.W. De Klerk but when Nelson Mandela was elected he decided to make the neighbouring Westbrooke his official residence, renaming it Genadendal (“Valley of Grace”) after the oldest Moravian mission in South Africa. Groote Schuur is now a museum open by appointment, and unlived in.

I’m not entirely sure of what project this is an architectural rendering, but I suspect it is an unbuilt project designed by Cass Gilbert for Blackwell’s Island in the East River, later known as Welfare Island and now Roosevelt Island. There were a number of schemes before the First World War (Thomas J. George was the author of one) for the construction of a new civic center for New York on the island, which is located right in the middle of the five boroughs.

The king of counter-proposals sets eyes on Divine Mercy shrine

Young architect Matt Alderman presents his counter-proposal to a horrifyingly kitsch proposal for a West-Coast U.S. shrine to the Divine Mercy. Why, given that the recovery of skill & talent in architecture in the past few decades, are most new churches still revoltingly ugly? “The problem is not that it is hard to get beautiful churches built, but that the wrong people seem to end up getting the commissions,” Matt writes. “Oakland and Los Angeles were, of course, going to go modernistic no matter what, but Houston Cathedral could have been a masterpiece if handled by someone with a greater openness to traditional design, rather than settling for a mediocre pseudo-traditionalism.”

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Another view of Dublin’s splendid General Post Office on O’Connell Street; the last one we posted was from half a century earlier.

Or is it in all the New World?

I do miss my two libraries in Manhattan, the Society Library on 79th Street and the Haskell Library at the French Institute on 60th. Neither of them, however, are fit to shine the boots of the library of the University Club on 54th & Fifth. Architecturally and artistically, it is undoubtedly the finest library in New York. But does it have an equal or a better in all the New World? The BN in BA certainly isn’t a competitor.

The devil in me, while entirely appreciative of the beauty of Radcliffe Camera, sometimes wonders if the handsome square it is in might be better off without it. What would it look like?

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Deep in the Cedarberg, in the northern reaches of the Western Cape, there is a lovely little Moravian mission in a valley called Wupperthal. Unless you have a 4×4, there is just one road in and out of the valley, and even that road can be a bit tricky for conventional vehicles. Barefoot children, smiling and carefree, play in the streets beneath the avenue of eucalyptus that perfectly frames the beautiful church. Genadendal is the most famous of the Moravian missions, but Wupperthal was actually founded by Rhenish missionaries, before briefly becoming Dutch Reformed in the middle of the last century, and then taken over by the Moravians, or Herrnhuters as they are called in Afrikaans, after the Sorbian stronghold of the Unitas Fratrum.

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Seventeenth-century Amsterdam building will, from June, be home to collections from St. Petersburg’s Imperial Hermitage Museum

A new 100,000-square-foot space displaying works from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg will open in Amsterdam this June. The Hermitage Amsterdam will be located in the Amstelhof, a former home for the elderly built in 1683 by the Dutch Reformed Church and transformed into a modern exhibition space by Hans van Heeswijk Architects. The opening exhibition, “At the Russian Court” — a “a deeply researched exploration of the opulent material culture, elaborate social hierarchy and richly layered traditions of the Tsarist court at its height in the nineteenth century” — will display 1,800 works from the massive collection in St. Petersburg and continue until the end of January 2010.

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The New York firm of Beyer Blinder Belle, responsible for the restoration of Grand Central Terminal, has been selected to develop “an adaptive reuse and restoration plan” for Exchange Place, a historic building on Budapest’s Freedom Square (Szabadság tér). Exchange Place was built in 1905 for the Budapest Stock and Commodities Exchange, and includes a number of ornamental details in the Hungarian style of the Secession architectural movement. After the Soviet conquest of Hungary, the building became the Lenin Institute before being given over to the state television broadcaster.

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Dr. van der Merwe, moderator of the Dutch Reformed Church, poses in the splendidly carved pulpit of the Groote Kerk in Cape Town.

Cape Town, old and new

The National Library, in the Company’s Garden.

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Above & below: the SS Normandie. The Normandie was seized by the U.S. government and renamed the USS Lafayette but burned in New York harbor before she could be put to good use in the war effort. The bronze doors to the chapel were salvaged and now grace the Church of Our Lady of Lebanon in Brooklyn.

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Afraid of celebrating glorious past, a horrible future is created instead

Fresh from the glories of Dresden’s rebuilt Lutheran Frauenkirche, the city fathers of Berlin have decided to reconstruct the old Stadtschloß (“City Palace”) at the heart of the German capital, only not quite. Largely ignored by the anti-monarchist Nazis, the original Stadtschloß was damaged by Allied bombing and by shelling during the Battle of Berlin before the Communist government of East Germany demolished it entirely and built the horrendously ugly Palast der Republik (housing the Soviet satellite’s faux parliament) on the site. The Communist monstrosity has finally been demolished, but the authorities decided that, rather than restore the beautiful royal palace that once stood on the site, they will instead merely replicate three of the old structure’s façades, leaving one of the façades and most of the interior in a modern style.

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O’Connell Street, Dublin, United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland.

One of my good friends, who is amongst the most loyal denizens of this little corner of the web, found our post on St. Nicholas Collegiate Church of great interest because his son attended the Collegiate School, the oldest school in North America (founded in 1628, and formally incorporated ten years later). The Collegiate School is part of the same complex as the West End Collegiate Church on the corner of West End Avenue & 77th Street on the Upper West Side. The church & school buildings were designed by McKim Mead & White in a Dutch Renaissance Revival style, and handsomely executed.

THE ARCHITECTS modelled the church after the seventeenth-century Vleeshal (meat market) of Haarlem in the Netherlands. The story goes that, during the Second World War, a handful of Collegiate grads serving together in the U.S. Army participated in the liberation of Haarlem, stumbled upon the Vleeshal and said “Hey, that’s our school!”

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