Character in a building makes us smile. Character implies something time-worn and wise, like laughter lines around the eyes. We see character in thatched houses, wonky walls, and in quirky details like turrets and fancy gables. But can you build character into a new structure? If architectural character is viewed as being akin to character in people then shouldn’t we move beyond the quaint and shambolic and assess a building on a broader scale of attributes – for its fortitude, its bearing, its handsomeness?

I was thinking about this as I wandered along the quay at Darling Harbour in central Sydney. It’s always been an odd place, a part of the old working harbour that was transformed in the 1980s into Sydney’s leisure land, with hotels and restaurants, cinemas and event venues. The first version is now being gradually torn down and replaced by buildings that better fit the current mood of the city. Which means it’s remained an odd place but with newer buildings. And do they have character? I’m not sure.

does Darling Harbour have personality?

Why is character important? I think it invites us to form an emotional bond with a building and that helps with place-making. The towns and cities we love tend to have strong personalities, and much of that is down to the architecture. People want to live in places that have character, hence the refurbishment of inner city areas that are ingrained with the sweat of life itself, in old warehouses and workers’ cottages. But so too do we love the apparent friendliness of villages that cluster around charming squares or grassy commons. It’s the remarkability of the buildings that aids the character.

I have always viewed architecture in human terms, in the same way that I anthromorphise animals. When I find myself standing before a building that I have only ever known through books I feel a chest-thumping  moment of recognition, as though meeting an old friend. “So here you are,” I say to it, and I usually lay my hands on a wall to connect myself physically with the building. I do this with Gothic cathedrals and 1950s office towers, and almost unconsciously, as I would when meeting a new person, I assess whether or not the building is a friend or not. What sort of character does it have?

giggling Central Park One (by Jean Nouvel)

Sydney Opera House is a bit flaky, all those flaring shapes, and also rather lonely, marooned on its little peninsula away from other buildings, bearing the burden of being in the spotlight. The Victorian terraced streets of Sydney, on the other hand, are usually happy and smiling. The plant-walled Central Park One building is proud, suppressing giggles as it rises up like a glamourpuss thrilled with her fabulous new coat. Well, that’s the way my mind works (which is why I could never be an architectural academic).

The other day I walked around my suburb looking at the new houses that have recently gone up. I was looking for character and found buildings hiding behind masks. I’ve mentioned before Robin Boyd’s marvellous  The Australian Ugliness which speared the Australian love of features in suburban buildings in the 1950s. Little has changed. On my little saunter, I passed houses filled with so many details, features, shapes and textures that they have ended looking like kids let loose with the dressing-up box. And then I came across a little red-brick bungalow, a hangover from the 1950s. Almost immediately I felt its friendly nature. I’m sure it said hello, while its newer neighbours were too busy sucking in their cheeks.

hello

The French have a wonderful term – jolie laide – to describe a woman who is not classically beautiful but has an allure despite her plainness. Architecture can do this, too, which is what draws us to the beauty in a variety of buildings that some might think of as ugly. Their simple honesty is as refreshing as someone telling us that the emperor is wearing no clothes.

jolie laide (the Sirius building in Sydney)

I treasure emotional honesty and laughter in people. And these qualities draw me to buildings, too.  Seeing a building that can make me laugh, and one that is imbued with the integrity of a good idea carried out well, is just as good as sitting down for the evening with a valued friend.

Do you think character is important? What characterful buildings do you love?

There’s a scene in Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’ when the 1920s flapper played by Marion Cotillard wishes she lived in the Paris of the past. The golden age was the Belle Époque, she moans to Gil, the lead, who is still reeling from his own good fortune at having slipped back to what he regards as the golden age, the 1920s. His Paris is filled with caricatures of everyone who was anyone, from Hemingway and Stein to Dali and Fitzgerald. It’s a witty comment on how we tend to glamorise the past.

Still from “Midnight In Paris” – Gil meets Man Ray, Buñuel & Dali

Sometimes, when I look back, I feel the same. And when I noticed that my partner was reading ‘Jigsaw’ by Sybille Bedford, I found myself transported back to another time and a particular place. Bedford was a very fine writer and led a rather extraordinary life, including a period spent on the French Riviera before WW2 when she became a close friend of Aldous Huxley and his wife, and bumped into émigrés like Thomas Mann and Berthold Brecht, who were escaping Nazi persecution. I bought the book when it came out in 1989 because I used to see Sybille Bedford regularly when I worked in Chelsea. She lived opposite my workplace, and I noticed her because she often wore an eyeshade, due to an intolerance to bright light. She was in her seventies and tended to wear rather blokey striped shirts and corduroy trousers that gave her a particular no-nonsense English look, although her mother was an Italian princess and her father a German baron. I used to wonder who she was, and then I happened on an article about her in a Sunday newspaper. Later, I was too callow to stop her in the street and tell her how much I’d enjoyed her book.

Old Church Street 1990 cc-by-sa/2.0 – © Ben Brooksbank – geograph.org.uk/p/4696411

When I think back to that time, Old Church Street seems filled with interesting characters like her. I worked on the narrow part of the street that runs between King’s Road and Cheyne Walk, the bit that is lined with a hodgepodge of 18^th and 19^th century houses and cottages with a smattering of early 20th century apartment buildings. There’s a huge old rectory at one end, which was empty then and in which social reformer Charles Kingsley, author of “The Water Babies”, had once lived. At the other end is the handsome ‘old’ church itself, with a stout brick tower marking the street’s junction with Cheyne Walk and the murky Thames beyond. Thomas More had a private chapel there in the 1500s but the building had been razed by a bomb in 1941 and then rebuilt. It was always busy on Fridays because that was the day posh folk married (none of your plebeian Saturday nonsense). The church hall to its side was used as a rehearsal room by the National Theatre. When ‘The Merchant of Venice’ rehearsed for a week or so, Dustin Hoffmann (playing Shylock) would stroll up to the pub with the rest of the cast for their lunchbreak, loud and laughing as actors always are when off the leash. Familiar faces from stage and screen seemed to pass all the time. I remember watching singer Grace Jones clobber a man who had taken her photo with her young son, which was a total no-no in her book.

Other celebs could be seen nipping into Manolo Blahnik’s discreet little shop halfway along the street. Manolo was always impeccably dressed and he clipped smartly down the street every morning like a character from a Henry James novel, always busy. His tall and austerely elegant sister Evangeline worked in the showroom along with a pair of camp and giggly boys.  I would hear their shrieks of laughter when there were no clients. Sometimes a Bentley or Daimler would sit outside, engine running like a getaway car, and you would glimpse Tina Turner or Princess Di trying on exquisite footwear inside. Madonna said his shoes were better than sex.

The actor Sir Michael Hordern ambled past most mornings to buy the newspaper. He was familiar to me from British stiff-upper-lip war films, and he was obviously in dire need of hip or knee surgery as he had an alarming gait that was painful to watch. He was gruff and usually frowning but would often mutter a hello as he passed. I thought he had the most wonderful face, so creased and characterful.

the budding writer in 1980s colour

The street changed as the 1980s came to an end, becoming glossy and Condé-Nasted. Smart little design shops opened and the pub threw out its traditional dark furnishings and replaced them with scrubbed pine and blackboards, and started serving eggs benedict instead of pie and chips, and mulled wine in winter. My time working there was also coming to an end – friends were dying from AIDS-related diseases and I was growing impatient with the superficial nature of my work. In 1990 I wriggled free, not realising that I would fall for a while into a deeper hole that would be harder to extricate myself from (although, thankfully, I did).

If I were to set a novel in that street during the 1980s, as I sometimes consider doing, then I’m sure I would mention the famous people I encountered there because that was part of the flavour of the place. This sort of thing can easily come across as cartoonish, though. When I was writing “Loving Le Corbusier” I wanted to convey a sense of an ordinary Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century, the normality of life. And yet Yvonne Le Corbusier would have been aware of so many of the great names of the time, and met some of them through her husband. At times I felt her Parisian world, seen from a table in the Café de Flore or the Deux Magots, was a little like mine in Old Church Street, observing other people who were famously creative and who inhabited a world that felt far removed from her (and my) own.

Le Corbusier with Yvonne 1930 © Fondation Le Corbusier

Creating a sense of the past in a novel is tricky. It’s about details, like using the idioms and mannerisms of the time, as well as conjuring up the food and the clothing of the moment. Or perhaps it’s doing none of that and allowing the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks. Get it wrong and it gets in the way and feels fake, like  watching a period drama where everyone has perfect teeth and glossy hair. I remember hearing Patrick Gale say about his book “A Place called Winter” that for a while he became obsessed with finding out what Edwardian underwear looked like. It’s important to know these things even when they never appear in the writing because they fill your mind as you write.

I’m going to re-read Sybille Bedford’s “Jigsaw” because I love disappearing into a past peopled by fascinating characters. The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there, is L P Hartley’s memorable opening line to his novel “The Go-Between” (itself a masterly treatment of the past) and it always resonates. Perhaps writers are more prone than others to reflecting on what has passed, mulling over the way things were, and why they were like that. But to transfer that onto the page or into film without being as deliberately playful as Woody Allen (or as starstruck as my memory) is a talent indeed.

Do you have a favourite book or film set in the past?

Recently I was asked to contribute some thoughts about bricks for ABC RN’s ‘Blueprint for Living’. My chat with Jonathan Green was interspersed with other interviews – one with a gardener who used bricks in his landscaping, another with a restorer of bricks in old houses, and even a chat with a cook who made bric pastry, a kind of North African pasty. (You can hear the segment here.) There was far too much to say about the subject in the time allotted but I spent a lovely week before the interview just thinking about brick buildings I admired. So I thought I’d share a few of them with you.

When I first thought about bricks, I remembered the places where I had been most impressed by them. Like the Roman houses at Herculaneum near Naples, covered for centuries in Vesuvius’s ash, and the brick walls of the lovely Pantheon in Rome, often overlooked in the rush to focus on its amazing concrete dome. There was also Albi’s incredible fortress-like cathedral of the 1300s, its buttresses contained within towers, its base flaring out to withstand the force of battering rams.

Places des Vosges

There’s  Hampton Court, that was started in the 1500s, and the elegant Place des Vosges in Paris of 1605, and the plain-fronted buildings of Belgium and the Netherlands of the same period. And the elegant Georgian buildings of Britain, from picturesque country rectories to the formal terraces of London. I lived in one that was built in 1838 and the walls of my basement flat were tremendously thick, with deep window sills outside, and even deeper windowsills inside. Brick at that time was only just becoming fashionable. More usually it was rendered and sometimes scored to look like painted stone, like the white neo-Classical terraces of Nash’s Regent’s Park. Even in the later grand houses of Belgravia, brick was relegated to the rear elevation and to the utilitarian mews buildings.

The burgeoning power of the Industrial Revolution steadily chipped away at this disapproval. Bricks were manufactured in proper brickworks instead of in on-site kilns as before, and that meant greater quality control and reliability. Clay was finely ground using proper machinery before being mixed with sand, ash or grit, along with water. The doughy mixture was then extruded through a rolling machine, the edges trimmed of any bumps before wires cut each brick to an exact size. These were fired at high temperatures in kilns providing a uniform heat, creating bricks that were incredibly strong. The new railways and canals were used to transport the bricks to wherever they were needed. And the bricks, themselves, were used to build the new railway viaducts and station buildings that were needed as the network expanded.

Florence, Siena & Bologna in Leeds (Flickr: Tim Green)

Brick is fireproof, of course, and that made them perfect for the new mills and warehouses of northern England. The first iron-framed buildings in Manchester of the 1810s were given a skin of brick, sometimes with a decorative twist with inlaid patterns. They’re often rather playful. In Leeds, for instance, there are brick factory chimneys that are copies of Italian bell towers of the early Renaissance.  It’s no wonder that people began to see brick in a new light.

The Red House (Flickr: Peter Johnson)

Architects of the Gothic Revival loved brick because they saw it as an honest material, one that needed no covering up.  And when William Morris wrote about a return to simple materials, he was living in an example of it. His own home, Red House in Bexleyheath, designed by his chum Phillip Webb in 1858, was made of brick. It’s seen as one of the seeds of the Modern movement of the next century, thanks to the exposure of its building materials, like the roof timbers and, of course, the unadorned red brick of its walls.

This, then, was brick’s moment. Think of the flamboyantly Gothic St Pancras station with the exuberant Midland Hotel fronting the astonishing train shed, the widest span metal roof in the world when finished and still a gob-smacking sight. Architects like Richard Norman Shaw championed brickwork in his Queen Anne Revival buildings of the 1870s, contrasting it with crisp, white-painted woodwork and touches of decorative terracotta. You can see it in his houses in Bedford Park and also in the leviathan blocks of flats that surround the brick-and-terracotta Royal Albert Hall. And then there’s the fabulous Prudential Building in Holborn by Alfred Waterhouse, started in 1879. Its deep red brickwork is so richly monochrome that it’s almost too much to take in. The ‘Pru’, of course, was the master of home insurance, and the use of brick in its headquarters reinforces the idea of the material representing home. Brick is used for chimneys and fireplaces because of its fireproof quality but it’s also shorthand for domesticity.

Chicago has great brickwork, not least the rather weird Monadnock building with its flared load-bearing walls, built in 1891 by Burnham & Root, like a more contemporary version of Albi cathedral. And then there’s the great brickwork seen in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie houses of the early 20^th century, in which the bands of slim bricks reinforce the strident horizontal of the buildings. I remember noticing a rather clumsily-done piece of brickwork on the Peter Beachy House in Oak Park, somehow at odds with the finesse of the rest of the building. It was pointed out to me that this was probably the work of FLW’s assistant, Walter Burley Griffin, who had completed the building when his boss ran off with one of his clients. Burley Griffin’s impact on Australia’s architecture is notable, of course, for his plans for the new capital at Canberra.

Roy Lippincott house

But the early houses he completed here used brick, like the Roy Lippincott house in Melbourne of 1917. It’s oddly fussy and unsuccessful, to my eye at least, and highlights just what a master FLW was.

Stockholm City Hall (Flickr: Richard Mortel)

Brick was used extensively in Scandinavian Modernism of the 1920s onwards, like the City Hall in Stockholm which influenced municipal buildings in Britain. That Scandanavian look also influenced 1950s domestic architecture in Britain and Australia, where blond brick complimented large windows and exposed timber framing.

Chau Chak Wing building by Frank Gehry, Sydney

Brick remains popular, even in large projects. Frank Gehry’s recent Chau Chak Wing building in Sydney shows how a brick building can have curves. And there’s the new Switch House addition to Tate Modern, where Herzog de Meuron used a fine brick lattice to compliment the monumentality of the original Bankside building,  itself an icon of brickwork along with its older sister, Battersea Power Station.

It’s an astonishing thing, a brick. Thermally efficient and able to curtail noise, it’s so simple and yet so capable of creating so much. I love the dusty-grey bricks of Beijing’s hutongs and I love the soaring red-brick walls of Art Deco apartment blocks in Sydney. There’s something humble but comforting about the material. So often I rave about concrete with a kind of wonder but in thinking about brick this past week, I’ve realised just what a quiet little hero it is.

Do you like brick?

What can’t you build in brick?

A consequence of moving to Australia from Britain over twenty years ago has been that I’ve passed through a lot more airports than I probably would have if I’d stayed in London. Not just the Australian ones but others in the Pacific and south east Asian region. Despite their predominant generic quality, most airports make an attempt at individuality. In Zurich, for instance, the train that takes you from the gate to the main terminal passes through a short section where the carriage fills with the sound of cowbells. Bangkok has a golden pagoda overlooking the departure gates, Singapore’s terminals are filled with orchids, and Dubai’s has silver palm trees. It may be window-dressing but it’s enough to give a sense of place, and I like that.

Airports have always felt remarkable to me, not least because I encountered them so rarely as a child. Growing up, it felt as though we were the only family in Britain who drove to Europe for our summer holidays while others flew. Sometimes we stopped at Glasgow Airport for lunch on our way home from a visit to my grandparents in Scotland and I would marvel at the terminal’s glassy space and the boards displaying faraway places like Copenhagen and Dublin.

I was living in south Wales when my junior school had a day out to Heathrow Airport. Apart from the excitement of being nearly-but-not-quite in London, I remember standing on the viewing deck of the orange-brick terminal (designed by Frederick Gibberd in the 1950s) and being transfixed by the rows of BEA Tridents and the sight of brand new 747s, which seemed huge. The sky was filled with the roar of jet engines and the acid tang of jet fuel. For a ten year old it was beyond enthralling. (Afterwards we went to Runnymede to see where the Magna Carta was signed but frankly no one was interested, and, being boys, we spent most of the time sniggering at the word ‘regina’ written below a statue of Queen Victoria, thinking it meant something else entirely.)

The first time I took to the air was as a fourteen year old, in a small propeller plane that belonged to the company my father worked for. These were patrician times, and I was flown up to Yorkshire for the day so that I could sit a kind of entrance exam for my new school, as the company was moving my father’s department from Wales to its Yorkshire headquarters. The airports we flew to and from hardly registered but the flight itself was exhilarating. The plane crashed a year or so later, killing everyone on board including the jolly pilot I’d sat next to, but it didn’t put me off wanting to fly more often.

Gradually planes became part of my normal life, even if that usually meant cheap holiday charters taking off from Gatwick at unreasonable hours of the night. Being in the airport zone, with all the shops and bars and spreading spaces and all the flurry of activity was endlessly fascinating. Airports were places filled with potential. Time was irrelevant – it may have been the middle of the night but the shops were open and the bars were doing a roaring trade. Everyone was on the move, or about to be, once French air traffic controllers had finished striking. One moment I was sitting in Gatwick, the next I was among sizzling, sun-blistered Brits on a beach in Ibiza. Fabulous.

Recently I read ‘Naked airport’ by Alastair Gordon, which is a jaunty account of the evolution of the airport. It’s fascinating to hear what people thought the first airports should look like. Some ended up looking like country clubs with lavish gardens and palm-lined driveways; others evoked classical temples; and many tried to emulate the aeroplanes themselves, with wing-inspired plans and control towers braced for speed. Gradually they turned into the vast spaces we recognise today. As Gordon points out, there was no real golden age, although the jet set of the 1960s might beg to differ. Flying went from being a rich man’s form of transport, where air crashes were not uncommon, to something that tried for glamour but which quickly became simply a matter of shoving the greatest number of people in and out as quickly and efficiently as possible. Different airlines went out of their way to provide a memorable service, as many still do today, if only for Business and First Class passengers, but the bottom line was, as now, in shifting people.

Le Corbusier en route
(image: Fondation Le Corbusier)

Le Corbusier adored air travel, flying to Moscow from Paris in the 1920s, and taking the Graf Zeppelin to Brazil in the 1930s. He loved how cities looked like architectural models when viewed from above. His early urban designs for modern cities in the 1920s had an airport at their centre, which seemed logical at the time, but when larger planes needed longer runways, and there were more passengers to deal with and more airline companies to process them then of course the airport moved to the city fringe. They sometimes felt too far away. In the 1930s, the mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia, refused to get off his flight from Chicago when it landed in Newark. He had bought a ticket to New York, he told the steward, not New Jersey. When the new and more convenient airport that he campaigned for opened, they named it LaGuardia in his honour.

Shenzhen

Airport architecture is often banal but there have been some real beauties, like Saarinen’s curvaceous terminals for Dulles airport in Washington DC and for TWA at Kennedy airport in New York, both completed in 1962, a year after his death. I’m not sure the exterior of the airport terminal matters so much now. Sure, I love the lush plantings around Singapore Airport and the white-lattice curves of Shenzhen’s airport but most airports of today feel more like giant shopping malls than temples to flight.

(Flickr: Stansted Airport)

When Norman Foster designed the new airport at Stansted in 1991 it seemed radical because it was so light, so barely-there, and meant the services inside could be easily changed or re arranged as required. As ‘Naked Airport’ often points out, passenger numbers and changes in aircraft design make many airports out of date almost the moment they open. Stansted’s airy quality has been stifled by the surge of crowds it now contains. No wonder airports are so often seen as de-humanising, with passengers processed like goods on a conveyor belt.

Singapore butterfly aviary

Despite everything, I still rather love airports. I enjoy submitting to them, seeing how I will be manipulated, even when pushed through cavernous Duty-Free areas to be seduced by products I had no previous desire to buy. Some do it better than most. Singapore’s is practically perfect. Not only does it have endless distractions, like a cactus garden and a butterfly aviary, but it retains a lavish sense of space. It’s practical, too, with free tours around Singapore if you have a five hour layover there. I once booked a night in its hotel that was only a few steps from where my plane had pulled up. Fifteen minutes after leaving my cramped seat after a seven hour flight, I was freshly showered and lolling on my bed reading a book. Brilliantly processed.

Another airport that occupies a particular place in my heart is Paris’s Charles de Gaulle at Roissy. The original Terminal One, which opened in 1974, is cramped and outdated but its sense of style makes its faults forgivable. I am always charmed by the narrow, bouncy underground travelators that carry me from the arrival satellite into the glowering concrete drum, its hollow atrium zigzagged by perspex tubes carrying escalators. It’s futuristic, in a gloriously retro way.

Of course, I may be a touch biased because being there means I’ve arrived in my favourite country, but it’s still a stunner. Architect Paul Andreu made a career out of airport design thereafter, creating larger and more open and curvaceous buildings as the decades passed and technology evolved, like the vast airport at Shanghai which is reached by the fastest train in the world, that uses magnetic levitation to whisk you from the city centre to the terminal in a matter of minutes.

Paris is an airport I have flown into regularly for decades, even from London where you’ve barely reached altitude before you’re descending again.  And so, in the end, despite travelling the world more widely than I ever dreamed I would, perhaps it’s what remains familiar that matters most.

Do you have a favourite airport?

Shenzhen

Spectacular is the mot du jour. I write this as the annual Vivid festival kicks off in Sydney. Buildings in the centre of town are lit up in all manner of wondrous ways. Every evening, the façades of Customs House and the Museum of Contemporary Art shimmer and explode with colour and stories; the sails of the Opera House are extravagantly ‘metamathemagical’, whatever that means; there’s even a light market. Oh, what a sight, what a circus! It’s not all about the lights, of course (at least that’s what the organisers say) – there are concerts, too, and talks and ‘ideas’. But the thousands who pour into the city every evening are really only after one thing: spectacle. They want to be astonished.

It’s the same the world over. Did you see the huge moon that was suspended in the ruined nave of Tintern Abbey recently? Or the spectacular displays now showing at the Venice Biennale, or those on display at Sydney’s own Biennale earlier this year? Architecture isn’t exempt, of course. Have you seen the new Musée de la Romanité in Nimes? Plonked next to the ancient Roman amphitheatre it’s a shimmering spectacle of slinky wrappedness, an envelope of sequins. We still gawp at the Shard in London or the tallest of the tall, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, in the same way that once we gawped at the Great Pyramid or the colonnaded square before St Peter’s in Rome. We crave the spectacular.

Aletsch glacier, Switzerland

Scale is always spectacular. We seek it in the natural landscape, walking among towering mountains or through groves of giant redwoods, or gazing over vast panoramas. Even the flatness of Australia’s outback is spectacular, the immense sky even moreso at night when the Milky Way stretches from horizon to horizon. Such natural spectacles make us feel small and put us in our place, and that’s what we like. Gosh, there’s more to life than just me, goes our thinking, and that makes us confront the existential conundrum of the purpose of life (even nature is all about us). We visit places that astonish us with the capability of our species, from the mind-blowing scale of Angkor Wat to the empty hugeness of Tiananmen Square in Beijing. How incredible that we have created these things, and we pat ourselves on the back for being part of such human ingenuity.

Foguangshan Taiwan

Hitler knew the value of the spectacular when he rallied at Nuremberg, or at least his architect Albert Speer and his cinematographer Leni Riefenstahl did. Wagner understood it, too, with the scale of his operas and the might of his music. And New Yorkers understood it when they built ever higher, displaying the wonder of the capitalist dream to the world.

Where spectacle fails, I think, is when it lacks content. I wonder if some spectacles are empty-calories. Does a moon hanging in Tintern Abbey really tell me anything new, that I might not get from gazing at the moon itself? At Sydney’s Biennale this year I found myself soon drifting away from the huge art installations and gazing instead at the old industrial buildings in which they were housed, sensing their history, the lovely patina of age.

Ai WeiWei ‘Law of the journey’ at Sydney’s Cockatoo Island

Since the Pompidou opened we’ve begun to expect our museums and art galleries to almost outdo the treasures they contain. The Guggenheim in Bilbao upped the ante and rejuvenated a whole city just by virtue of its shape. Now every new museum wants to do the same. I can’t remember a single thing I saw in Suzhou’s museum except for I M Pei’s building itself (which I liked a lot).

I remember years ago sitting in the Haymarket watching ‘The Phantom of the Opera’. I thought it was pretty awful (I’m not a Lloyd Webber snob – I loved ‘Evita’), and couldn’t stop thinking how amazing it would be if the same budget was spent on something good. As the chandelier crashed down at the end of the first half and everyone gasped, I wished I was as easily pleased. It would have been different if I had been totally captivated by the music or the story. At an outdoor performance of one of York’s Mystery Plays I was so immersed in the story that when it began to rain I thought it was a marvellous stage-effect. Spectacle is about balance, of course. Spectacle needs content or it loses any impact after the first glance. And I keep wondering if many of the spectacular buildings we have today, their swirling shapes crafted by computer, lack content. Look at me, they cry, and we do for a moment. Until another crops up that is more spectacular.

I will probably take in the Vivid festival and I’ll ooh and aah with everyone else as I walk through tunnels of coloured light and watch the ever-changing spectacle splashed across a building’s façade. But then I’ll doubtless go home and forget all about it, just as I would after a night at the circus.

What’s the most spectacular thing you’ve ever seen?

I’ve been thinking about bathrooms a lot lately, mainly because it’s winter and our upstairs bathroom has a heated floor, which makes it the warmest room in the house. Mornings are suddenly bliss, whereas previously – before we renovated – the old bathroom was cold and damp, the towels still moist from the previous day, the tiled floor a freezing affront to my bed-warm feet.

The 300-year-old Sukaya onsen near Mt Hakkoda, Japan – one of my most memorable bathing experiences (image: rurubu.jp)

A good bathroom is always a pleasure to use. And yet they’re often utilitarian spaces which frankly give little pleasure. I’ve always fancied a bathroom with a fireplace and possibly an armchair, not so anyone else can sit there but more for me to prolong the pleasure of a bath. Le Corbusier was a bathroom enthusiast and advised they should be one of the largest rooms in a house. The bathroom in his Villa Savoye is a great example, with plenty of space and somewhere to recline if the mood grabs you. It’s a touch of Ancient Rome, or maybe a Japanese onsen, a room to be enjoyed and to take your time. The bathrooms of my youth were certainly never that.

Villa Savoye

I remember the house we moved to in the early 1970s. It was classic 1930s, with fireplaces in the bedrooms, and a primrose yellow suite in the one and only bathroom. After those pesky period fireplaces were ripped out and central heating installed, the bathroom was gutted. What replaced it was something orangey-brown, with a fibreglass bath and an orange shagpile carpet, and new melamine cupboards to replace the fine wooden ones. I remember gazing at the old yellow bath dumped outside on the lawn and having a vague sense that what we were doing was wrong. And yet who couldn’t love the new shower and the orangey-brown mosaic tiles with the orangey-brown Laura Ashley wallpaper above that? Especially when the whole space was drenched in the sweet scent of my sister’s Aquamanda toiletries, in their orangey-brown packaging.

The idea of carpet in the bathroom seems to be a British thing, introducing extra softness to a space in which you are perhaps most vulnerable. I remember some relatives had a bath sunk in the centre of their large bathroom, the only break within a veritable field of lush carpet. But I was disappointed to discover that it looked less like something out of a James Bond film and more like something that should have been covered over with palm fronds to trap wild animals. In Australia, bathroom floors are always tiled. There’s a grate in the floor so that water from an overflowing bath or basin is diverted outside, very practical. Australians think carpet in the bathroom is rather disgusting. (They also loathe wallpaper and view a washing machine in the kitchen as another symbol of the Brits’ revolting habits.)

Japanese-style bath for sale

This shows that bathrooms are emotive spaces. Perhaps that explains why we think nothing of pouring so much money into them, as though to make up for the careless way we treated them in the past. I’m sure even a decade ago I would never have dreamed of installing underfloor heating. And so today we drool over luxurious bathrooms featured in glossy magazines, wowed by hi-tech taps and rainforest showerheads. And yet still they can feel a little soulless.

Recently I visited the home of one of Australia’s foremost architects, Richard Leplastrier. He is famous for his emphasis on simplicity and sustainability, and his buildings have a pleasing Japanese look. As a young man he worked for Jørn Utzon, architect of the Sydney Opera House, and for Kenzo Tange, famous for his crisply-shaped buildings in Tokyo and beyond. Simplicity and beauty have been key elements in Leplastrier’s work ever since. His own home is like a Japanese pavilion, sitting within a magical landscape overlooking one of Sydney’s hidden waterways. A large, deep bath sits on the deck, perfect for a long soak under the stars, but the proper bathroom with its shower, basin and loo is quite separate, accessed along a decked pathway. It has no walls at all, just a big sheltering roof, and so your own call of nature is complemented by the surrounding calls of nature, like abundant birdsong. Many of the homes he has designed for others have the same separation of bathhouse and actual house, even right in the middle of Sydney

my open bathroom

It struck a chord with me because my partner and I have a place in the country, nothing more than a glorified shed. The bathroom is separate, with one wall that is completely open to one side, looking out to a clump of trees. It means that you often feel the watchful eyes of a possum or goanna as you shower. Sometimes inquisitive birds flit over your shoulder when you’re shaving, drawn by the sound of running water. Rats eat the soap if you leave it uncovered and we were once troubled by a bright green tree frog that was determined to set up home in the toilet bowl. But it’s a glorious place and I love it. Some people, when they see it, utter little shrieks, shocked by its exposure and the idea of being observed. But it works in Australia’s climate, except on days when gale force winds drive in the rain.

barely-there ensuite

It’s odd how precious we’ve become about the whole bathing/ toileting thing. And yet modern hotels often have bathrooms that are open to the bedroom or barely concealed beyond a glass wall. I’ve never been a fan of the ensuite bathroom, especially if the loo is only a step or two away from the bed. Practicality is important but so is the spirit of place and I do not want to sit on a loo in my bedroom. The great Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta had a funnel built into the head of his bed so he could relieve himself in the middle of the night. Not sure what Madame Horta thought of that but I’m imagining a  grimace and an eye-roll.

As I warm my toes on the heated floor and step into a shower defined only by a sheet of glass, I sometimes wish I could open up the outside wall to the garden, or slide back the ceiling so I could enjoy the stars and bring back a true sense of place. Bathing is something of a sacred ritual when you think about it – the preparing for the day, the cleansing at the end of the day. Friends of mine often have ‘emotional’ showers, understanding that a few mindful minutes spent standing in flowing water can help wash off anxiety and a dark mood. I think that’s a wonderful idea. And maybe, when we acknowledge this meaningful aspect of our bathrooms, and appreciate the precious time spent within them, then we’ll create a bathroom that truly supports us.  Even if that means, for someone, an orangey-brown colour scheme.

What would be your perfect bathroom?

The other day I was sitting in a packed train carriage and I realised I was the only person not looking at a phone. It felt almost religious, the silence of everyone with heads bowed and eyes down, and yet it was I who was feeling holier-than-thou. I had made the radical decision to ignore social media and simply enjoy the view from the window. By journey’s end, I had dreamed of lives led in a variety of houses we’d passed, fantasied about what an eco-Australia would look like, and even had a quiet laugh at a remembered joke (Two hippos standing in a river, and one says, “I don’t know why but I keep thinking today’s Thursday”). It was a gentle way to pass the hour-long journey and I arrived feeling rather refreshed, cosseted by my dreamy mood. And I remembered when a famous architect told me that one of his biggest regrets was that he had spent too much time dreaming. Given that he had achieved so much in his career, I thought he was being a mite harsh on himself. Can you spend too much time dreaming?

 I think guilt is often implicit in the notion of dreaming. It’s often seen as a waste of time. Remember being told off at school for gazing out of the window and dreaming your life away? Or was that just me…

In his later years, my father would sit happily for some time, apparently looking out at the garden, his mind filled with thoughts. It’s him I thank for the genetic predisposition that sees me doing the same. Is it any wonder that I’ve ended up living in a country whose traditional creation stories are called the Dreamtime? And yet I live with a man who is always on the go, little time for dreams. When we planned a new garden, so cherished after years spent in near-gardenless flats in London, it was filled with plants of every kind – brightly flowered, highly scented, magnificent of form. “And where will we sit?” I asked. “Sit?” he repeated, as though I’d asked where we might put the go-go dancers’ podium. No time to sit when you’re busy. No time to sit and dream, is what I heard.

Of course, being of the writerly persuasion, I’d like to say that all my sitting and dreaming has reaped magnificent rewards – the prize-winning novels, the successful Hollywood films, the BAFTA – but the truth is less epic. My dreaming may not have changed the world but it’s helped me live my life.

I’ve always been blessed with an ability to fall asleep quickly, mainly because I adore submitting to the dream-world. This is a busy and sociable place where I meet up with all kinds of people I haven’t seen for ages (sometimes because they’ve been dead for a while). Some of my dreams are of the tea-with-the-Queen variety (Dame Judi’s been making a few appearances recently). Some are of the didn’t-see-the-wood-for-the-trees variety, where I suddenly realise there’s a beautiful beach at the end of the garden or a quaint Old Town tucked behind the supermarket. Who knew? Jung would shake his head at the predictability of it but it doesn’t stop them from being deliciously enjoyable.

Dreaming with your eyes open is another matter, a conscious thing. As a young boy walking home alone from school, I would often imagine that I was in a film, that there was a camera focussed on me. And so I’d walk along giving ‘thoughtful’ expressions and doing dramatic double-takes. I’m sure passers-by wondered who the weird boy was but the long walk passed quickly. (And just between you, me and the padded walls, I still do it occasionally.)

Dreaming is often a safety valve, a way of escaping the toil and trouble of the present (and long walks home). We dream of a better life, a better way of doing things. But dreaming for the sheer pleasure of it, letting your mind work its way through different scenarios, dipping into little pleasures, prodding little fantasies, is like your first day on holiday when you yield to a world of possibilities. Dreaming is different from stillness and the connection to mindfulness. Both allow your thoughts to roam freely but the difference with dreaming is that you do attach thoughts, feelings and interpretations to all the mental roaming. Mindful dreaming is active. Through it can come a sense of empathy, of new experiences and feelings. And how can you find clarity in anything if you don’t allow yourself time to dream all the different ways it might otherwise be? Being able to let your imagination take flight is surely one of the glories of humankind. Isn’t that something we should build into each day?

In his 1958 book, “The Poetics of Space”, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote that everyone needs a space in which to dream. It’s gorgeous trying to imagine what such a space would look like. Would it be bright with sunshine or darkened by shadow? Would you sit up or lie down? Would the walls be bare, decorated with pictures or non-existent, open to the elements?

Many of us already have such spaces, even if we don’t think of them in this way. I often plonk myself on a particular rock that faces the ocean and being there I find my imagination takes me to far-off places and new ideas. My father liked a certain chair that faced out into the garden. I think resting the eyes – looking at distant horizons and soft landscapes rather than encroaching walls and computer screens – helps to trigger the process of dreaming and frees the imagination.

But really, anywhere will do. And as for too much dreaming? Never.

So where do you dream?

Sixteen years ago, my partner and I decided we had enough equity in our house to buy an investment property. This is quite common in Australia and it’s not unusual for someone to have several properties, spread all around the country, generating income. It’s thanks to the ever-increasing price of real estate which seems to have barely caught its breath, certainly since I arrived in the 1990s. While this is good news to existing home owners, it’s become a nightmare for people setting out to buy anything for the first time. Not only do they have to find the money for a heart-stopping deposit  but they are then lumbered with huge mortgage repayments. So I know that we are incredibly fortunate to have been able to do what we did.

At first we imagined that we might get something sensible in the city, like a small flat, but then I had a thought: why not buy a property we might eventually move to? We could rent it out until we were ready to live there. It seemed like a brilliant plan.

And so we ended up with a lovely old farmhouse in northern New South Wales with ten acres. It felt like a win-win situation – we could rent out the house and its fenced garden and still have land to play with. Even better, there was a shed we could camp in for holidays. Having a foot in two places is, of course, a mixed blessing. As many know who have holiday homes, they quickly morph from a relaxing retreat into something more burdensome, loaded with an endless list of jobs-to-do just waiting for your next visit. Where once we enjoyed long days exploring the area and thinking of ways in which we might improve the place, now we arrive prepared for work and wondering what disasters need to be fixed – a fallen tree, a broken pump, a leaking roof. (I know, I know, poor us and all that.)

And yet being able to escape to the country has been a marvel. At first we’d turn into the long drive and think that someone was going to tell us to clear off. Could it be true that we’d actually gone and bought this magical place? In the first years the grassy fields in front of the house were cropped by a herd of a neighbour’s beautiful cows, adding to the bucolic atmosphere. Whenever the house was between tenants, we would walk through its lofty rooms and imagine the time when we would call it home. It’s a real classic, built in the 1910s using timber felled on its own land. I always marvel at its setting, crowning a slope that enjoys long views and which receives the cooling coastal breeze in summer (every day at 1pm, regular as clockwork) while being sheltered from the most damaging gales. Those farmers knew about feng shui, I reckon.

There was, however, one thing that troubled me – the lack of birds, or, more precisely, the lack of birdsong. Not that there were no birds, they were just a bit thin on the ground. There were flocks of ibis and plenty of swamp hens down at the creek and there are always colourful Eastern Rosellas fussing through the pecan trees, and grey herons stamping around for frogs, and magpies heralding the morning with their glorious carolling song. But where were the little birds? Where were the fairy wrens (surely Australia’s prettiest bird) or foragers like whipbirds (named after their whip-crack call). Our friend Rick told me not to worry. Trees were the answer.

The narrow paddock behind the house borders the macadamia plantation next door. And so my partner decided to plant out the whole field and create a rainforest, which is what was there before the pioneer farmers cleared the land at the end of the 19^th century. He said the trees would catch any unwelcome drift from the sprays used on the macadamia trees. For me, and my feng shui eyes, it felt right for the old house to be supported by lush forest.

before

The soil there is volcanic and as rich and brown as chocolate cake mix. Locals joke that you poke a stick in the ground and the next day it’s a tree. The generous rainfall makes everything, including the weeds, grow at a stupendous rate. And so, within a short time, the forest rose up, every year taller and more astonishing. There are now towering quandongs with fat purple fruit, the spotted bark of leopard trees, a tamarind, stands of clumping bamboo, spreading figs and spiky-leaved flame trees, tree waratahs and myrtles, and  plenty more whose names I don’t know.

after

And with them came the birds. One weekend I noted down all the different species I saw and there were nearly forty. The balance is extraordinary. Each day busy flocks of tiny birds, like Silver-eyes, Red-browed Finches and Thornbills, work their way through the trees, and Fairy Wrens warn of any dangers with loud, peeping alarm calls. Bowerbirds with violet eyes and catbirds, with a squealing call like a mewling baby, and Spangled Drongos, that cackle noisily, visit the more open trees. Fruit doves gorge on berries and shy emerald doves peck at seeds on the drive so there’s the flash of their green wings as you approach. Whipbirds pick through the leaf litter and call to each other, the true sound of the rainforest. Whipbird Despite their name, Noisy Pittas in their turquoise coats stalk silently through the darkest shadows. The latest, and not entirely welcome, forest recruit is a Brush Turkey which builds immense piles of leaves in which it will bury its eggs to hatch in the festering warmth: it scratches up any new plantings like a giant hen.

The dawn chorus is deafening now, when there was so little before. I’ve become attuned to the birdsong through the day, too, knowing when there are eagles overhead by the abrupt silence, or when an unwelcome intruder is being chased away by an array of different birds – a visiting cat or fox doesn’t stand a chance but the goanna marches about like it owns the place. Unfamiliar birdsong has me out with the binoculars, rewarded by the sight of a bird simply passing through, like the Scaly-breasted Lorikeets, or one that will start to make the forest part of its territory, like the comical Pacific Baza with its jaunty crest and striped J-P Gaultier vest, who now nests in the gum tree and watches our every move from a nearby branch. At night the owls bark and Frogmouths swoop unseen, their calls spooking me as it sounds like they’re stage-whispering ‘Colin, Colin’ in the dark.

As the golden light of a dawning day pushes through the early mist, the birds give full throat to the day and I know how lucky I am to be there. And when I contemplate yet another task – a flat tyre caused by running over a spike of unseen barbed wire, the peeling paint that calls out for a paintbrush, a flyscreen holed by rodents  – and when I flinch at the sight of brown snakes hunting for rats in the rocks by the milking shed (every Eden must have a snake, of course), I only have to listen to the birdsong to feel like I’m the luckiest man. And knowing that the key to all this was nothing more (and nothing less) than a tree (or two or three…).

Do you have a place that fills you with joy?

(My own photos of the birds are often rather blurred so I’ve added links to www.graemechapman.com.au which has lovely photos of all kinds of Australian birdlife.)

I was delighted to be invited to speak to The Fussy Librarian this week about writing (and my messy desk). You can read it here.

It was particularly lovely thinking about the research that went into ‘Loving Le Corbusier‘, especially as I am planning to visit more Le Corbusier buildings later this year, including another trip to the beautiful village of Vézelay, where Le Corbusier’s wife spent a tense time during WW2. So here are a few pictures to whet the appetite, including one of Yvonne, my inspiration.

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Many a mickle makes a muckle is an old Scottish saying which means that a lot of little things can create one big thing. Like pennies saved in a jar over time that add up to a sizeable amount when the jar is full.

The saying speaks of the Scottish love for thrift (or meanness, depending on who you talk to).  But there’s surely something in it, especially when resources are scarce. If you have a karmic frame of mind, perhaps being careful in small ways creates a bigger generosity in the world. And frankly, why throw something away if it can be re-used? In the past people kept everything from odd bits of string to old paper bags. Do we do this anymore? What’s the point of saving rubber bands when you can buy a bag of them for next-to-nothing at the dollar shop if you need one? Few things are made to last. Do people repair broken kettles or toasters? We seem to have accepted a world of planned obsolescence.

When I look at the demolition of old houses in my area, making way for new development, I notice that they have one thing in common – nothing is set aside to be re-used. The old buildings are flattened and the rubble carted away in huge trucks to landfill sites elsewhere. Trees are cut down, established gardens are destroyed, and a blank canvas of bare earth is left for the builders. When the first colonisers arrived in Australia in the late 1700s, the land was described as Terra Nullius, a land of nothing, that conveniently ignored the cultures that had been thriving there for 60,000 years. In many suburbs of today’s Australian cities, it’s Terra Nullius every day. And that feels rather bleak. Surely we can use at least some of the mickles of the past when we create the muckle future?

I’m certainly no model of thrift. I’ve chucked out clothes I hardly remember buying. I get seduced by the idea of the latest gizmos even although my current gizmos are working just fine. As for a carbon footprint, mine is huge. I fly vast distances just for the simple pleasure of feeling Alpine grass underfoot. I buy French wine and Danish butter and Italian prosciutto instead of the local varieties. And so I try to compensate in other ‘mickle’ ways.

Like when we renovated. We were told it would be much simpler to demolish the whole place and start afresh but we saw nothing wrong with the old house and its sturdy brick walls. We wanted more space and so it made sense to add another floor. The old roof tiles were kept to be used as edging in the garden. The hardwood roof timbers were used as framing for a new deck. The doors to the new upstairs rooms were fitted with reclaimed handles that match the originals downstairs. Similarly, when we rebuilt the old milking shed in the country, all of the hundred-year old timbers were used in the new structure. The windows were a second-hand job lot from a salvage company: the corrugated iron for the roof and outside walls came from a neighbour who had demolished a barn: the bathroom fixtures were all second-hand. Only the interior walls were lined with new material – timber from locally grown hoop pine. There was a real pleasure in re-using old things that still had life in them. And when I say life, I mean things that retained the spirit of the old. Old timbers have character and feel like they belong. And so do old light fittings and even old sinks. It felt good not trashing what we already had.

Le Corbusier’s studio

It’s one of the things that I liked about Mr Austerity himself, Le Corbusier. In the Cabanon he built as a sixtieth birthday present for his wife Yvonne at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, he used simple materials – wood framing, bark cladding, a fibre-cement roof. The single light fitting is fashioned from wire he found on the nearby beach and the table is surrounded by stools made from upturned whisky crates from the next door café. He used them in his own studio nearby, too. Today, of course, you can buy beautifully crafted copies of them in polished oak with no splinters. Much as I like them, they lack the cheery make-do-and-mend quality of the originals.

Re-using things costs money and takes time and thought. Old timbers are often warped and have hidden nails that blunt tools. The variables make it less appealing to builders. But most of us understand the importance of using resources we already have. Many people enjoy re-purposing old furniture to create stylish new pieces from things that might otherwise be thrown out. The shabby chic style that evolved in the 1980s showed how much we like the look of the old and the worn and yet we still buy new pieces that have been artfully distressed to look old because it’s easier. The line between authenticity and sham is often blurred in the wonderful world of interiors.

The Beehive

Recently, I passed The Beehive, the newly completed office for an architectural firm famous for buildings that relish shape and texture, and it really made me smile. The façade above the concrete ground floor is made up of old terracotta roof tiles, laid in a way that creates privacy and shade and visual interest. It’s the work of the architect Raffaello Rosselli, who, along with his architect father Luigi, has produced something that is truly out of the ordinary. In both senses of the phrase, as the Wunderlich tiles were used in thousands of ordinary Australian houses in the first half of the twentieth century, including my own. Raffaello came to prominence with his design for a tiny house built in a back lane of central Sydney that used rusty old corrugated iron on the outside. He sees potential in old things but creates something new that suits today’s needs.

The two main Australian supermarkets have just banned single-use plastic bags (yes, really, my European readers, it’s taken us until now to do that.) And what a kerfuffle there has been. Many people see it as an irritation rather than an ecological step forward. And so it gladdens my thrifty heart whenever I see the appreciation for things that have a longer and more useful life. Perhaps architecture can help set more inspiring examples. As usual, what is happening in the centre of the city will flow out to the suburbs and the demolition of future buildings might be more mindfully done, if done at all. Those in the country, of course, have long understood the necessity to re-use what you already have so there are few lessons to be learned there.

I’m certain a more beautiful muckle can be achieved if we know exactly what to do with our mickles.

Are you a re-user?

I’m itching to write about my recent visit to Le Corbusier’s Couvent de la Tourette but in the meantime, click on the link below to read my recent essay on concrete, Brutalism, and the importance of preserving good architecture of all types:

A sunbeam in the concrete jungle.

While you’re there, check out the other content. Meanjin is one of Australia’s best literary magazines, edited by Jonathan Green and published by Melbourne University Publishing. It’s the printed equivalent of visiting a really good bookshop – something for everyone – and I was very grateful to be included in its Winter 2018 edition.

But for those hanging out for La Tourette, here’s a teaser…

The sign at the entrance warns me that this is an espace de silence, a place of silence. I’m thinking we should be tiptoeing rather than noisily lugging our suitcases from the car but we’re staying the night.

I’d emailed to make a reservation the moment I knew we’d be in the area but I didn’t hear anything back until, a month or so later, I received a message via Facebook. It was from Florence, who looks after the bookings at the priory, and she wrote that her emails to me kept bouncing back. I was dead impressed that she’d used social media to track me down and so I’m delighted to meet her now in the small office at the main entrance. She’s witty and warm, and tells us that although silence might be an overstatement, keeping our voices down will certainly be appreciated. We’re given the code to the main door and told which will be our bedrooms. Although, of course, they’re cells. The two upper floors are lined with nearly a hundred of them, with the resident Dominican friars living in the part that overlooks the valley. We’re the only guests apart from a group of Japanese architecture students and we’re free to come and go as we please, and to walk wherever we want, except for those areas expressly marked private.

And so begins a memorable visit to one of the twentieth century’s greatest buildings.

We’ve arrived in the bright sunshine of the afternoon, having driven south from Burgundy through a beautifully hilly landscape. I had slammed on the brakes the moment I saw La Tourette on the opposite slope of the valley. I’ve studied photos of this building for nearly forty years so it was a heart-stopping moment to come face-to-face with the real thing.

So that’s how you sit in the landscape.

I’d always been a little anxious about visiting La Tourette, knowing that it’s one of Le Corbusier’s most celebrated works. What if I didn’t like it? This is not your conventional religious building, after all. It opened in 1959, and is famous for its austerity and its use of reinforced concrete. Le Corbusier was drawn to the commission by Father Marie-Alain Couturier, the hugely influential figure who was instrumental in bringing a new artistic expression to the Catholic church in France after the Second World War. Name any great religious work in France of this period, such as Matisse’s designs for the Rosary chapel at  Vence, Fernand Léger’s mosaics in Audincourt and Plateau d’Assy, and Le Corbusier’s masterful chapel at Ronchamp, and the hand of Father Couturier is involved. One of the first meetings he had with Le Corbusier was when he turned up at his home in Paris. Yvonne was unnerved to find on her doorstep a priest dressed in white robes. It didn’t stop her playing one of her practical jokes, slipping a whoopee cushion on the chair as he was about to sit down. According to Le Corbusier, the meeting went extremely well after this rather unusual way of breaking the ice. Sadly, Couturier was dead by the time La Tourette was completed. (The incident figures in my novel, Loving Le Corbusier.)

In French, the place is called a couvent, or convent, but priory is a better translation as most people today think of convents being filled with nuns, and this was a building for men. Monasteries tend to be secluded places for prayer and retreat but this new priory sought an active role in the community. The original Dominican friars were from a remote area in the Alps and felt that having a priory close to the city of Lyon and its university would make it more visible. When it opened it was the study centre for all Dominicans in the region, which is why it was designed on this scale. Today, though, only fifteen friars live there, most of them working in the community, and visitors tend to be more interested in the architecture than religion.

I’ve always found La Tourette difficult to work out but now I’m here I can’t for the life of me think why. It is amazingly simple. The large block of the church is built into the land, closing the U-shape of the main building, which is held aloft on a series of slender piloti, rising above the steep slope of the land. There’s a courtyard but only part of it has been terraced and made into a rough kind of a cloister, where simple grass grows rather than anything prettier.

Rough is the word for this building. This is Brutalist architecture, and as you arrive, you can’t fail to notice the rawness of the concrete, stained and cracked and as coarse as the name Brutalism implies. Unkempt grass covers various roofs, some of which have protruding ‘light cannons’ which draw natural light into the spaces below (these were the work of Le Corbusier’s friend Iannis Xenakis, the man more famously involved in the tented Philips pavilion that Le Corbusier designed for  Expo ’58 in Brussels). Inside, you find crumbling concrete lintels and wonky frames holding in the walls of the glass, and while I’m sure they have degraded over time, I can’t help feeling that they were rough at the beginning. This roughness is on purpose. Le Corbusier wasn’t interested in ultra-fine finishes and embraced the flaws in materials like concrete. It’s a wabi sabi quality, the idea that beauty can lie in imperfection.

cloister

So much is familiar from having visited Le Corbusier’s other buildings. A concrete water spout drawing water from the roof is straight out of Ronchamp. There is a strong use of colour, just as you find in his Unité d’habitations, with a wavy blob of black-paint on some of the doors to mark the handle. The cells themselves are like the children’s rooms in the Unité’s, with space enough for a surprisingly comfortable bed, a wooden desk and a pleasant little balcony with concrete latticework, just like the balconies in Marseille. There’s a washbasin and a storage unit that also acts as bedhead.

cell corridors

The bathroom is along the corridor, with bath, showers and toilets behind separate doors and water pipes painted a vibrant blue, which reminds me of the colour-coded pipes used by Piano and Rodgers at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Sections of tinted glass, known as Mondrian panels because of their primary colours, enliven the windows overlooking the cloister and remind me of the panel of coloured glass set into the window in Le Corbusier’s own apartment in Paris.

The most arresting feature throughout the building is the ventilation. Everywhere, set within windows, within walls, and next to doors, are slender openings with hinged wooden doors painted in bright primary colours. There are metal tubes that swivel open, too. It means that airflow can pass through the building easily without any loss of security. The external ones are meshed to keep out insects. When they’re closed you barely notice them. At night, I leave my ventilation door open to the corridor outside and also the one next to the balcony door and a wonderful breeze floats through my room during the night. (He used the same thing in the Cultural Centre at nearby Firminy.) It’s brilliant and I can’t help wondering why it hasn’t been used more, especially in countries like Australia where cross ventilation is such a blessing on a hot day. Nothing mechanical, just the constant drawing of air through one space to another. Talk about simple.

We explore the place. There is something at every turn, like the way the windows at the end of each corridor are blocked by angled slabs of concrete (or concrete flowers, as they’re called) so that your mind isn’t distracted by the view outside. And yet there is a huge wall of undulating glass in the refectory that encourages you to gaze out to the valley beyond. It’s all a question of balance.

I’m eager to see the church. It’s oddly reached, along a slope whose downward angle exactly matches the upward slope of the roof of the circulation space you’ve just left. It makes me think of the ramps in Villa Savoye and the Maison La Roche. At the end there’s a curved doorway with a massively thick metal door like one in a submarine, as though built to withstand a flood. You have to step through the entrance, rather as you do in an Asian temple.

The church is the space I had feared I might not like but it’s extraordinary. The altar occupies a central place with seating for the friars at the lowest end, and an open space for the public at the other.  A sliver of window tops the western wall, allowing a line of light just as you find in Ronchamp. There are low windows, too, letting in light to the choir that is coloured by their painted reveals, giving the impression of stained glass without the bother of the glass itself. It’s a huge concrete box and yet it feels majestic rather than overbearing. There’s little to distract you and that contributes to its overwhelming sense of peacefulness. Comparing it to the busy exuberance of a Baroque interior, I know which one makes me feel more focussed.

at Vespers

As guests of the priory, even though Florence tells us there’s no expectation that we take part in the spiritual life there, we attend Vespers. It’s a lovely experience. The friars are dressed in white robes. One friar has obviously had a tiring day and can’t stop yawning. The altar is set with candles and the fading light outside means the space feels as cavernous as a cathedral. The reverberation of the singing is magnificent.

Afterwards we eat in the refectory next door, where one of the friars greets us warmly. I’m expecting that we might have to say grace but there’s nothing like that. It’s a large space with the longest wall filled with glass panels of unequal width, looking out to twinkling village lights in the distance. The friars dine in their own space and so it’s just Anthony and me and the Japanese students at separate tables. The food is basic – slices of watermelon then stuffed tomatoes followed by a sickly chocolate mousse out of a packet – but I would happily eat bread and water in this space. I’m grateful, though, for the bottle of red wine (the local Beaujolais, of course) that comes with it. A laminated sign with Modulor man shows us how not to cut the bread. Breakfast the next morning is similarly basic but equally welcome. I check out the kitchen next to it, with its cheerfully painted storage units, their simple wooden door handles like those he used in his own homes.

I sleep amazingly well in my cell despite the relentless hooting of an owl outside and wake as daylight begins to colour the sky beyond the trees. And so I slip out, ambling through the woodland that surrounds La Tourette and lingering at the beautiful graveyard where the friars of the past are buried, the graves marked by simple wooden crosses. There are classical relics and old buildings such as a quaint ice-house dotted through the parkland, clues to the more secular life of the old Chateau of La Tourette in whose grounds the priory sits. I noticed the previous evening a number of people walking their dogs or sitting chatting on benches, and I liked how the parkland is shared. As I return for breakfast, stopping every few steps to marvel at a new angle and different view of the building, I notice I am being watched by a friar as he sips his morning cup of coffee on his balcony. I think how lucky he is to live there.

With breakfast out of the way, we’re able to see La Tourette’s pièce de résistance, the crypt. It’s not underneath the main church but to one side, at a lower level, so that you can look into it from the church. Being within it, though, is a totally different experience. Access is usually denied but Florence told us we could enter as the architecture students would be there, too. It’s approached via a precarious set of narrow steps from the Sacristy on one side of the church which leads you into a pitch-black corridor that runs underneath the nave and then out into the frankly astonishing space of the crypt.

crypt

It was here that the friars performed an individual mass each day but that was abolished after Vatican II. There are six separate altars, stepping down as the floor follows the natural contours of the land. Extraordinary circular skylights give a diffused, coloured light. Every surface is painted, although the rough concrete is never masked. It is an sublime space – tilting, stepped, colourful, moodily lit. I could’ve stayed for hours but the Japanese students are planning to film there and want us out. “You cannot be here,” says their tutor in stilted English and I want to say, “Yes, I know, I can’t believe it either” but instead I assure him we’ll be gone in a moment.

We spend much of the morning walking around, exploring spaces we hadn’t noticed the previous day. I feel so privileged to have the run of the place, to be able to open doors and find a small chapel or a common room or a library. And I think what a perfect place it would be to stay and work on a book (there, I’ve set it in motion by even mentioning it). I’m reluctant to leave.

concrete shapes

Le Corbusier died in 1965 while swimming close to his holiday home at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. His body was placed here overnight on its journey back to Paris. It’s sentimental, I know, but just being in this special place, knowing that he was here and that his body was here, means a lot to me. Architecture is always emotional. My fear was that I would find this building hard to love, that its roughness and austerity would not move me. But of course it’s astonishing. It’s emotional, it’s thoughtful, it’s calm, it’s uplifting, and it’s Le Corbusier down to the very last grain of sand in its concrete.

I’m obviously a very slow leaner.

It fascinates me how one can immediately like a place, whether it’s a city or a whole country. I suppose the same goes for the opposite, disliking somewhere for no logical reason. It’s something you feel in your gut, an emotional response, and it’s happened to me in cities, like Chicago, which I loved within hours of arriving, and in whole countries, like France and Italy, which make me smile the moment I’ve arrived. It’s like walking into a room and feeling that it’s a lovely space. It’s what I felt when I travelled in Japan in 2014 and it’s what I felt more strongly when I was there again a few weeks ago. I am now officially in love with Japan. And yet why do I feel so at home there when it is, frankly, such an odd and unusual place? Well, let me count the ways…

Landscape

The main reason for this trip was to see autumn colour. The Japanese take the season very seriously and the hillside temple compounds of Koyasan, not far from Osaka, were ablaze with maples in flaming red, orange and yellow. There are Japanese websites that will tell you which place has the best autumn colour on that particular day and they’ll even direct you to the exact trees that are putting on the best show. Shop displays and even the sides of buses are decorated with maple leaf designs. It’s sort of naff but sort of wonderful, too, because any country that loves trees has got to have something going for it.

If ever a country makes me hanker to live in a more temperate climate again then Japan does. Tranquil gardens with remarkable rocks, trickling streams and damp, mossy pathways dotted with pagoda lamps seem to call out to the moisture-content of my body. It was truly the season of mellow fruitfulness, making it a reflective paradise compelling to any writer. Of course, the effortless gardens filled with all their subtle contrasts – soft moss, rough cobbles, clipped camellias, scented cedars – are anything but effortless, often trimmed and raked to within an inch of their life. In Takamatsu I watched a couple of gardeners sweep the water of a garden’s shallow waterway, disturbing any algae that had formed among the stones. And everywhere I saw men up ladders, clipping unruly branches from the pine or yew trees or tying them down so that they would have the perfect lateral shape. It’s called cloud pruning and, while it goes against my belief that nature is best when allowed to do what it wants, it’s hard not to be seduced by that search for perfection. I even began to admire bonsai trees.

At Koyasan, with its famous temples, we wandered at night through a lofty cedar forest in which hundreds of stone tombs mark the dead. With owls hooting, and soft light from the stone lanterns along the path, it was the perfect example of what Japan does so well – the fusion of mother nature with mankind. Haunting, certainly.

Architecture

Japanese cities are not exactly beautiful. Many cities were flattened by bombs during the Second World War or their fragile streets of wooden buildings destroyed by fire. Most of them now sprawl outwards with long main boulevards that lead to some distant focal point, often a temple or a castle. Running parallel to the main boulevards in the centre you’ll usually find covered shopping malls – brightly lit, garishly decorated, and home to every type of shop and plenty of restaurants. People cycle through them, just as they cycle along the pavements, somehow managing to miss pedestrians.

But among the generic modern stuff there are pearls, and often traditional ones. The temples for both the Buddhist and Shinto faiths are similar – a pagoda, a large main prayer hall, and a variety of outlying buildings scattered throughout a walled compound – but each is stunning. In Osaka, the huge Isshinji temple is famous for making a Buddha statue every ten years from the ashes of 20,000 cremations. The Buddha is displayed alongside the previous ones. I thought it was a brilliant idea and judging by the busyness of the place, so do an awful lot of people in Osaka. Most temples show an extraordinary use of wood, often left unpainted, which somehow makes them more powerful. One on the island of Miyajima made me think of C20th Brutalism the way its huge timber frame was so forcefully displayed – Brutalism, C17th-style, of course.

the muscular Toyokuni temple hall on Miyajima

A visit to the so-called art islands of the Inland Sea was interesting for the contemporary buildings of architect Tadeo Ando, and others. On Naoshima, there are several museums, and many houses that have been transformed into galleries. Yayoi Kusama’s red pumpkin greets the ferry in the main village and a yellow one sits at the end of a pier near the chic Benesse Art Museum.

One of the famous pumpkins by Yayoi Kusama

The Chichu Art Museum houses five of Monet’s Waterlilies as well as a couple of James Turrells and an astonishing Walter De Maria staircase space. Ando’s building itself, with concrete ramps and angular courtyards is also considered an artwork. But Naoshima felt a little too precious for me and I was glad we didn’t linger too long. On neighbouring Teshima, a single concrete structure by Ryue Nishizawa has large openings to the sky and holds a single artwork by Rei Naito called Matrix where the floor weeps tiny water droplets that roll around the polished floor like mercury. An absurdly affected guide had warned us in quiet, reverential tones not to touch the exhibits as they were so delicate, as though we might never have encountered an art gallery before. In this case, we couldn’t touch the water seeping through the floor. It felt too pretentious and yet I stayed there, among the water droplets, for an hour so something obviously engrossed me.

Teshima

In Hiroshima I was eager to see two buildings – the shattered bank building that is such a potent symbol of the atom bomb that exploded four hundred metres above its dome in 1945 – and the Peace Park Memorial, built by the young Kenzo Tange in 1955 (an architect whose work I have previously written about, and adore). Sadly this long pavilion was covered by scaffolding as it underwent work to make it earthquake-proof but the spacious park itself, with its various monuments, including a cenotaph in which the names of all who were killed are inscribed, is very moving. There were hoards of roving school groups there, too. It’s only comparatively recently that there’s been acknowledgement that the bomb was used because of Japan’s active role in the war rather than a random attack by the USA. Despite the way Hiroshima seems to have rebuilt itself into a thriving and obviously prosperous city, with ospreys diving for fish in its river and a wonderfully sleek Incinerator Plant at the end of the island (yes, I did visit it), I couldn’t tear myself from the heaviness inspired by the Atomic Bomb Dome. It was lit at night and visible from my hotel bedroom, and I would sit and gaze at it, trying to imagine the unimaginable, that bright flash in the sky one August morning that ended the war in the most gruesome way. (Equally moving was the tall gingko tree in a Hiroshima park that was blown sideways by the bomb but survived, leaning precariously still, and whose seeds are still sent out into the world as powerful symbols of peace and resilience.)

Craft

The use of wood in Japan is famous, and a stay in a traditional inn gives you a chance to appreciate the fine joinery of cedar and pine, the delicacy of paper-filled sliding screens, with lantern light casting shadows on the beautifully-bound tatami mats.

In a country whose cities are so choked by people and yet can seem so tranquil once you step away from the main boulevards, where space is optimised in tiny houses that look basic and simple, there is beauty to be found in small things, like a simple tea cup, the elegant utensils in which food is served and the burnished or lacquered wood trays on which they are carried, the paper-wrapped tea caddies, and the thoughtful way gifts are wrapped (although wrapping is often over the top and very wasteful). Flowering plants and even water gardens planted in old washing up bowls often stand at the doorways of the humblest, scruffiest homes. The roofing technique of using shingles made of thin copper and the Japanese way of thatching, using splinters of cedar bark, and the precision of wooden screens that can be folded out of sight within a matter of minutes are one of the many pleasures to be found throughout this country.

Food

In 2014 we spent a couple of nights in traditional ryokans and they were unforgettable experiences. So this time, we booked more Japanese-style rooms than Western. The grandest was the Iwaso on Miyajima island, a famous and beautiful old ryokan with spacious rooms overlooking a babbling stream. Dinner was served in our room and it was a lavish affair. At ryokans there are usually about ten courses comprising different dishes, some of which are cooked at the table – thin slices of marbled Kobe beef fried with enoki mushrooms, vegetables simmered in delicate dashi, the broth made from seaweed and mushrooms that has a gorgeous earthy pungency. Each dish tasted as good as it looked, the constant bringing of food making the meal last an hour and a half.

At the two temples we stayed at in Koyosan, where most of the many temples take in paying guests to help maintain their spectacular buildings, the food was served by monks in a common dining room (although there were screens between tables in one). Being Buddhist, the food was vegetarian and while the first temple was superficially smarter, the second’s offerings had more flavour. I love the miso soup and the variety of ways they do tofu, and there were potatoes and leafy greens poached in dashi, and rice if you wanted it. Everything is served with such panache, and you always feel satisfied at the end. (Although I confess we nipped to the nearby Lawsons to buy a chocolate Haagen-Daz afterwards.)

In Osaka and Hiroshima I fell in love with the okonomiyaki, a sort of pancake dish filled with cabbage, egg, slices of bacon and given a rich soy-sauce dressing, which is made in front of you (you sit at the counter in small but busy little restaurants). With a large glass of chilled Sapporo beer, it’s filling, nutritious and very satisfying. And in the izakaya, you sit at the bar in a noisy room and simply point at whatever food you want, rather like Japanese tapas. I was careful to avoid the more dubious-looking things like fish heads and offal but everything was bursting with flavour, from leafy greens sprinkled with roasted sesame to piles of steamed squid. You eat as much or as little as you please, and the feeling of bonhomie was extraordinary, especially in those places where no English was spoken and everything had to be mimed.

Friendliness

The old man sitting across from us on the country train travelling through Shikoku was wheezing rather loudly because he’d had to run. We exchanged a smile. I noticed how his grey hair was tied up in a topknot, so that he looked like a hipster, although I suspect that wasn’t his intention. “Country?” he asked, and made sure that I understood by patting himself on the chest and saying, “Japan.” I told him Australia and he seemed delighted. He then dipped into his carrier bag and handed a couple of mandarins to me, and another two to my partner. Oddly enough, I had been musing on the way my partner had just told me he was craving a mandarin. I live with someone who craves fruit? I was thinking, unable to think of anyone else I knew who craves fruit. But now I had two mandarins in my hand, I realised it was just what I wanted. I thanked the man profusely and we ate the fruit, much to his apparent delight. For the next ten minutes there was a two-way exchange of nods, smiles and appreciative noises, meaning the mandarins were delicious. At his stop, the old man reached over to give us half of what he had left. “No, no!” we cried but he was having none of it, and tossed the bag in my lap before hurrying from the carriage. He stood on the platform and waved to us as the train set off again.

A young woman now sat in his place and she, too, smiled at us. And then, with a sudden flourish, she produced two origami flowers which she presented to each of us. What on earth was going on with that seat? They were lovely little paper decorations, multi-coloured and intricately folded, and we thanked her, of course, while feeling rather surprised. She hadn’t a word of English but we mimed a conversation and I asked her if she had made them and she nodded and produced a tiny tube of glue to show how she stuck them. When it was her stop, she left with a wave and a smile.

The next person who took her seat didn’t give us anything. ‘Mean bastard,’ I whispered to Anthony.

same but different

Protocol

We decided to buy food to eat in our hotel bedroom in Hiroshima on our last night as we had an early start in the morning. Japanese department stores are fascinating places to visit, with gorgeous displays of fine porcelain, beautiful fabrics and interesting cooking implements. (Daimaru is my favourite.) The basement food halls are brilliant. There is usually a supermarket-type part and the rest is taken up by concessions selling everything from French bread and elaborate cakes to special teas, a hundred different types of saké and various seaweed products. We bought two bento boxes – a pleasure to look at, a joy to eat, and ridiculously cheap for all their apparent work. I wanted something sweet as well and settled on a little jar of crème caramel that had apparently won prizes at a food festival. It cost about $4 and was so small I felt embarrassed just asking for one. The assistant, though, seemed delighted. What followed was classic Japan. First she lifted the tiny jar from the chilled display as carefully as if were a Tiffany diamond and then placed it in an attractively-printed cardboard box. She then tucked a chilled sachet around it to keep it cold for its journey to my hotel, and buttressed it with springy cardboard so that it wouldn’t topple over as I walked. The box was carefully sealed and then placed in a bag, the handles twined together so it’d be more comfortable to carry, and then she came out from behind the counter to present the bag to me with both hands. She then gave a deep bow. This was a $4 pudding! I was almost embarrassed by this show and probably over-smiled and over-thanked but really, it’s happened before. Anthony was watching from a distance and told me afterwards that the assistant bowed repeatedly as I walked off.

The same sort of thing happened at hotels. In one instance, the receptionist and the lovely woman who served us breakfast both came out on to the pavement, and bowed and then waved to us as we walked away. I looked back as we were about to turn the corner, some distance on, and they were still there, watching us go. The guard in the train turns and bows before he leaves the carriage; the checkout chick bows as she enters the store to start her shift; even the ground staff bow as your plane pulls back from the airport gate. Some might find that all a bit too much, too formal and rigid, almost a bit spooky, but it sums up the way the customer and work in general is shown huge respect. And while sticking to such rigid rules and protocols might become very wearing, and lacks the spontaneity of a heartfelt gesture, it certainly oils the wheels of society when everyone knows the rules.

There’s more, though. Whenever we dallied over a map or were obviously unsure of where to go, people would always stop to offer help. One couple, who had no English, walked us to the restaurant we were looking for. People move out of your way on the pavement or thank you when you move aside or open doors for them, and apologise if they get in your way when photographing. The politeness and generosity is infectious. In parks there were brushes to clean your shoes after walking on a dusty path. At station platforms and at bus shelters there were thin cushions to make the cold metal benches less chilly to sit on. To my mind that goes beyond mere rigid rules and duty and enters into the realm of pure empathy.

So it’s an extraordinary place, Japan. It has beautiful buildings, a fascinating culture, and a genuine friendliness. It’s no wonder that it is rapidly becoming one of the world’s top tourist destinations. For us – whether we were gazing at a sunset from a mountaintop temple or ambling through a magical forest or gawping at the beautiful products for sale in the food halls or laughing at the way Auld Lang Syne was booming out in the park around Himeji castle to signify it was closing for the day – there was only one question in our minds: when could we return? Someone told me about a friend who visits Japan each year simply for her mental wellbeing. After this trip, I’m thinking that’s a very good idea indeed.

What places did you connect with the first time you visited them?

French composer Michel Legrand died yesterday at the age of 86 and I’ve found myself playing a lot of his music today, my little way of thanking him. That means film soundtracks, because Legrand is probably more responsible than anyone else for my love affair with film music. His music was everywhere when I was a child. As a teenager, while everyone else was listening to Joni Mitchell or Led Zeppelin, I was lost in a soft-focus world where the repeated chords from “The Go-Between” would transport me to another world.

That’s what film music always was for me – a means to escape into another world, a soundtrack to my dreams. It wasn’t something I’d have admitted to, of course, because film music was seen as rather infra dig. Thankfully, attitudes to film music have changed. In a world where the boundaries of rock, jazz, classical, lounge and New Age are blurred, film soundtracks are now revered, and even seen as important milestones for serious composers like Philip Glass. Film music lost its taint of Mantovani muzak in the 1980s when ‘The Piano’ and ‘The Mission’ made people realise that film music was actually cool. Soundtracks were re evaluated and a new appreciation grew. Legrand sat astride the line dividing brilliant from naff – experimental and jazzy so often, but prone to the ickiness of soaring strings at times.

It was Jacques Demy’s ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’ that sent him my way. That song – “I will wait for you” – and its repeating motif, building in emotion each time, is classic Legrand. Frankly it’s wonderful, even if once it’s in your head it’s not easily shifted. The film is a marvel, too, popping with colour, and with the young Catherine Deneuve showing why she’s a star. The entire film is sung, for heaven’s sake! It was still classic French cinema – swarthy boy and blonde girl in love, swarthy boy leaves for the army, everyone is sad, the end. As story lines go it’s hardly edge-of-the-seat stuff but French films are best when they deal with the little nuances of life and Legrand’s music encapsulated all of it. The follow-up, “Les Demoiselles de Rochefort”, with Deneuve again, is the campest thing you’ll ever see, with snaky-hipped George Chakiris (from “West Side Story”) adding a bit of Hollywood glamour, although I keep expecting Cliff Richard to pop up, singing ‘The Young Ones’, as the film is geared more towards Britain’s swingin’ sixties groove.

I loved Noel Harrison singing ‘The Windmills of your mind”, too, the timbre of his spoken voice, and again that wheeling, turning, progression of emotion. Legrand’s music always touched me because it started low and built gradually until you’d feel a tiny uplift in your heart and even the prick of tears in your eyes, despite yourself. And even when everyone was sick to death of hearing “The Summer Knows” from “The Summer of ‘42” piped through hotel lounges, restaurants and lifts, I couldn’t help thinking its rising rhythm and repetition was rather marvellous.

Everyone told me that “Yentl” was pretty naff with all its Jewish stereotyping so I didn’t bother going to see it when it came out. I knew the music, sort of, and it did seem overly earnest. And so I was surprised to watch it recently and find that it was rather good. I mean, Streisand isn’t bad, the music works, the whole thing has heart.

Legrand was an accomplished jazz pianist, working with many of the greats, including Miles Davis.  His tendency to sing was rather off-putting, though – a thin, reedy voice, singing English lyrics like a phony Frenchman. But always a memorable tune.

In 2006, I rediscovered my great love for all things French after a fabulous holiday in Provence (my first time there since the early 1990s). Back in Australia, I found myself buying a wide variety of Legrand soundtracks, discovering films I’d never heard of, and music that showed why Legrand is so revered. And it’s these I’ve been listening to today. When I hear the good (“La baie des Anges”), the bad (“Ice Station Zebra”) and the downright schmaltzy (“Paris belongs to lovers”), I feel soft and sentimental. I’m not sure Legrand was the best French film composer (I’d hand that gong to Georges Delerue) but his music has coloured my thoughts about France for most of my life – overblown at times but always tender. I know his music will continue to accompany me as I write at my desk.

A bit of France, a bit of ham, a bit of beauty, and a lot of who I am. Thank you, Monsieur Legrand.

Michel Legrand – thanks to Flickr; John Turner

These days so much architecture is about appearance, making a big statement and attracting the eye (and the Instagram account). Many critics accuse architects of going for one-liners rather than developing anything deeper. Is there anything beyond the wow factor? It’s a good question to ask and I’m certainly among those who are a little jaded by the relentless swirling, curling skyscrapers that are springing up in every corner of the world. And yet sometimes a bit of wow can be refreshing, shaking things up, making you question whether things have to look the way they do. There have, after all, always been buildings that wow us.

Villa Savoye 1929

As an adolescent, I was drawn to modern architecture because so much of it looked outlandish. When you’re trying to figure out who you are then naturally you’re drawn to things that seem to be doing the same. I was particularly attracted to the first decades of the twentieth century when architects wanted to create something they thought was more suited to the modern age. Tradition was out; rule books were ripped up. My eye was caught by Le Corbusier’s white-box houses that promised so much. How different they looked from my own home back then – a 1930s brick house with a half-timbered gable and leaded bay windows, the sort seen everywhere in Britain in some form or other. (When my father first took my mother to see the house, she refused to get out of the car, saying she wanted a double-fronted Victorian house, not 1930s Tudorbethan.) No one I knew lived in a modern house, although some lived in new houses, which weren’t the same thing at all. In Britain, a new house was often just as traditional as those built decades before, only flimsier, with bay windows and a jumble of small rooms.

Some stood out, though. As a little boy, I was excited whenever we drove past what my sister and I called the mushroom house. It was built in the early 1960s with the upper floor cantilevered out so that it looked as though it might topple over. Cars could be parked in the paved area below the cantilever, and to cap it all off, the house had a broad balcony, another source of joyful wonder. It was like no other house I’d ever seen and it made me smile each time I saw it.

Vittorio Emanuele ll monument
(Flickr: Vyacheslav Argenberg)

I experienced that same glow when I was seventeen and I happened across a building that made me gasp with amazement. On a rainy morning in Rome, after a dismal overnight flight (French air traffic strikes) and unable to sleep, I slipped out from my hotel, turned a corner and came face-to-face with the Vittorio Emanuele monument. It’s the huge wedding cake that looms over the ruins of the Forum and puts Michelangelo’s Capitoline Hill in the shade. With its columns, chariots and flights of steps, it’s very white, very ostentatious and downright vulgar. I thought it was simply fantastic. Among the faded grandeur of normal Rome, it’s like a drag queen walking into a Pall Mall gentleman’s club. It makes me want to laugh every time I see it. You’ve got to love a bit of architectural dissonance, a bit of unexpected wow.

Lingotto (Wikimedia commons)

FIAT’s Lingotto factory in Turin was another building that enthralled me. You may know it from the original ‘The Italian Job’ film with Michael Caine, with a trio of Minis hurtling around its rooftop track. The first time I saw it in a photograph I felt like doing cartwheels. It was so wonderfully, joyfully mad and yet, when you thought about it, it was totally rational. It’s the work of engineer Giacomo Mattè-Trucco. Its concrete frame allowed massive windows which let in oodles of light to the factory floor, there were elegant, spiralling ramps at either end of the building, and there was that roof track. In 1922, it encapsulated the brave new world of mass-production and practicality. To the modernists, it may as well have been a temple.

I can’t believe that it took me until last year to visit it for the first time. FIAT moved out in the 1980s and the buildings have been repurposed as a shopping centre, a university, a hotel and an exhibition complex. Thankfully, the track remains.

I was there for the Slow Food movement’s biennial Terra Madre exhibition, which I heartily recommend to anyone who has the least interest in food.  I had an amazing day talking to people who grew cacao in the Amazon rainforest, made blue bread in Hopi territory and harvested rose petals in Iran but some of the thrill was knowing I was at Lingotto. (You can hear my interviews here with some of the Terra Madre exhibitors and the Terra Madre organiser.) Leaving the festival, nourished by stories of the resilience of remote communities saving their traditions by finding new markets in a world hungry for authenticity, I was more than ready to explore the old factory itself.

one of the end ramps at Lingotto

Until the early 1980s, every single FIAT was made at Lingotto. The first pieces were welded and bolted together on the ground floor assembly line which then moved onwards and upwards, floor-by-floor, until the car was completed at the top level. The final step was to test drive the finished product, which meant a whizz around the rooftop track. All being well, it was then driven down the ramps at the end, loaded on to a train, and transported to a FIAT showroom in Italy or beyond. It’s so logical and the Italians were justifiably proud of it. At this time in Britain, half-built Morris cars were being shunted around their plant in Oxford by lorry. No wonder everyone wanted a look at the FIAT place. Le Corbusier had photos of it in his cutting-edge book Toward An Architecture in the 1920s and managed a spin around the track in 1934.

The recent revamp by Renzo Piano is fairly sympathetic, with a futuristic turquoise-glass conference module up there on the roof and the inner courtyards filled with jungly palm trees. What looks like an old water tank actually houses a small but rather gorgeous collection of Matisse, Canaletto and Italian Futurist paintings that belongs to the Agnelli family, who owned FIAT. You have to visit the gallery to be allowed out to the roof track but it’s certainly worth it. I walked its perimeter, scrambling up the steeply-banked corners, and curbing a desire to run around the whole place singing Italian pop songs. I was enchanted to discover that the spiral ramps still smell of rubber tyres. It was easy to imagine a stream of tiny FIATs taking those curves at speed. I can only imagine how astonishing it must have seemed in the 1920s.

Lingotto’s blend of the madcap and the practical might not take away your breath in the way the latest computer-aided blobs by current architects do but it will definitely put a smile on your dial. I loved every part of my experience there. And, decades on from the first wow days of my youth, I was happy to find that architecture still gets my heart racing, that even things I have seen before can still make me gasp.

I’m convinced that Lingotto managed to be built in such a revolutionary way because Turin itself was filled with good architecture from every period, although much of it is  Art Nouveau (called Liberty style, in Italy). There was a precedence of innovation. When we see something that breaks the rules then doesn’t that encourage us to produce something equally shocking? Maybe that’s the case in the cities of the world where every skyscraper and new project seems to be competing for your attention. A little can go a long way if it all boils down to simple superficiality. But when it raises a wow and a smile then maybe it’s worth it.

What building wowed you the first time you saw it?

New towns don’t exactly have a great image and are often used as symbols of soullessness, like Cumbernauld in the film ‘Gregory’s Girl’. The British new town Milton Keynes tried to do away with that image by blending a wide variety of environments, from garden suburb to hi-tech industrial zones, and used to advertise itself by showing children cycling along leafy laneways and couples sauntering beside lakes, barely a building in sight. But people still joke about Milton Keynes

Saltaire (Flickr: L S Monaghan)

There were many new towns built in the nineteenth century, thanks to the grandees of the industrial revolution, who created village communities for their workers. Some were small, like Sir Titus Salt’s lovely Saltaire in Yorkshire, started in the 1850s, and some were larger, like the leafy Arts and Crafts villages of the Lever brother’s Port Sunlight and the Cadbury family’s Bournville, both being built in the 1880s. (Prince Charles continues to push that Old English look with his new town, Poundbury in Dorset, every building given a Classical or vernacular reference so it won’t scare the twinset-and-pearls brigade.)

To me, though, new towns were places of the 1960s, mainly because I grew up close to one that was still expanding. The very first house I lived in looked down on Cwmbran in the valley. I remember it as windy and grey, big and blocky, full of angles and open spaces. It was so different from normal towns and I wasn’t sure I liked it. That was probably reinforced by the fact we rarely went there, despite its big new shopping centre, my parents preferring to shop the traditional way in nearby Newport. When we stayed with my grandparents in their house outside Glasgow we would often drive into another new town, East Kilbride, which had the deep pink roads common to Lanarkshire. It felt bleak and grey, too, although I was always excited by its large car parks because that meant there were plenty of cars for me to gawp at. I remember once watching with amazement as a whole family clambered out of a tiny ‘bubble car’ through its single front door. I think that image attached itself to my overall idea that new towns were bizarre and alien places.

All bizarre and alien places should be properly examined, of course, because there are some real marvels among them. Like Perret’s amazing rebuilding of the bombed-out port city of Le Havre in northern France, and maybe even Milton Keynes (I’ve never visited it so can’t really comment) and most certainly Chandigarh, Le Corbusier’s Punjabi capital, which is often cited as one of the most liveable cities in India.

Which brings me to Firminy, another of Le Corbusier’s new towns, which I visited last year.

It is an odd place, Firminy. At first glance it’s just another French working town that sprang up to house miners and mill workers and which is now filled with high-rise housing blocks. West of Lyon, it’s at the very edge of the Auvergne so that you can see the sharp hillsides of much wilder countryside beyond, which reminded me of the glimpses of moorland and dales you get from the industrial towns of Yorkshire.  In the 1950s, the mayor of Firminy planned to update the place by clearing away old housing and replacing it with something more contemporary. The new area would be called Firminy-Vert (green Firminy). The mayor, Eugène Claudius-Petit, happened to be a close friend of Le Corbusier’s and naturally he believed that Le Corbusier was the best man to create this new town. It was the perfect fit for Le Corbusier who was as much an urban planner as an architect (and had grown up, in fact, in the New Town of La-Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland). It would be very twentieth century, with ample sports facilities, a church, a cultural centre and new apartment blocks, with plenty of green space for children to play in.

It was a long process, though, and the only building that was completed before Le Corbusier’s death in 1965 was the Cultural Centre, in which you have to buy a ticket if you want to visit the other buildings. The long pavilion with its sharp, tent-like roof looms over a generous sports ground, on the other side of which is a gently stepped stadium – another Le Corbusier design – and a swimming pool, completed by Corb’s protégé, Andre Wogensky. And then there’s the church.

Saint Pierre

What a strange-looking building the church of Saint Pierre is. It was designed to add height to the horizontality of the surrounding area but it’s a lop-sided kind of structure, a little like the concrete cooling tower of a power station, and reminiscent of the Palace of Assembly in Chandigarh. The base is square and contains a generous entrance area and various meeting rooms so that the curving, sloping shape above holds the church itself. As at La Tourette, there are shapely skylights (or light cannons) poking from its very top, and a complicated system of ledges and channels takes rainwater to the ground, which looks as though it was designed for a giant steel ball to run down like a pinball machine.

Saint Pierre interior (pre-lunch)

We bought our tickets just before lunchtime, with everything about to close for an hour or so (la belle France’s bloody stomach always comes first) but the ticket seller urged us to run to the church before it closed because the light inside at that moment would be extraordinary. And it was. The inward-sloping concrete walls were brushed with wavy lines of white light reflected from the skylights and also through the random scattering of tiny openings above the altar, which sparkle like stars. It’s a dazzling effect, as though the building is in motion. Later, when we returned after lunch for a more leisurely look, the light had completely changed, the sun no longer hitting the building from the same angle, and the starry effect was muted. The reflected lines of light were gone altogether, giving the lofty interior a more sombre air. That playfulness strikes me as very Le Corbusier, a man who understood that buildings are never static, that light and colours change, and with them, mood.

The church was only properly completed in 2006, which explained why so much of the concrete interior felt and smelled new, but the design is completely Le Corbusier’s. We had arrived fresh from a night at his priory at La Tourette so it was fascinating to see how, once again, the great architect, famous for his austerity and who claimed no religious faith at all, has managed to create a building of powerful emotion, with a sense of uplift and, dare I say, joy.

Cultural Centre (note the colourful ventilation panels)

Later, we went back to explore the Cultural Centre, which has the same pivoting ventilation panels that I’d admired at La Tourette, like little doorways in the walls, drawing the breeze into otherwise stuffy offices and a lofty theatre space. It is a generous building, filled with light, unexpected views and sudden dashes of strong, primary colour. Conceived as the new town’s community space, with its gallery, theatre, meeting rooms, museum and offices, it felt lively and inhabited.

We finished by driving up to the nearby Unité d’habitation, whose construction started in 1965, the year of Le Corbusier’s death.

It was the only one of three planned Unités to be built, which seems a shame as there are newer housing blocks nearby with none of the Unité’s attributes, a clear demonstration that you can shove innovation under some people’s noses and they still won’t see it. In some ways, with its position on a hill overlooking the town, the Firminy Unité has a more forceful presence than those in Marseille and Nantes-Rezé, crisp against the blue sky. Its colour scheme is simpler, too, using predominantly red and white with only a touch of blue, although there are multi-coloured glass windows peppering the sides of the school that occupies the uppermost two floors (much bigger than that in Rezé). The rooftop is closed but we managed to sneak a look at its stepped concrete seating and running track. It was built as public housing and costs were kept deliberately low but it’s still a fine building, if not in the same league as the Unité in Marseille. And as I noticed in the others, there’s an air of cheerfulness in the people who were coming and going. People smiled at me as I took my photos, and children were playing on the grassy playground to the back of the building. Not bad at all.

As we left Firminy, I noticed a familiar object gracing a roundabout. It was the Open Hand, the symbol Le Corbusier developed for Chandigarh. Its unmistakeable shape shows the immense pride taken by the town in the man who changed the look of the place. This had been apparent in the little bistro where we had lunch in the middle of town, its paper table mats covered with images of Le Corbusier’s buildings in Firminy and the UNESCO logo. I’m a sucker for anywhere that celebrates its architecture.

I left Firminy glad to have found another place that I had liked. Like the 1960s new towns of Britain, it is a blend of open space and enclosure, greenery and concrete, and with the emphasis on supporting community – births, deaths and marriages in the church, gathering places for sport, theatre and play, while living with views, cross ventilation and boundless natural light. It might not knock your socks off as Ronchamp or La Tourette will but it is deeply satisfying.

Le Corbusier town and proud of it

Do you have a favourite new town?

fan of Firminy

I made a resolution this year that I would start swimming again. Before Christmas, a friend was staying and I mentioned that I never swam, despite the beach being so near. “I walk,” I told her. “Can’t you do both?” she asked. And I mulled over that as though it was an incredible proposition.

The truth is that I’m a hopeless swimmer. As a child I was told that my father’s cousin was deaf because he’d got water in his ear while swimming. That sank in and stayed with me. And anyway, I was hardly from a family of strong swimmers. The town pool in south Wales where I grew up was a bleak and freezing place and the best thing about going there was getting a cup of hot Bovril and a marshmallow afterwards. A friend had a pool at his house but it always had leaves and dead rats floating in it. When we moved to Yorkshire, the town pool was indoors and stank of chlorine. As an adult, holidays on the Mediterranean just meant playing in the waves to cool down, not real swimming.

I was in my thirties when I decided to do something about it. So I went to adult swimming classes at the Oasis pool in London. There, at last, I conquered my fear of putting my head underwater and thereafter I would swim quite regularly at the old-fashioned baths at Marshall Street, just behind Oxford Circus. When I say swim I mean only breaststroke. Front crawl was beyond me.

And then we moved to Australia and bought a house close to the beach. There are three ocean pools an easy walk away, a large netted enclosure in the bay nearby, and we have the longest beach in Sydney, popular with surfers, although I can’t get the thought of sharks from my mind when I swim in the sea. The other morning I asked a woman who had been snorkelling in the reefy part of the beach whether there was much to see. “Three little sharks,” she said, adding that she’d seen a school of eight the other day and the sight had nearly stopped her heart. Mostly they’re not the attacking kind. It’s that ‘mostly’ that I worry about. (No wonder the collective noun for a group of them is a shiver or frenzy of sharks.)

I swam occasionally when we moved here but it didn’t give me much enjoyment, especially when I was surrounded by such strong swimmers everywhere I went. I asked the council if there was anywhere local that held adult swimming classes, thinking I needed to improve my poor technique. The response was sheer bafflement. A grown man, unable to swim, and living by the beach? How is that possible? And so I decided that walking was my thing. For two decades I have walked along the long beach and walked on the path around the peninsula and walked on the cliffs at the gateway to Botany Bay. I love walking. Walking clears my head, ushers in new thinking, relaxes and inspires me. But secretly I have always thought it would be rather marvellous to swim as well. My partner swims each day before breakfast, year round, winter and summer, and I would often walk past the pool in which he was ploughing up and down and I would think how lucky he was. He would come home so uplifted and refreshed and I wanted some of that.

So, on my last birthday, just before Christmas, as a brilliantly hot summer day dawned, I told him that I would join him at the ocean pool. ‘Lovely,’ he said. And since then I’ve joined him most days. Gradually my technique and my stamina have improved. I can now do the crawl, although I’m slow, and recently I’ve taken to snorkelling, especially in the huge netted enclosure in the bay. There are seagrass beds there and sometimes we have the entire space to ourselves. There are always loads of different fish to investigate, from schools of mullet the size of salmon to a solitary stripy leatherjacket with its pursed lips and spiky body. There are stingrays flapping along the sandy bottom and this morning there was an incredibly beautiful silver fish with long streamers flowing behind it, a blow-in from tropical waters further north. The water temperature is a warm 22 degrees and it’s bliss to float on my back and watch the clouds.

Practically every day I ask myself why it took me so long to do this. The water will get chilly in the next few months and I will stop swimming for the winter, although I could go to one of the heated municipal pools further afield if I fancied. Except I’ve been spoilt by seawater and fish and sitting in the sunshine afterwards, gazing out at the horizon, sometimes spying the local pod of dolphins leaping in the surf.

I rail so often at the ugliness of Australian buildings and the careless way trees are torn down to make way for larger houses, but it is redeemed by Mother Earth. The proximity to incredible nature is Australia’s best feature. I love the colourful birds and the sneaky possums and the skittering lizards in my garden, and now, at last, I am appreciating the watery realm that is practically on my doorstep.Traditionally, the Chinese thought water was a symbol of the flow of life itself. It’s the blood in our veins, the flow of money that supports our lifestyle, the movement of new thoughts and ideas, the tidal ups-and-downs of everyday life. Water is vital.

Immersing myself in it each day feels like I’m connected to a bigger life. It often takes a long time to learn what it is you love. But it’s always worth making the effort to find out.

Are you a swimmer?

a leatherjacket
(image from nsw fisheries)

Sometime in the last two decades it appears we became a nation of claustrophobes. Or that’s what it looks like if you check out our homes. What’s the first thing renovators do? Knock down walls to create the biggest space possible. In some open plan homes you expect tumbleweed to roll by. Open plan living isn’t just in, it’s mandatory, and I think it’s a curse.

Open plan, Prairie-style – Pleasant Home, Oak Park, by George Maher

Open plan isn’t a new idea, of course. You could argue that the great medieval halls started the craze, with their central fireplace and everyone eating and sleeping in the same big space. But it was really the beginning of the twentieth century that saw its promotion as the modern way of living. That was understandable, given that so many homes at the time were dark and dingy warrens of small rooms. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright encouraged the opening out of space as part of his Prairie style, with a flow that was seamless and luxurious. The Modernists of the 1920s used new building-frame technology to create bright, open plan spaces with huge windows and fewer walls. This was still a time of servants, and it took until the 1950s for the kitchen to be liberated. In Le Corbusier’s flats and elsewhere, the mother could now gaze lovingly out at her family as she prepared yet another meal for them. By the 1970s, it was chic to entertain your guests in the kitchen, not propped up at the breakfast bar, but actually sitting at a table for your prawn cocktail, cheese fondue and Black Forest Gateau. It reflected life’s new equality, even if it was still usually women preparing the meal.

Free flow but with doors – Le Corbusier’s own home in Paris

Blame the Americans and their perky sitcoms in which everyone, from the Brady bunch to Will & Grace, moves effortlessly from kitchen to dining table to sofa, nothing blocking those camera angles. Every speculative home builder loves open plan, because walls and doors cost money and the fewer of them the better. It’s easier to conjure up images of New York lofts than be open about what it actually is: cheap.

the standard Australia spec-home open plan space
(image: Domain.com.au)

While visitors might be impressed by your open plan space – “wow, great for parties!” – what happens when there’s just your average family in that space? Loss of money, of course, because large spaces are expensive to heat and costly to cool. And what about noise? Soaring ceilings and galleries off which bedrooms lead, funnel noise indiscriminately. Normal living isn’t quiet – the clatter of cutlery, the ear-piercing juicer, the siren call of Triple J, all will drift and amplify in the open plan space. And where do you put the furniture?  With an entrance door leading straight into a living, eating and cooking area we’re left with a glorified hallway. It’s more important to keep pathways clear than create spaces that are comfortably contained. Which means that oh-so-relaxed-looking open space is downright stressful to live in.

is this what we want to return to? (Fontenay Abbey)

But there, it seems we’ve returned to the start, to that great hall of medieval times. Which shows that fashion is cyclical and there’s nothing new under the sun. Personally, I can’t wait for a return to walls, shutting the door against the noise and curling up with a good book. And if someone else wants to make dinner then at least I won’t have to witness their resentment if I can’t see them.

Are you a doors-shut or free-flowing person?

(This article was written for ABC Radio National – read others here, or listen to the podcasts here.)

There’s something wonderful about flying. Even crammed into Economy on a fourteen-hour leg, I’m happy to sit there and watch the films and eat whatever I’m given. I love a window seat, gazing down at whatever we’re passing, but on some international flights you’re asked to lower the blinds, even during a daylight voyage, meaning you miss out on what’s below. A few airlines have external cameras so that you follow progress on your backseat screen but it’s not the same.

Looking down on the landscape below is always a pleasure. It’s fascinating to fly directly over a Javanese volcano or to see the length of the Grand Canyon or the radiating road patterns of a city like Tehran.  This is Google Earth and a geography lesson in real time. When I lived in Britain, holiday jaunts would invariably end by leaving clear Mediterranean skies and returning to a Britain that was lost to low cloud. Nothing to see here, folks. It made re-entry into normal life feel even more dismal. Occasionally you’d hit a cloudless day and look down and think, ‘Oh, there’s Brighton’ and somehow that made it better.

Ajaccio

These are some of my most memorable looking-down experiences:

Coming into London: In the late 1980s, British Airways boasted that they’d never cancel a flight even if there was only one passenger. The evening flight I caught from Aberdeen to London, after a day’s interior design consultation with a client, was virtually that. There must have been three of us rattling around the Boeing 767. I remember being served smoked salmon sandwiches and generous slugs of wine. And while that felt very luxurious, we were soon stuck in a holding pattern over London, circling for what seemed hours. But boy, it was so beautiful – the sparkling lights, the brightness of Oxford Street and the sudden shimmer of the Thames and the lustre of the new Canary Wharf rising in Docklands. Stretched out in my seat I submitted to the twinkling landscape below, as magical as a dream, and London seemed like a glorious place.

Leaving London: I was feeling very emotional, leaving my life in London to start a new one in Sydney. Heathrow was smothered in November fog and our plane lifted off into thick cloud. When we were airborne, the cloud parted – just once – and I saw through the gap the little stretch of Kings Road that had been so important to me, where I’d worked and where I’d been so happy for so long. And then the gap closed again. It was no more than a fleeting glimpse but it felt as though Chelsea, and London itself, was bidding me farewell.

Flying into Sydney: The first time I saw Sydney was from the air. The long flight from San Francisco had been over endless ocean but then, nearing the coast, the plane banked as it prepared for the final descent. Suddenly there was the glint of a city and some cliffs and then Anthony pointed to a spit of land moored among turquoise-blue bays and gridded with orange-tiled roofs. “That’s Cronulla,” he said. I sometimes feel we invoked a spell. That afternoon we would walk on its beach and a few months later we would buy a house there, the one in which we still live some twenty two years later.

Flying into Leeds: This was my first trip back to Britain since moving to Australia. I’d endured a long KLM flight to Amsterdam, flying over Australia’s immense continent, where you look down, hour after hour, and see a red landscape that looks like another planet’s. I remember thinking how incredible it was that there were probably places down there on which no human had ever set foot. Now, as the British Midland jet edged past the Humber bridge and over the flatness of East Yorkshire, all brown tilled fields, I looked down and thought, in a slightly superior way: there’s not a piece of that land that hasn’t been walked on. But the emptiness of Australia never really captured my heart and now I love returning to Europe, and its countries so clearly trampled by history

Flying into Nice: I flew into Nice many times when I lived in London but there was a long gap between this flight and the last. The Emirates flight was virtually empty as many passengers had disembarked in Rome, and there was now a party atmosphere among the crew. They came around with chocolates – “Go on, take a couple more” – and there was a lot of laughter. The views from Dubai had been crystal clear, coastlines so sharp, mountains crisp, and the heel of Italy’s boot sparkling with reflections from the many greenhouses. We seemed to skim the roofs of the Vatican and were quickly up again and across Elba before swinging down to the great Bay of Angels and my beautiful Nice. It was years since I’d been to France. The bay was blue and beautiful, filled with tiny motorboats and large yachts with white sails, and the hills were covered with houses, their windows glinting in the morning sun. The Alps hovered in the distance like a mirage. I was struck by an intense feeling of coming home, a re-awakening and a remembering, which is present still each time I arrive in France.

Singapore Strait

Flying into Singapore: I’ve flown Singapore Airlines more than any other airline, at least internationally.  The service is lovely, even when there’s turbulence, often in the bumpy air as we cross the Australian coastline, and encountering tropical storms nearer the Equator. On one trip, I was returning from Britain on my own. My father had died suddenly when I was in Chicago and although that had felt chaotic, re arranging flights and so on, the week or so I spent with my family after the funeral was uplifting and hardly sad at all. But on that flight home I became more emotional and I couldn’t concentrate on films, or sleep. The woman next to me was uncommunicative, too, unresponsive when I made a comment or had to squeeze past for the loo. In the last moments of the twelve hour flight, coming in to Singapore, she turned to me and said, “I’m sorry I haven’t been very talkative. I’ve been in England for my father’s funeral and this is the first chance I’ve had to really process everything.” “Me too,” I said.  And suddenly we were chatting and grieving together, which stopped only when there was a slight bump. “What was that?” I said, alarmed, before realising that we’d landed, the tiny bump of the wheels on tarmac so discreet, so typical of Singapore Airlines. I normally enjoy marvelling at the ships anchored in the Singapore Strait and the bright lights of the city’s towers but this time, looking out or looking down wasn’t nearly so important as looking back with someone on exactly the same route. As they say, it’s the journey that’s important, not the destination.

What are the memorable flights of your life?

If you haven’t already visited Venice then I’m sure it’s on your bucket list. There is simply no place like it. I am lucky enough to have visited it several times. The most memorable was when I was in my second year at university and a few of us nipped over in the middle of term to meet up with the lucky few who got to spend an entire term there, studying the art and architecture of the region. The week we arrived turned out to be Carnevale, newly revived and therefore still something of a secret. It was dreamlike to walk the alleyways and come across people in full costume – masks, crinolines, the lot. At night there were little braziers on Piazza San Marco around which people sat and strummed guitars. The week finished with a huge party in the Piazza and a flock of white doves being released from the top of the campanile. I’ll never recapture the incredible mood of that February visit but Venice always delivers something memorable, no matter when you go.

Now I am lucky enough to write and broadcast my short pieces most weeks on ABC Radio National’s Blueprint for Living.  The individual pieces can be found in the Podcasts and Other Writing sections of this site. Occasionally several pieces are included in a longer feature but not printed on the webpage. This week it was about Venice – the ‘masque of Italy’ as Byron described it.  You can listen to the whole podcast but I thought I’d reprint my individual Venetian contributions here:

Santa Lucia station

Thanks to Flickr Stephen Colebourne

The best way to arrive in Venice is by boat, like Aschenbach in ‘Death in Venice’, but a close second is by rail. You don’t expect trains in Venice but its station is one of the most theatrical in the world. Your train takes you across the lagoon on a viaduct that was built in 1846 to serve the first Santa Lucia station, which was replaced by the current building. The great stations of Italy are often statement pieces – Milan’s is overblown and monumental, Florence’s is 1930s rationalism, and Rome’s is all 1950s glass modernism – so it’s a surprise to find that Venice’s is like many others around Italy – polished travertine pillars, tiled floors, and a ticket hall graced with a jaunty mosaic. But then you step outside. It’s as energising as discovering the Grand Canyon there because, beyond the shallow steps and the open piazza, is the Grand Canal itself. This is the business end, though, not the bit Canaletto painted, but all the same it’s filled with life – the vaporettos churning the water, the water taxis, and the crowds of tourists lugging their bags across the bridge and into the city proper. A domed church and the faded grandeur of medieval buildings face you on the opposite side of the canal. You expect singing at the very least but there’s usually the sound of bells.

Before you leave, turn around and take in the station building. It’s long and low so that it doesn’t intrude on the skyline. The winged emblem of the rail company crowns the plain façade, the only decoration. The building was planned in the 1930s by Virgilio Vallot, who was happy to do whatever Mussolini wanted. And Mussolini wanted modern stations – this one now handles over 30 million passengers a year. In fact the building wasn’t completed until 1952, slightly modified by Paul Perilli, but retaining the Fascists signature stripped classical look that is hard not to admire, despite the politics behind it. As a plain and simple gateway, it allows you a moment to gather yourself before succumbing to the theatricality and riches of the city before you.

Palazzo Venier dei Leoni/ Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Thanks to Flickr Nicolas de Camaret

Peggy Guggenheim was art. Her uncle, Solomon, had already amassed a great collection that would be housed in Frank Lloyd Wright’s gleaming white museum in Manhattan, when Peggy began immersing herself in the cultural scene of 1920s Paris. She even married two Surrealist painters in succession, one of whom being Max Ernst. And she took abstract art to the world, starting with her gallery in London. She famously bought an artwork a day for her own collection, including everyone from Brancusi to Picasso. She made sure everyone knew who Kandinsky was and then, back in America during WW2, she gave Jackson Pollock his first show, supporting him throughout his career.

In 1947 she bought the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, in which she lived until her death in 1979. It’s one of the most unusual buildings in the city. Facing the busiest stretch of the Grand Canal, not far from the Salute church, you might mistake it for a modernist interpretation of a Venetian palace, being so white, so low, so odd. But look at the monumental Palazzo Cornaro on the opposite side of the Grand Canal and you’ll see the sort of place it was intended to be. Only grander. The Veniers were one of the city’s most venerated families, producing three doges, including one painted by Titian. Work started on the palace in 1751 but almost immediately stopped, no one quite knows why. The ground floor languished in its wonderful setting until recovered by the Marchesa Luisa Caserta in 1910 who reinstated its grand rooms, hosted somewhat ludicrous parties for the likes of the Ballets Russes and had a flock of albino blackbirds whose feathers she dyed according to her mood. Another socialite owned it afterwards before Peggy Guggenheim got her hands on it in 1947. In 1951, she flung open its doors to the public, allowing everyone to enjoy her remarkable collection of works by the greatest C20^th artists which positively drip from its walls. Peggy herself is interred in its beautiful garden, overlooked by statues by Marini and Kapoor. It’s an enchanting spot to sit and reflect but  better yet is to steal away from the crowds and stand on the waterside steps, gazing out at the Grand Canal. Here you can appreciate how this was always meant to be the doorstep to a magical world, almost as surreal as some of the works it now displays.

Social housing on the Giudecca

Giudecca from San Giorgio Maggiore – the grey roofs of the Aldo Rossi development are glimpsed to the left of the Zitelle church dome, the Valle development is beyond the red-brick mill right at the other end
Thanks to Flickr James West.

The Giudecca is the island tucked to the side of Venice and people visit its great buildings like Palladio’s Redentore church and various C19th villas, or they luxuriate in grand hotels like the Cipriani. But the island has long been a place of workshops, boatyards and warehouses. Many of these buildings remain, often re-purposed as cultural spaces. There was always a population living here, the workers for the area. Which is why it’s worth tearing yourself away from the main sights and taking a moment to walk along the quiet and often surprisingly leafy laneways of the Giudecca. It’s here, for instance, in the Campo di Marta that you’ll find social housing by Aldo Rossi, the architect and theorist who won the Pritzker in 1990. Rossi’s seminal work, ‘The Architecture of the City’, stressed the importance of cultural context, the way that our buildings reflect how we think of ourselves. His own buildings have a curious familiarity, all light and shade like a de Chirico painting, with elements that evoke other eras. Tucked away next to the island’s market garden, this cluster of pale-terracotta, low-rise apartment buildings, built in 1984, is topped by arched metal roofs that recall the dome of the nearby Redentore church as well as buildings by the early modernist architect Adolf Loos. The solidity is broken up by brick staircase towers that evoke Renaissance fortifications.

And while you’re here, take a stroll to the western part of the island to inspect a larger complex, designed in 1980 by Gino Valle, with 94 apartments tucked into an area bounded by narrow canals and abandoned factories. These finely-shaped brick buildings evoke industrial warehouses, and the ostentatious neo-Gothic flour mill nearby, now an equally glitzy hotel. Seemingly crammed together, the long apartment blocks contain covered arcades, crisp staircases and stolen glimpses that draw you onwards and reference the narrow alleyways of the old city itself. The tall canal frontages have stylised gables sliced in two, like ruined classical pediments.

These social housing projects may not be the equal of the grand palazzi and churches nearby but they show how good design and liveability remain an important part of this, the most extraordinary city on earth.

Do you have a favourite building in Venice?