Blairchitecture: 'Ascend up into the light'

Here's one I designed earlier: Pyramind of Peace and Accord

The Pyramid of Peace and Accord was commissioned from Lord Norman Foster by the president of Kazakhstan in Astana, to where Nursultan Nazarbayev moved the state capital in 1997.

The building was conceived to host a congress of world religious leaders. It contains an opera house in the basement. "As you ascend up the pyramid you ascend up into the light," Lord Foster said: his intention was to build a pyramid "so light that it will appear to float away".

Nazarbayev expressed anti-religious views when he was president during the Soviet period, but since the breakup of the union and his continued presidency (most recently endorsed in a 2011 election in which he received 95.54 per cent of the vote) he has stressed his Muslim beliefs and undertaken the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Kazakhstan, which has significant hydro-carbon reserves, is now sometimes referred to as 'the Singapore of the Steppes': not only has its president been lauded in a recent book by Jonathan Aitken, the former British government minister imprisoned for perjury in 1999, but it enjoys, for a reputed £13 million fee, the advice of our former prime-minster, Tony Blair, and his contacts and associates.

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song

New

Along the Thames a vast linear city was built in the 2000s, without ever being officially planned, announced or publicised. Briefly interrupted by central London's historic riverside buildings, to the east it starts at the Millennium bridge, to the west at Vauxhall bridge, with the apparition of the huge, hideous and expanding St George's Wharf complex. This linear city is a buy-to-let paradise, an almost endless enfilade of green glass, terracotta and wavy roofs, the boom's most visible legacy in London, blocking and defining the river. Only a handful of structures really stand in its way and interrupt it – the largest of them by far the rotting and magnificent hulk of Battersea power station, its stock-brick solidity a remarkable contrast to the Trespa all around. Except now, it's being pulled back in, as surely as the warehouses-cum-penthouses of Shad Thames, as part of perhaps the final big riverside development. A tube extension, bizarrely considered a priority by central government, has dragged this last post-industrial waste back into service. The flats went on sale two days ago, instantly snapped up by investors undeterred by the massive price tag.

Owen Hatherley

Old

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.


What became clear to the London Assembly’s Planning and Spatial Development Committee is that the Thames' understandable attraction as a location for exclusive residential development not only compromises the adequate provision of a riverside path but also results in the Thames being barricaded from its immediate hinterland and the rest of London.

A new amendment

Aaron Swartz, 8 November 1986 - 11 January 2013

Whatever else is true, Swartz was destroyed by a "justice" system that fully protects the most egregious criminals as long as they are members of or useful to the nation's most powerful factions, but punishes with incomparable mercilessness and harshness those who lack power and, most of all, those who challenge power.

Woolly liberal

Man and Nature: out of balance

For two centuries, since the Age of the Enlightenment, we assumed that whatever the advance of science, whatever the economic development, whatever the increase in human numbers, the world would go on much the same. That was progress. And that was what we wanted.

Now we know that this is no longer true.

We have become more and more aware of the growing imbalance between our species and other species, between population and resources, between humankind and the natural order of which we are part.

In recent years, we have been playing with the conditions of the life we know on the surface of our planet. We have cared too little for our seas, our forests and our land. We have treated the air and the oceans like a dustbin. We have come to realise that man's activities and numbers threaten to upset the biological balance which we have taken for granted and on which human life depends.

We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late. That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe. It endures as we eat and sleep, work and rest, as we are born and as we pass away. The duty to Nature will remain long after our own endeavours have brought peace to the Middle East. It will weigh on our shoulders for as long as we wish to dwell on a living and thriving planet, and hand it on to our children and theirs.

Margaret Thatcher, speech to the Second World Climate Conference, Geneva, November 1990

Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.

Thomas Hollis, 1720-1774, by Joseph Wilton, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London

For Thomas Hollis, libertarian, writer, bibliophile and patron of the arts, it was less than sixty years.

The London-born philosopher, radical propagandist and philanthropist Thomas Hollis was politically progressive, devoting his life to lobbying for parliamentary reform, opposing corruption and promoting democracy. Hollis's 'Great Plan' to reform public life, begun in 1754, shaped political debate in Britain and created an identity for the London Opposition, the most significant political force outside government from the 1750s to the 1770s. This group was united by their suspicion of Court and commercial influence over political life and their admiration for a classical ideal of the independent, virtuous, selfless statesman.

Hollis's programme included the anonymous publication and distribution of thousands of volumes and prints promoting the concept of liberty to public institutions in Britain, America and Europe. His patronage was extensive and he wrote articles, designed prints and commissioned coins and medals to promote his political agenda. He promoted the work of sympathetic artists, such as Robert Edge Pine and Giovanni Cipriani, and gave advice to other artists including Joseph Nollekens. He was also heavily involved in the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, now known as the Royal Society of Arts. Hollis's substantial cultural achievements and patronage ensured that the Whig concept of liberty and public service continued to have an influence on British political thought and public life.

Hollis was educated at Adams Grammar School until the age of 10, and then in St. Albans until 15, before learning French, Dutch and accountancy in Amsterdam. After the death of his father in 1735, his guardian was a John Hollister. He was trained in this time in public service by John Ward of Gresham College, London. He took chambers with Lincoln's Inn from 1740 to 1748, though without ever reading law. By this time he was a man of considerable wealth having inherited from his father, grandfather and uncle.

In 1748–9 he toured Europe with Thomas Brand (later Brand Hollis) and again during 1750–53, largely on his own, meeting many leading French philosophers and several Italian painters. Back in England, he was an ardent member of the Society of Arts. He proposed Piranesi for membership of the Society of Antiquaries, gave numerous commissions to Cipriani, and, as one of Canaletto's best friends in England, commissioned six paintings from him. These paintings included Old Walton Bridge in which Hollis, his heir Thomas Brand and Hollis's manservant were depicted, also the interior of the rotunda at Ranelagh. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1757. He was well connected, knowing Francis Blackburne and Theophilus Lindsey, John Wilkes, several peers, and the elder William Pitt. He was a governor of Guy's and St Thomas's hospitals, and a guardian of the asylum and Magdalen Hospital.

Hollis's main contribution to public service was protecting and advancing English liberty by circulating appropriate books on government. From 1754, he reprinted and distributed literature from the 17th century. Including works such as Toland's Life of Milton, tracts by Marchmont Nedham, Henry Neville, and Philip Sidney, and John Locke's Two Treatises of Government; they were elegantly bound to give them greater effect and tooled with libertarian ornaments such as the liberty cap and owl. To start with the tracts were directed towards libraries throughout Britain and continental Europe; later he turned his generosity to America.

He continued his great-uncle Thomas's practice, as a great benefactor to American colleges, especially Harvard, sending donations and numerous books, often decorated with libertarian symbols. From 1755, his principal American correspondent was Jonathan Mayhew of Boston, and, after his death in 1766, Andrew Eliot. His other benefactions included substantial donations to Berne Library and to the University of Leiden Library.

Thomas Hollis died suddenly on January 1, 1774 and was buried, as he had wished, ten feet deep in a field at his Dorset farm, Urless, near Corscombe. The field was then ploughed over, also according to Hollis's instructions, leaving his grave unmarked.

As Hollis never married, his estate was left to longtime friend Thomas Brand on condition that Brand added the name of Hollis to his own name. He did, becoming Thomas Brand Hollis, and continued his friend's traditions of philanthropy and political engagement.

Urless Farm

Wepyng and dolour out of mesure

'A, Launcelot!' he sayd, 'thou were hede of al Crysten knyghtes! And now I dare say,' sayd syr Ector, 'thou sir Launcelot, there thou lyest, that thou were never matched of erthely knyghtes hande. And thou were the curtest [most courteous] knyght that ever bare shelde! And thou were the truest frende to thy lovar that ever bestrade hors, and thou were the trewest lover of a synful man that ever loved woman, and thou were the kyndest man that ever strake wyth swerde. And thou were the godelyest persone that ever cam emonge prees of knyghtes, and thou was the mekest man and the jentyllest that ever ete in halle emonge ladyes, and thou were the sternest knyght to thy mortal foo that ever put spere in the reeste.'

Than there was wepyng and dolour out of mesure.

Nature notes - January dawn

Here, where I live, the dawn air is suffused with the delicate yet distinctly, sweetly acrid scent of slurry from the silage-fed, indoor-housed, milk-laden cows; it is filled with the low insistent hum of the milking machines and the repeated clonk-clunk-clonk of the yard scraper, as the amber fingers of the sodium lights break gently over the asbestos rooves of the industrial cattle barns, and the mist hangs low over the gently murmuring, phosphate-laden, fish-denying streams.

Elsewhere confident farmers deliver for society or ask, can we really carry on with farming as it is?