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2013 May

No. 6, Burlington Gardens

Sir James Pennethorne’s University of London

German university buildings are an (admittedly unusual) obsession of mine, and I’ve often thought that No. 6 Burlington Gardens is London’s closest answer to your typical nineteenth-century Teutonic academy’s Hauptgebäude. And the connection is appropriate enough, as No. 6 was built in 1867-1870 for the University of London in what had once been the back garden of Burlington House (which at the same time became home to the Royal Academy of Arts). Despite the building’s Germanic form, the architect Sir James Pennethorne decorated the structure in Italianate detail, providing the University with a lecture theatre, examination halls, and a head office. Pennethorne died just a year after drafting this design, and his fellow architects described it as his “most complete and most successful design”.

The University of London was founded as a federal entity in 1836 to grant degrees to the students of the secularist, free-thinking University College and its rival, the Anglican royalist King’s College. It now is composed of eighteen colleges, ten institutes, and a number of other ‘central bodies’, with over 135,000 students.

Since its founding, the University had been dependent upon the government’s purse for funding, as well as for housing. Accomodation was provided in Somerset House, then Marlborough House, before evacuating to temporary quarters in Burlington House and elsewhere. It was not until the 1860s that Parliament approved the appropriate grant for a purpose-built home for the University to be erected in the rear garden of Burlington House. (more…)

May 29, 2013 4:30 pm | Link | 5 Comments »

IHT, RIP

New York Times Kills Off the International Herald-Tribune

The New York Times Company, owners of the Paris-based International Herald-Tribune, announced recently that they are going to kill off the 126-year-old newspaper. I had predicted back in 2009 that this was precisely what would happen because of the aimless direction the IHT had taken since the New York Times became the sole owners of the title in 2002, after a long period of joint ownership with the Washington Post. The IHT will be merged into the worldwide operations of the Times this autumn and be rebranded as the International New York Times

Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker bids adieu to the Trib, remembering the first time he left the U.S. in 1960. Crain’s New York Business provides a brief overview of NYTCo’s decision. Margaret Sullivan, the Times’s ‘Public Editor’, reduces any appreciation for the Herald-Tribune as mere emotive romantic nostalgia. Nikki Usher mourns the IHT’s tendency to broaden the Times’s typically American editorial lens. Meanwhile, Ken Layne of The Awl is a bit frank about the decision to drop the Herald-Tribune for The International New York Times: “That’s an incredibly shitty name that makes no sense at all!”

May 29, 2013 4:25 pm | Link | 3 Comments »

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