I have commented before about the perils of over-restoration, in which a building’s owner becomes a little too enthusiastic about its preservation and ends up with a building that, except in style, looks almost new. Chelsea sits on a 500-acre preserve in Muttontown, L.I. which has come into the hands of the government of Nassau (the county on Long Island in-between Queens County and Suffolk). The county has managed to maintain the house and its grounds at exactly the appropriate level: not plastering over every crack to make it ‘good-as-new’, nor neglecting it so it becomes structurally unsound, but rather allowing it to develop and age naturally. These photographs from the ever-capable James Robertson admirably display the house and its grounds, including its shallow canal-moat.

I can’t help but be amused by the brash contrast of the informal and the formal in this photo of Yoweri Museveni’s inauguration as President of Uganda in 1986. The years after Idi Amin’s overthrow in 1979 were almost as turbulent as the rule of the alleged cannibal. Milton Obote, the man Idi Amin had overthrown to gain power, returned to the presidency for five years during which Uganda’s troubles never ceased. In January 1986, the Obote government collapsed after Museveni’s rebel army seized the capital. The old emperor had fled, and the apparatus of state hailed the new emperor as their own. Museveni, Holy Writ in hand and guided by a clerk as the Chief Justice looked on, took the oath of office and formally ascended to the presidency of the nation.

Since then Mr. Museveni has defied expectations. As president he allowed political parties to operate but forbade them from fielding candidates in elections. He hand-picked members from all Uganda’s major political factions and tribes to take part in his government, ensuring all groups had an interest in continued stability and peace. During his so far twenty years of rule, the personal freedom of Ugandans has tended to increase, as has economic prosperity — single-handedly ruined by Amin when he expelled the entire ethnic-Indian merchant & trading class in 1972. When Museveni came to power, Uganda had one of the highest rates of AIDS infection in the world. In open defiance of the West, Museveni’s pragmatic abstinence-oriented education policies have slashed the rate of infection in Uganda from over 20% in the 1980s to just 4.1% in 2003.

Uganda today is far from perfect, and there are still numerous examples of violence and corruption, but the gradual evolution continues. In 2005, Ugandans voted in a referendum to abolish the ban on political parties participating in elections. In the same year, Museveni’s predecessor and rival, Milton Obote, died in exile in South Africa but was graciously allowed a state funeral in the Ugandan capital of Kampala. 2006 saw the first multi-party parliamentary elections in Uganda for a quarter of a century. Museveni’s movement won a comfortable majority with 59%, but the opposition parties still managed to keep things competitive.

And yes, Uganda’s judiciary are still resplendent in their traditional robes of office — something under perpetual threat of abolition back in Mother Britain.

Over two-hundred species of bird, the enthusiasts tell me, have been sighted in the fields and marshes through which I tromp. Most famously, twenty years ago a Wood Sandpiper — Tringa glareola — found its way to these parts. The Wood Sandpiper breeds in Scandinavia and spends northern winters in southern Africa or Australia (a not disagreeable routine, one would suppose). The 1990 Wood Sandpiper of Westchester whetted the whistles of birdwatchers (themselves a curious species) up and down the Eastern seabord.

Needless to say, I chanced upon no Wood Sandpipers today (not that I would have been able to discern one), the most recent East-Coast siting having taken place two years ago in Delaware. The American Woodcock, plump and currently thriving, generally winters closer to the Gulf of Mexico but has begun to return north by now, more reliably seen around dusk rather than in midday. My favourite, however, are the Wild Turkeys which are found here. They are such charming creatures, utterly lacking in guile and artifice. Were ever an avian species to mount a coup d’etat or engage in espionage, the turkey would be the last to fall under suspicion. I was stalked during part of my promenade today by two females of the species, though they eventually lost interest and wandered off into the woods, leaving me to perambulate the meadow alone.

Down at the end of the meadow and through the shielding woods are the salt marshes and the Neck that juts out into the inlet. Right at the waterline I found a suitable rock, its base encrusted with barnacles, on which to sit and look over Greenhaven Channel to Hen Island, from which the poor old recluse Lou Farnum was unceremoniously removed during the Great War under suspicion of signalling to German U-boats. Nothing was ever proven, and he returned to live in his tent on the island, and ended up saving the lives of a few Boy Scouts who chanced to overnight there on the evening of an almighty storm. Barnacles — while admittedly the vital ingredient to one of Captain Haddock’s favoured oaths — are the sworn enemy of anyone who ever grew up along a coast. Many a child’s shin was scratched or bloodied by barnacles during a careless slip while exploring the shore rocks. Vendettas forged in youth are hard forgotten, and I still fail to see why God has scourged the better parts of this Earth with barnacles, though of course we must rely on the appropriateness of His infinite wisdom.

Whenever I’m on the Neck I have a peek at the ruins of the old cottage. There’s not much left of it beside the stone foundations and chimney, but I always look at it and think what an excellent location for a bolt-hole it is, right by the water, with stunning views in summer and cracking storms in winter. Then again, it’s a good three-quarters of a mile from the nearest road, so stocking up on groceries would be a bit tricky. Perhaps a pack mule could be employed for the weekly trip.

The worrying thing about the Neck is that there is only one narrow strip of land attaching it to the mainland. Perfect site for an ambush, really, and I once found the route blocked by a doe and her fawn — not a pair I had any intention of getting between. Today, upon finally returning to the little spit of land, I saw in the distance some furry creature of indeterminate species scampering away. It looked like the sort of thing that ought to be nocturnal, and immediately I assumed not only that it was rabid, but that it had also lost some money on the horses that morning and was determined to infect the next human being that crossed its path. After pausing a while it seemed there was no option but to press on and hope the critter had continued scampering, rather than lying in wait to block my way home. It was probably running from its bookkeeper, after all.

Returning home and de-shoeing, I noted a satisfactory caking of sand and mud on my boots — the evidence of a morning well spent.

View towards Hen Island, late winter.

“It does not matter what the artist paints, but how he paints it,” proclaims the painter Hans Laagland. “That is why Rubens is a genius while Picasso’s work is passable.” Laagland, a Fleming himself, is one of the scant few artists in our day who paint in the grand style of the Flemish baroque master. He was born in Belgium’s Dutch province in 1965 and took up the brush and easel when ten years old. The young boy quickly developed a fascination with Rubens, considering and absorbing his works in the neighbouring city of Antwerp. Laagland’s emphasis is on traditional craftsmanship, painting in oils on wood panel, investigating and recreating the Old-Dutch lead white used by Rembrandt and the vermilion of Rubens. With a particularly capable hand at portraits, his work can be seen everywhere from the Norbertine abbey at Postel to the Belgian parliament in Brussels.

“It has been downhill ever since Rubens,” the painter says. Rembrandt — “Rubens’s disabled cousin” according to Laagland — was the last great painter; “What comes after him no longer has any significance.” Those versed in the Netherlandic tongue can read Mr. Laagland expounding upon his artistic ideas in De Kunstverduistering (“The Eclipse of Art”), his extended essay on art and painting now published as a book by KEI Zutphen.

Hans Laagland, Figures with Game and Fruit
Oil on wood, 47½ in. x 102⅓ in.
1993

Hans Laagland, Still Life with Melon
Oil on wood, 23½ in. x 35½ in.
1995

Hans Laagland, My Parents
Oil on wood, 29½ in. x 39⅓ in.
1997

Hans Laagland, Large Art Deco Still Life
Oil on oak, 35½ in. x 30¾ in.
2001

Hans Laagland, View of the Studio (self portrait, detail)
Oil on oak, 63 in. x 102⅓ in.
2000

Elsewhere: Laagland Agents

Despite the longer history behind the original wing of South Africa’s Parliament House, when most people think of Parliament today they think of the 1983 wing that currently houses the National Assembly. The wing was designed by the architects Jack van der Lecq and Hannes Meiring in a Cape neo-classical style similar to the rest of the building, and it is actually quite a handsome composition despite the awkwardly proportioned portico, which is too tall for its width or two narrow for its height.

The large chamber within was built to house joint sittings of the tricameral parliament established by the 1983 Constitution. In 1994, this became the ordinary meeting place of the National Assembly, South Africa’s lower house of parliament, and also hosts joint sittings of both houses for the State Opening of Parliament, the President’s State of the Nation address, and the visits of foreign heads of state.

The multi-hued geometric patterns on the floor are actually handsome and lend the chamber a suitably African feel, but the chamber as a whole was hastily designed and quickly constructed, and this shows in the poor detailing throughout the hall. It almost gives the feeling of a converted high school gymnasium. Its frenetic nature and lack of overall style is perhaps reflective of the indecisive apartheid government of the 1980s that built it.

If one has the means but not the time, why not consider making a donation towards a full or partial scholarship? I’m told the list of applicants for scholarships is long, and these are often the most keen participants in such intellectual and social endeavours. More infomation on the Symposium can be found here.

“THE MOST HUMBLE City of Valletta” is the official title of Malta’s capital, which was founded in response to Moorish threats and withstood the onslaught of Nazi bombers. But ‘La Ċittà Umilissima’ is now facing a humiliation brought about by its own rulers, who have commissioned the modernist architect Renzo Piano to reshape the entrance to the oldest quarter of the city. ‘Starchitects’ like Piano are so called because their temporal success lies more on their ability to create hype about their sensational and novel designs than on the quality and timelessness of their work itself. Most notorious for collaborating with Richard Rogers on the despised Pompidou Center in Paris, Piano has re-envisioned Valletta’s city gate without a gate, placed a new Maltese parliament on stilts next to it, and developed plans for a roofless theatre on the bombed-out ruins of the Royal Opera House.

The foundation of the Maltese capital was initiated by the Order of Malta during its rule over the island, not long after the famous Ottoman attack of 1565 was repulsed. The city takes its name from Jean Parisot de Valette, one of the greatest men to have ever served as Prince & Grand Master of the Sovereign Military & Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, and the knights’ impact on Valletta’s development have led some to call it “the city designed by gentlemen for gentlemen”. This stateliness led some to give ‘The Most Humble City’ its second moniker of ‘La Superbissima’ — the most proud.

The area being redeveloped lies where the main gate to the old city stood until it was destroyed by German bombers during the Second World War. The open area created is, sadly, now much abused as space for parking automobiles.

Renzo Piano has designed a gate-less gate to replace the Italian modernist gate (not an entirely insensitive design I must admit) that was constructed in the 1970s.

The design includes what I think is an exterior elevator, topped off with poles from which to fly the Maltese and European flags.

Since the gate is meant to be for pedestrian use with no vehicular traffic, one can’t really think of any reason not to take the simpler option of restoring the old gate that existed within living memory. An appropriate touch might be to top the gate off with a sculpted rendition of the arms of the Maltese republic instead of the lioned-and-unicorned British royal arms that were added after the Royal Navy appropriated the island from the Napoleonic interlopers who had themselves seized it from the Knights two years before.

Valletta has lacked a theatre of suitable grandeur since the loss of its Royal Opera House in 1942. The structure was designed by Edward Middleton Barry, the third son of Sir Charles Barry who collaborated with Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin on the Houses of Parliament in London. (Compare the Barry-Pugin collaboration to Piano-Rogers; the Palace of Westminster or the Centre Pompidou? Not a hard choice for any but the most indoctrinated). As it happens, Barry fils also designed Covent Garden Theatre, which became the Royal Opera House, London in 1892, twelve years after his death. Valletta’s opera house burned down only six years after it opened but the proud citizens rebuilt to its original design. On the evening of April 7, 1942, the house met its ultimate destruction at the hands of the Luftwaffe. After the war’s end, German prisoners-of-war held in Malta offered to rebuild the Royal Opera House themselves for a nominal sum as an act of atonement. But at a time of high unemployment when many Maltese were leaving the island, the government felt compelled to decline the offer.

A 1950s scheme was chosen to mostly rebuild the opera house to a slightly different design by an Italian architect, Dr. Ing. Zavellani-Rossi, but the plan ground to a halt for lack of funds. In the 1980s, Renzo Piano was contacted and a design approved by the government, which continued dithering and also considered a design by the Maltese architect Richard England. In the middle of the 2000s, Piano was commissioned for the project yet again and produced the roofless design which has caused consternation and protest among the citizens of Valletta and the cultural community of Malta as a whole.

Since the demise of the Royal Opera House, Malta has lacked a National Theatre, and despite the beneficial Mediterranean climate Renzo Piano’s roofless design can clearly only be used seasonally, rather than year-round.

A number of more traditional or restoration-oriented counter-proposals to the modernist designs have been made, one of which even managed to garner an endorsement from the British theatrical producer Sir Cameron Mackintosh.

Again, given the controversy that any modernist design inevitably provokes, wouldn’t an outright restoration be simpler?

The third component of the design is a new parliament building, linking the new city gate-without-a-gate to the roofless theatre. Malta’s parliament currently convenes in the Armoury of the former Palace of the Grand Masters of the Order of Malta, which now doubles as legislative home and presidential palace. As outstandingly beautiful as many of the chambers of the Magistral Palace are, the parliament is forced into modern accommodation in the Armoury because none of the other gracious halls are large enough to fit both parliamentarians and the public who submit them to rigorous scrutiny. Yet Valletta has no lack of stately buildings (especially in the old city) that might better accommodate the Republic’s legislature. Some have suggested the Auberge de Castile or the Auberge d’Italie — the palaces that once housed those countries’ natives who defended Malta and the freedom of the Christian Mediterranean as Knights.

As critics have pointed out, the site in between the opera house ruins and the city gate does not have any potential room for expansion, and does not offer any significant improvement in working space from the legislature’s current location. Worth the cost of employing one of the world’s most notorious ’starchitects’ and blighting the old city until someone is brave enough to tear it down? Hardly. The citizens of Malta would be wiser to save their money in these straitened times so that they are not compelled to demolish expensive structures come the day when public tastes improve.

There is, however, at least one regard in which the civilian has his military brother beat: Pierre only has six children, Philippe has seven.

We can deduce a lot about a power by looking at the structures it erects. The return to neo-classicism under Stalin after the earlier Russian deconstructivist architecture of the 1920s is telling, as is the almost universal (and only seemingly contradictory) adoption of socialist Bauhaus architecture for the headquarters of New York corporations in the post-war period, or the turn to Brutalism by the governments of numerous Western liberal countries in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. While the apartheid government adopted a guise of conservatism, its revolutionary re-ordering of South African society was so radical that, for example, the old Edwardian railway station in Cape Town was demolished and completely rebuilt in order to better accommodate the separation of the races.

When the Afrikaner Nationalist government was elected in 1948, it inherited one of the richest architectural traditions in the world. South African architecture, from the original Cape Dutch so praised by Ruskin, through the Cape Classical of the architect Thibault and the sculptor Anreith, and on to the attempt at a South African national style by Edwardian architects like Herbert Baker, the nation’s legacy of boukuns (building-art) is one of which any nation would be proud.

The Cape Dutch style has proved particularly versatile and easily reinterpreted in almost every age of South African history since Jan van Riebeeck planted the oranje-blanje-blou on these shores in 1652. Yet from 1948 until its final electoral demise in 1994 the National Party government erected almost no buildings in the “national style” of Cape Dutch or its aesthetic descendants. Instead, they built in the grim modernist style found everywhere else in the world, both in the liberal-capitalist West and the totalitarian-Marxist East. One need only consider the Nico Malan (now Artscape) in Cape Town, the Staatsteater in Pretoria, or the Theo van Wijk building at Unisa.

We should, however, not only judge a society by what it creates, but also by what it destroys. The Nationalist government’s architectural legacy of creation was undeniably abominable, but the government did not even manage to keep a decent score in preservation. I have already mentioned before the case of Saasveld, the old Cape Town home of Baron Willem Ferdinand van Reede van Oudtshoorn which, thankfully, was carefully dismantled instead of being simply demolished. While Saasveld was eventually reconstructed at the Huguenot Memorial in Franschhoek, too many fine examples of old Cape architecture met with ruin and destruction, either thanks to the lack of state-mandated preservation or as a result of demolition by the government itself. The old estate of Rouwkoop in Rondebosch is a perfect example (above, in a sketch by Sir Herbert Baker).

The estate was granted in the 1660s, making it one of the earliest, and the house was built in a typically simple classical style in 1701. The masters of Rouwkoop, however, swiftly abandoned their classical refinement in favour of a more rustic approach, building additions with thatched roofs, including a jerkinhead roof to crown off the mismash yet charming arrangement. Classicism in the Cape is almost never pretentious, but on the contrary rather admirably restrained (in fact, one almost wishes its occasional baroque flourishes were more frequent). Still, when one considers Rouwkoop one gets the impression of an urbanely thinking patriarch who is succeeded by offspring who have descended into a more comfortable rustication.

The idiosyncrasy of Rouwkoop should have marked it as especially worth of preservation. In the estate’s later years as a hotel, however, it was partially burnt. Instead of undergoing the devoted restoration it deserved as an important part of the architectural heritage of the country, Rouwkoop was levelled to the ground in the 1960s and a block of apartments built on the site. It is frustrating that in the list of the many old homesteads captured by the camera of Arthur Elliott in the early twentieth century, Rouwkoop is absent. Still, for this old Cape dame of a house — with one foot in the city and one in the country — being sketched by no less than Sir Herbert Baker seems an appropriate legacy.

Twee versamelaars van suid-Asiatiese kuns het ’n subkontinentale woning in ’n Kaapstadse meenthuis geskep. Die huis was die onderwerp van ’n artikel deur Johan van Zyl in ’n onlangse uitgawe van Visi-tydskrif met hierdie foto’s van Mark Williams. Die algehele effek is ’n bietjie “over the top” vir my, maar die verleiding van die Oriënt sal nooit ophou. (Bo: ’n Paar van marmer-olifante uit Udaipur wagte by die hoofingang).

“In ’n nou keisteenstraat aan die rand van die Kaapse middestad staan ’n huis met ‘n geskiedenis” Mnr van Zyl skryf. “Toe dit in 1830 vir Britse soldate gebou is, het die branders nog digby die voordeur geklots, en nie lank daarna nie het Lady Anne Barnard hier sit en peusel aan ’n geilsoet vy wat ’n slaaf vir haar gepluk het, stellig van dieselfde boom wat nou in die huis se (nuwe) trippelvolume-glashart staan, ’n knewel met ’n vol lewe agter die blad.”

“’n Dekade of twee gelede het die reeds luisterryke geskiedenis van die huis ’n eksotiese dimensie bygekry toe twee toegewyde versamelaars — selferkende stadsjapies wat destyds in die modebedryf werksaam was — hier kom nesskop met hulle groeiende versameling Indiese oudhede.”

’n Uitsig vanaf die binnehof. Links na die deure is die ingaang na die gastekamer.

Die verhitte swembad is uitgevoer met panele van groen marmer.

Die teehuis (my gunsteling deel van die huis) kyk uit oor die binnehof. Die hang-bank het ’n omkeerbare rugleuning.

Die eetkamertafel is gedek met ’n 14-stuk eetservies, spesiaal gemaak vir die Baroda-paleis in Gujarat, met die koninklike wapenskild in goud gedruk. Die marmer in die vloer kom al die pad uit Jaisalmer in Rajasthan.

’n Statenbijbel dalk?

Die slaapkamer.

Die badkamer, met versonke marmer bad.

Die spieelraam en kandelare is uit Florence, nie Indië nie.

NOTA: Weer, ek hoop die Afrikaans-sprekers sal my arme kennis van die taal verskoon. Regstelling is baie welkom!