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Beverly Bernstein obituary

The Sheet — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:36:15 +0000

My friend and former colleague Beverly Bernstein, who has died aged 72, moved to London from New York with her husband, David, in 1964, intending to spend a year or so in the UK. Instead they stayed and made a significant contribution to architectural education, social housing and development planning around the world.

Beverly's appointment, in her early 20s, to the role of senior registrar at the Architectural Association School coincided with the end of a turbulent period in the AA's history. She became part of the selection process for a new principal, John Lloyd, and was the right person for the new registrar's role. She combined creative management with sound financial sense and the ability to form a young, responsive and fun-loving administrative team. Her reform of the AA's organisation was tested both when negotiations went on for two years on the merger of the AA School with Imperial College, and when they failed, as the AA continued its independent path.

In 1970 she left the AA to follow her development-planning interests, working with Colin Buchanan and Partners and Land Use Consultants. By chance rather than design, she specialised in the development planning of islands and had success in the Seychelles, Malta, the Channel Islands and Saudi Arabia. She edited Habitat International, Housing Review and The Works of Charles Abrams. Together with David Bernstein and David Levitt, she had a significant effect on social housing, helping to create the modern housing association movement and, in 1968, Circle 33 Housing Trust.

She was born Beverly Joan Liden in New York, the daughter of an executive of A&P Stores. She read labour economics at Cornell University and studied European literature under Vladimir Nabokov. She became an economic researcher for the US Conference Board and then the British Institute of Management in London. She married David in 1962.

Beverly was awarded an MPhil in town planning from University College London in 1974 and became a British subject in 1988. In retirement she needed her tennis-playing prowess to counter the efforts of being a restaurant critic of the Hampstead and Highgate Express.

David survives her.

Central Saint Martins: Inside the art factory

The Sheet — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:05:29 +0000

Its entrance is a restored granary, its main thoroughfare a vaulted street. But are Central Saint Martins students happy with their spectacular new home? One term in, Jonathan Glancey finds out

'I was so disappointed," says Carol Breen, a student of communication design at Central Saint Martins college. She's talking about the London institution's decision to leave its old premises, scattered around Soho and beyond, and relocate to King's Cross, a part of the city famous for trains and, well, more trains. "I thought it would be quite sterile," says Breen, "but I have to say, the building is beautiful."

The area, however, although certainly dramatic, could never be described as beautiful – and right now it's anything but peaceful. The college is reached via an unspectacular new bridge over the Regent's Canal; but, instead of the sound of gently lapping waters, there is the pounding of pneumatic drills, the thrum of heavy plant machinery, the sound of digging, lifting, thumping and dropping. Join all the students scurrying across Saint Martins' public square – still very much under construction and so vast it's like a stone prairie – and you start to wonder why one of the world's most highly regarded art and design colleges would ever choose King's Cross at its new home.

Here, 67 acres of former railway lands are slowly being conjured into a newly habitable stretch of city that one day will boast a full complement of shops, flats, offices, cafes, restaurants and performance venues, with Central Saint Martins at its heart. Given that the college used to be housed in a jumble of buildings spread across central London, with its boundless daytime and after-dark attractions, it is hardly surprising that many students (and tutors) found the idea of upping sticks to the former King's Cross Goods Yard questionable and even upsetting.

But there are plenty of compensations, not least the chance to study in a piece of contemporary industrial architecture with great presence. Once through the forbidding gateway – formed by Lewis Cubitt's restored 1852 granary building, a brick and iron colossus whose upper floors house a library – you find yourself in a huge lobby facing a massive enclosed street. This is 110 metres long and 12 metres wide with, 20 metres above your head, a translucent vaulted roof: it's a dramatic and powerful space, set between three-storey ranges of studios framed by two Great Northern Railway goods and grain stores. The sheer scale of it all is wholly unexpected – as if a stretch of street as long and wide as Oxford Street had been roofed over within a building.

"When we won the competition to design a new Central Saint Martins in 2002, the plan was for a new 11-storey block in Holborn," says Paul Williams of Stanton Williams, a practice responsible for some highly crafted and lovingly finished modern designs, from the Millennium Seed Bank in West Sussex to shops for Issey Miyake in London. "But with all the space here, there was no need to build upwards."

Space is certainly the dominant feature. One side of the cavernous entrance lobby leads to art galleries, as yet empty; the other to what will be a strip of shops, cafes and places of entertainment that Argent, the developer of the King's Cross site, hopes to keep as chain-free as possible. And straight ahead is a row of shiny turnstiles that stop the public at the point where the internal street begins.

Look through from here and you see students slowly making sense of the vast architectural canvas enveloping them. Squatting on the floor made of thousands of tiny timber blocks, lying on benches, tapping away at laptops, talking together inside and outside a vast refectory, they seem to be perched like fledglings on some kind of ultra-modern rockface. There is such a feeling of space, of coming together, especially with so many bridges linking the two sides – and this is the whole point of the building. As Breen says: "It allows us to get a picture of the whole college. It's good to be in closer contact with students from different courses."

Khedidja Benniche, an architecture student, enjoys feeling so exposed: "I find being a guinea pig very empowering. I find working in the street or on the balconies inspirational, plus the openness helps. You always see if tutors or friends are passing – although the acoustics are an issue. Perhaps the architects overlooked this."

These sort of imperfections were, however, part of the plan, it seems. "It's still a big warehouse really," explains Williams. "As architects, we've pulled back to allow students and staff to stamp their own identity on the building. So it's a little raw. We think it's up to the various departments here to test the potential of the building. It's utterly unresolved in that sense."

Studios, for just about every creative discipline you can think of, rise up on either side of the street, reached by lifts and factory-like stairs. With all those plain concrete floors, all those rough and ready timber partitions, plus the exposed ductwork, the sewing machines, lathes and looms, it feels a bit like a 19th-century Manchester mill brought up to date. Each studio is tinted and enlivened by paintings, sculptures, clothes, prints, videos – and, of course, students.

"I denounce him before you! Arrest him!" barks a young man dressed in 17th-century French garb. I've sneaked into a rehearsal room: I think it's Molière's The Misanthrope. But drama students and set designers can also get their hands on a fully equipped theatre, a studio theatre and a further set of rehearsal rooms cantilevered out over a lobby bar and set behind a great translucent screen. At night, anyone walking past on the outside will see shadows of the young actors striking poses behind the glass. What's more, the lighting gantries have disabled access – not something you can say of many theatres.

It does seem astonishing, but even when you have tramped through acres of studios, the building just keeps on going. Here, at its far northern end, are lecture theatres. I peep inside. A talk is in progress: "Bohemia in London – Fashioning Artistic Identity." In a central seat sits an upright young man in a pair of sail-like, calf-length black cotton trousers, his head of tightly drawn hair crowned with a top-knot finished in traditional Japanese style. I don't know if he's there to listen to the lecture or to illustrate it.

"What you get here," says Williams, "is architecture as a kind of interchange. I like to think that, whereas in the 19th century this was a place where grain from Lincolnshire connected with the railways and the canal, now ideas are interchanging here between students from all over the world." The statistics do bear this out: 53% of the college's 4,000 students are from the EU (including Britain, of course), with 47% from the rest of the world. I can't resist mentioning the cheap and cheerless red-legged chairs staggered along the internal street. "I winced when I first saw those," admits Williams. "We really have to look for something else when there's some spare money."

That's the Pompidou spirit

Heading back to the main entrance, I visit the beautiful library in the granary building, its many bookstacks squeezed between iron columns painted a lovely deep red. Beneath timber joists, students leaf through books and magazines while enjoying – and hopefully being inspired by – views out to the architectural fantasia of St Pancras. The walls are marked with the remnants of bold Victorian numerals to identify what were originally grain chutes but are now windows. Phil Baines, the college's professor of typography, has used this lettering as the basis for the distinctive typeface that features throughout the building – although such is the clarity of Stanton Williams's plan, there is little need for signs.

Just before I leave, I look back at the monumental spaces the architects have created. Here is a rugged yet heroic place, a fusion of modern design and 19th-century industry that uses space in a way that's reminiscent of Tate Modern. It reminds me, too, of the Pompidou Centre. Posters of that great Paris building, also designed to provide endless amounts of flexible space where anything might happen, are pinned up in the college's architecture department. It's no great surprise to find that Stanton was a member of the Pompidou design team back in the early 1970s: its spirit lives on in this raw, powerful place.

"We see each other all the time, everywhere, which is good," says Andrea da Costa, a textile design student. "You can have a peek into what students of other disciplines, such as industrial design and jewellery, are up to. Fashion and textiles are now on the same floor, sharing workshops, mannequins, sewing machines – and inspiration. The best part is definitely that we are finally on one campus. The students are united – and getting to know each other."

Jonathan Glancey

Central Saint Martins opens its doors – in pictures

The Sheet — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 09:53:20 +0000

The gleaming new building in King's Cross, London, has opened for student enrolment. Designed by the architect Paul Williams, the art college complex will host about 600 students and is at the heart of the regeneration of what was a run-down area

Central Saint Martins opens its doors – in pictures

The Sheet — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 09:53:20 +0000

John Bancroft obituary

The Sheet — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 13:33:26 +0000

Architect of the brutalist landmark Pimlico school in central London

Sometimes a single building becomes the focus for an architect's endeavours and reputation. For John Bancroft, who has died aged 82, that building was Pimlico school. Not only did Bancroft design and see this striking landmark of the 1960s through to completion, he also waged an unremitting and lonely struggle for more than a decade to save his cherished creation from destruction, to no ultimate avail.

Pimlico was political from the start. A monument to the comprehensive schooling policies of the Inner London Education Authority and the architectural vagaries of the Greater London council, it was imposed in 1967–70 on a razed and open urban block in the heart of Tory Westminster. A little earlier, and a school in a tower block might have faced off against the surrounding stucco terraces. But by the mid-60s the experts knew what children could do in and to lifts. So Bancroft, the GLC's inhouse job architect, opted for a walk-up building of four storeys only, linear and compact, with a stepped section to maximise daylight. The lowest storey was sunk to the levels of the former townhouse basements. Out of this pit, like a creature in a zoo, grew the concrete-and-glass school, glaring at the rectangle of streets all round. Boxy projecting classrooms with canted glazing, supposedly self-cleaning, completed the brutalist effect of provocation.

Unluckily for Bancroft, Pimlico school was out of date when it opened. Educational ideas change fast, and he had been handed an outdated brief. The bigger spaces worked well, but the classrooms were inflexibly shaped and grouped, while the double-height concourse that was the school's heart was never put to full use after the departure of the enthusiastic first headteacher, Ken Green. Worse, the heating and cooling system was rapidly vandalised, and no lasting solution to the extreme solar gain in the classrooms could be found.

Pimlico soon earned itself a reputation, especially in music and drama, but did so despite its remarkable building, not because of it. When Westminster council, casting greedy eyes upon the site, decided in 1995 to redevelop half of it with luxury flats and create a smaller school on the other half under a PFI scheme, the idea proved hard to combat. Bancroft, by then long retired but always a doughty campaigner, summoned up influential architectural allies and saw the first scheme off, maintaining that simple changes could renew the school. But he was hamstrung by his inability to get Pimlico listed, ministers taking the expedient view that inherent design faults impaired its architectural value. The last remnants of Pimlico school disappeared this year in favour of a faceless substitute.

Bancroft was born in London and brought up in Nottingham. His civil-servant father was an amateur painter and also collected books, a passion which John fully inherited. He started as a draughtsman in a brewery, where someone noticed his talent and persuaded his father to pay for his training at Nottingham University. After national service at Chatham in Kent, he worked for the local borough council there before moving in 1954 to Crawley Development Corporation, in Sussex.

His ambitions took off only when he joined the schools division of the London county council's architects' department in 1957. There, John caused amusement by wearing a smock at the drawing board, but proved his credentials with designs for Elfrida Rathbone (now Haymerle) school, in Peckham, and an extension to Philippa Fawcett college (now Dunraven school), in Streatham. After Pimlico, he was shunted into an administrative role in the housing division, and retired early in 1980.

Though loyal to the public service and collective ethic, Bancroft was at heart an individualist who regarded his calling as a high art with spiritual aims. Critical of most architecture of his day, as early as 1973 he announced, "I am a Victorian at heart." True to his word, he was active in the Victorian Society. Under his leadership a clique called the Dinosaur Five gingered up the GLC in 1979 to oppose a plan by the Natural History Museum to destroy the side galleries of their Grade I-listed building. The campaign's climax was a cake baked in the shape of the museum, from which Spike Milligan cut the threatened galleries before the attendant press. An alternative scheme devised by Bancroft helped save them.

During his retirement he was involved in the restorations of HMS Warrior, then at Hartlepool and now at Portsmouth, and of the SS Great Britain at Bristol. He also designed premises for Howes' Bookshop at Hastings, the source of many acquisitions decking his walls at Haywards Heath in Sussex.

John was a gravel-voiced character with streaks of grit and obstinacy but liberal views and a saving sense of humour. He is survived by his fourth wife, Janet, and by a daughter, Sarah, from his second marriage.

• John Bancroft, architect, born 28 October 1928; died 29 August 2011

Andrew Saint

The conversation: Architecture – modernism v traditionalism

The Sheet — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 12:51:30 +0000

Is there an establishment bias against traditional architecture? Modernist Michael Taylor talks pastiche and passion with traditionalist Robert Adam

The war between traditional and modernist architects flared up again this week after Paul Finch, chairman of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, praised the fact that modernists had prevailed in bids to create Olympic buildings. Robert Adam, a member of the Traditional Architecture Group, and Michael Taylor, a senior partner of Hopkins Architects, the firm that has finished the Olympic velodrome, met to discuss architecture, Marcus Vitruvius and half-timbering, with Lanre Bakare in the middle.

Robert Adam: The prejudice towards traditionalists is rather like sexism. It's just in the culture. If you're in the profession, that's just what you do. When you're delivering the prejudice you don't really notice it, but if you're on the receiving end of it, then it's a problem.

Michael Taylor: Underlying that is the slightly strange notion that only one style or approach should prevail. That goes way back. You hear stories about people who supported Le Corbusier fighting with people who supported Mies van der Rohe.

RA: Some people are so passionate about what they do they cannot separate their personal preference from what is good. I've known students who were not let on to courses because they've worked for me or who were told they'll fail a course if they carry on with a traditional style. To get through an architectural college pursuing traditionalism is extremely unlikely.

MT: It's particularly odd when there is a shortlist for a competition, something like an Oxbridge college, and you have a list which encompasses a range of styles and you think, "Are you really going to look at them on their merits or have you already made your mind up about what kind of building you want?"

RA: Most traditionalist architects know there is no point going in for competitions if they are going to be judged by other architects. Then the whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are planning guidelines for local councils which specifically say "pastiche" will not be favoured over good modern design.

Lanre Bakare: Should modernity be preferred precisely because it is innovative and forward thinking?

MT: You've got to look to the root of the issue, really. I wouldn't say you shouldn't have neo-classical buildings or that children shouldn't learn Latin or Greek in schools. By definition every building which is built today has to be a contemporary building. What I'm more interested in is the consistency of thought which goes through that process. For instance, if you got [the Roman writer, architect and engineer] Vitruvius back here now, his core values of commodity, firmness and delight are still absolutely essential to everything we do. Yet would he expect you to be working in blocks of stone and pediments? Well, no, I don't think so. People are benefiting from cars, aeroplanes and other modern technology, and so to take the appearance and facades of your architecture as one separate element which should make a very clear and literal quotation back to history seems to be inconsistent. And I think people struggle with that.

RA: I think only architects struggle with that. Most people don't have a problem with a Ferrari in the drive and a Georgian house behind it.

MT: Let's agree vast parts of our cities are covered in very bland modern buildings with too much glass and steel. People like interesting materials, Vitruvian values, things based on human scale and a sense of place. I don't think modernism does away with any of those things. The way the traditionalist groups talk about modernism is as though it is a form that is a derivation of the international style, but I would argue the more progressive modernism does take on board context, scale and materials, and includes those in a modern way. I don't think you have any choice but to accept your contemporary status. My challenge to you is: why don't you embrace those challenges, but without explicit quotation from the past?

RA: In a way that's the key point – the direct quotation from the past. Modernism quotes from its own past, and in the end it is a tradition as well.

MT: In terms of an architectural language, surely with everything that's at our fingertips today – we have such a huge amount of materials to choose from, and computers to help us – why do we not take the materials and opportunities we have and build a sensitive and responsive modernism out of that?

RA: Take the modernism out of that and I agree with you. I think evolving is fine but I don't think saying, "I have something new at my disposal and therefore I should use it regardles" is right.

MT: So how do you prevent your buildings from being skin deep? If they are built with steel or concrete frames and use the technology we have available, how do you stop your familiar-looking classical architecture from being just a skin on the outside of the building? For many people, and for me, that is deeply unsatisfactory.

RA: I think this disappointment only comes from architects and others who have this structural, rationalist view of it. If people want to feel comfortable in their environment and need some reference to the past to do that, then I don't have a problem with it. I remember speaking to a woman about the appearance of half-timbering. She said she knew it wasn't the real thing, but for her it was a souvenir of something she liked. That is important, and I've never forgotten it.

MT: There are some buildings where there will be common ground – for example, the works of Brunel, or Crystal Palace. I'm sure you would see classical references, and I would see great engineering, incredible innovation and three-dimensional satisfaction. I just think architecture is a complete three-dimensional experience, and you should go beyond your souvenirs on the facade and look at the entire depth of experience.

RA: I do agree with that, actually. The thing I disagree with most is that you become frozen out because people don't believe it is possible for a traditionalist to adapt. I believe there are examples which show that is not the case.

MT: Anyone would recognise the problems with modernism and see values in traditionalism which they like, but the problem is traditionalism is fixed and isn't something that people think is moving forward. The direct quotation is the problem I have with it. People can point out the failings of modern architecture, but the answer is not to go back in time, pick a moment and transport it to the here and now.

Lanre Bakare

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Sticks and stones: can architects be built in the classroom?

The Sheet — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 16:06:22 +0000

The government wants your advice on rebuilding the cultural curriculum. So how would you nurture the Frank Lloyd Wrights of the future?

Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the greatest architects of the 20th century, learned the beginnings of his craft by playing with wooden building blocks. Many other architects did, too. But Wright was one of the very few architects who spoke thoughtfully, throughout his life, about childhood. Many architects since have been embarrassed by their youthful ways, and have presented themselves as fully fledged artists and professionals mature beyond their years.

And yet, one of the big problems in Britain – a country infamous for its visual illiteracy, or so say outsiders – is that architecture isn't taught to children, not much in the home, and much less at school. What an all-embracing discipline it is, though, for teachers and pupils alike: a fusion of art, maths, geometry, geography, physics, technology, politics, economics and environmental concerns.

So it is encouraging to see the government taking architectural education seriously. Ed Vaizey, the culture minister, has asked Darren Henley, managing director of Classic FM, to lead a review of cultural education. In launching the review, Vaizey stressed the point that all young people should have opportunities to take part in performance and visual arts and learn about Britain's cultural, architectural and film heritage.

Working with the Museums Association, Henley is asking anyone interested in his review to make submissions here by 20 May about how best to expand the cultural curriculum. If you are interested in nurturing an understanding of architecture in up-and-coming generations, send in your suggestions: the government might just act on them.

So how should an understanding and appreciation of architecture be approached in schools? Building blocks aside, how can we nurture not just the Frank Lloyd Wrights of the future but a public who will push these budding architects, rather than sniping from the sidelines that all modern buildings are terrible?

Children are naturally interested in architecture. Give them a stack of paper and ask them to draw a house, or ask them to build a sandcastle, and they will be very happy. They will enjoy making houses out of cardboard boxes, twigs, leaves, mud or stones. These creative skills should be encouraged beyond early education, because children have an innate understanding of the idea of shelter and dwellings, and they know how to make the buildings they create special. Architecture is itself a game, a high game of playing with forms (along with geometries, tricks of light and, of course, plans), and the greatest of all architects have never ceased to play; their sense of invention has been as fecund as a child's.

Teaching architectural interpretations of history is also a good jumping-off point. If you can interpret a building, of whatever place or era, you can read history. Children revel in tales of Egyptian tombs, pyramids, palaces, castles and magical homes: it is only a short gap between these delights, these fantasies and the whole world of architecture.

An appreciation of architecture doesn't mean that a child has to become an architect – a slow and expensive profession to enter – but it could, if only it was more widespread in Britain, make future generations feel more able to spur on, or deter, the best and worst architectural proposals, and even to commission intelligent architecture that will benefit everyone, from low-cost housing to spectacular art galleries.

Our desire to build, both to provide shelter and to celebrate who we are and what we dream of, is innate. Rather than complaining about contemporary architecture in a passive and ill-informed way, we should offer future generations the space to think how they might like to shape their world – the world of buildings that humans will always need. That might well begin, playfully, in the classroom.

Jonathan Glancey

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Leo Steinberg obituary

The Sheet — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:34:31 +0000

Art historian and critic known for his elegant investigations of Renaissance paintings

Leo Steinberg, who has died aged 90, was one of the most brilliant and original art historians of his generation. He wrote as persuasively about the great Renaissance masters as he did about Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. His best-known work was The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983).

I was lucky enough to meet Leo in 1955, and over the decades we continued to see each other – in New York, where he lived for most of his adult life, or on his visits to London. He was impatient of small talk or gossip; conversation was always about particular works of art, which he would discuss intensely. What he said was charged with a sense that art was of overwhelming importance: "anything anyone can do, painting does better".

That passionate involvement with a specific work, and the intelligence which fed it, made him not only an engrossing interlocutor but also a dazzling lecturer (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, tickets for his lectures sold out on the day they went on sale). He was invited to deliver the prestigious Mellon lectures at the National Gallery in Washington DC (1982) and the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University (1995-96).

He was a devoted teacher, concerned about his students, whose careers he followed. From 1961 to 1975, he was professor of art history at Hunter College, in New York, and then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was Benjamin Franklin professor until his retirement in 1991.

Though firmly identified with the New York art scene, Leo was born in Moscow, where his father, Isaac, a distinguished lawyer, was briefly Lenin's minister of justice. Isaac's radical views (he wanted to shut down all prisons) soon led to his dismissal and emigration to Berlin after threats of assassination.

Leo's childhood in Berlin left him with a barely noticeable German inflection to the otherwise impeccable English formed in his adolescence, since the arrival of the Nazis forced another displacement – to London. There, he finished his schooling and studied sculpture at the Slade. He moved to New York with his family soon after the end of the second world war.

In New York, he worked as a freelance writer and translator, studied philosophy and taught life drawing at Parsons school of art. He embarked on a doctoral thesis at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. His study of the diminutive and intricate Roman baroque church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, designed by Francesco Borromini, set out the formal devices employed by the architect to engage the passerby's unsuspecting attention.

While working on his thesis, Leo published criticism in arts magazines and became the most articulate spokesman of the rising New York School of painters. His early advocacy of Rauschenberg and Johns was committed but jargon-free, and he was one of the few critic-historians whose essays were eagerly read by artists for their clarity and elegance. His criticism was collected in a book of essays, Other Criteria: Confrontations with 20th-Century Art, in 1972.

But for all this involvement, he was not really acquisitive and lived rather frugally. In 2002, he donated his collection of 3,200 prints (mostly from the 16th and 17th centuries, but also works by Picasso and Matisse) to the museum of art at the University of Texas in Austin. In 1986 he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship (known as the "genius" grant).

He continued to be prolific, writing with equal enthusiasm about Pontormo and Picasso. The examination of a work was never approached on merely formal terms – although he was a painstaking analyst, always meticulous in his attention to detail, to the way brushwork was used to fragment or to mould space; he would even investigate the implications of words pasted on the printed scraps of collages (treated as abstract patterns by most art historians) in his search for clues to the artist's intention.

Leo was impatient with any criticism which merely analysed the object presented to the spectator, since what really interested him was why the artist had wanted to do it in the first place. This is the key to The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. The book is concerned with what Leo termed "ostentatio genitalium", the display of the genitals which often figured in devotional paintings or engravings of the Renaissance and which had been "tactfully overlooked for half a millennium". He argued that the prominence of Christ's genitals was a presentation of incarnational theology explicit in the sermons and pious literature of the time, in which the blood shed at the circumcision is considered the first offering of the redemptive sacrifice.

It was the embodying of an idea which historians, oscillating between prudishness and pornography, found embarrassing or far-fetched. The book was received with bemused deference at the time; however, it has recently been reprinted with an account of the controversy and has transformed our understanding of Renaissance art, while his reading was confirmed in an appendix to the book by the Jesuit theologian John O'Malley.

Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were the artists who preoccupied him in his later years; Michelangelo's sculpture of the naked Christ in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, to which the church added a loincloth, was one of the key works discussed in The Sexuality.

His book Michelangelo's Last Paintings, on the frescoes of the Conversion of St Paul and the Crucifixion of St Peter in the Cappella Paolina, in the Vatican, appeared in 1975. In 2001, he published Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper, a subtle re-examination of the most famous of Renaissance frescoes, in which he pointed to the combining of the forewarning of betrayal and the institution of the Eucharist which followed it.

When I visited him last year – we both knew we might not meet again – he dismissed the matter of his health in the first few minutes, but for an hour and a half we talked of Michelangelo's Doni Tondo, a circular painting of the holy family, in the Uffizi, Florence. We discussed the affectionate embrace of the figures, and the naked youths who people its background. He was writing an extended essay on the painting and thought that he would leave it unfinished, a fragment.

Leo married Dorothy Seiberling in 1962; the marriage ended in divorce. For more than 40 years, he was much helped by a devoted assistant, Sheila Schwartz. He is survived by his nephews and nieces.

• Zalman Lev ("Leo") Steinberg, art historian, born 9 July 1920; died 13 March 2011

• This article was amended on 13 April 2011. The original stated that Leo Steinberg had also been married to Phoebe Lloyd, and that he was helped by Sheila Schwartz 'in his later years'. These points have been corrected.

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Architects do matter, Mr Gove

The Sheet — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 00:09:41 +0000

The education secretary claims architects have 'creamed off' money that could have gone to teachers. It's time he opened his eyes to the far-reaching benefits of a beautifully designed school

If Michael Gove were a building, he would leak. He would crack and crumble on faulty foundations. He would be windy, but also overheat. Behind a pretentious facade, he would be shoddy in design and execution.

So far, the secretary of state for education has had to apologise for the hasty and inaccurate way he announced the cancellation of school building projects, and been told by a judge that his failure to consult was "so unfair as to amount to an abuse of power". He keeps giving not-quite-true information to Parliament, for example that a college in Doncaster, a pilot project of the government, took an impressively short 10 weeks to procure. It actually took 22 weeks.

On 14 February he told the House of Commons that "it's a scandal… millions of pounds were spent on consultants" on the design of new schools. "One individual, in one year, made more than £1m as a result of his endeavours." This might be an impressive fact, were it not that he is referring to a case in Birmingham in which the sum was £700,000, was paid over four years and covered the work of five advisers at different times, as part of a programme of more than 80 schools, costing more than £1 billion.

Yet Gove presses on, seemingly untroubled by evidence, common sense or decency, with his campaign to lower the quality of the buildings in which the nation's children are taught. He has repeatedly attacked architects for "creaming off" money that could be better spent on teaching. He recently smirked to a conference that "we won't be getting any award-winning architects" to design new schools, "because no one in this room is here to make architects richer". The message is that a well-designed environment is an irrelevance: teaching is all that matters.

There has been talk that schools can be churned out in bulk, the way Tesco builds its supermarket or McDonald's its outlets. To dot the country with standardised McSchools is not obviously consistent with the government's localism agenda, or its interest in a "happiness index", but never mind. One contractor, Willmott Dixon, has punted some suggestions as to what such schools might look like. These look plausible, if drab, on unencumbered, level sites. But, like Daleks encountering a staircase, they need help when they hit a slope, or a constrained urban site, or the individual needs of particular schools. Standardisation has its uses, but it needs design to do well.

To Gove's rejection of design, Phil Blinston, executive head of the Minster School in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, says: "It's bizarre. I just don't get it. Why wouldn't we want to factor in everything architects have learned from other buildings? Youngsters are growing up visually articulate. Why would they not expect to see that in school? Why would you expect them to lower their standards?"

The Minster School has been using an award-winning building for four years, designed by architects Penoyre & Prasad. Blinston says: "Our results were good and continued to rise with the new building. Our behaviour has improved." It has good acoustics and natural light, which "have a profound effect on the emotional state of children, which helps their learning".

Its circulation works smoothly, without "one-way systems, keep left signs or massive numbers of rules". Hidden spaces "where vulnerable kids fear to tread" are designed out, so you don't need "people standing guard". It is designed so that locals can use the building in evenings and school holidays, so this public asset is used to the full.

"I'm not talking about fancy architecture," he says – and a limited budget means the school has a simple-going-on-basic look – "but it's about enabling people to feel good. Good design produces a relaxed community. If we say education is important, we can demonstrate that by putting children in decent environments." Buildings cannot do a teacher's job, in other words, but they can make good teaching better and bad teaching less so.

To which it might be added that, if environment were irrelevant to learning, then Eton College, the alma mater of many of the present government, would sell its agreeable slab of Berkshire real estate and move to low-cost units in a business park in Slough.

Gove is very much right about one thing, which is that the last government's £55bn Building Schools for the Future programme, which aimed to rebuild or renew nearly every secondary school in the country, was a monstrously wasteful and cumbersome process, which often led to very poorly designed schools. The "creaming off", however, was not being done by architects, who were, instead, among the first to point out the faults of the programme.

The main beneficiaries were the financial institutions and their advisers who funded the programme, who will earn handsome returns and bonuses for years to come at the taxpayers' expense. They are followed by the big construction companies, several of which were fined in 2008 by the Office of Fair Trading for breach of competition law – ie price-fixing – on a range of project types. They were, to coin a phrase, creaming off the funds of clients, including local authorities.

This unfortunate blemish has not impeded the same companies from securing huge education contracts, and it would be stretching credulity to think that price-fixing never now happens in school building. Yet there has been no ministerial slap. Rather, Gove's architect-free vision of the future places ever-greater reliance on the men with the hard hats, the handshakes and the plausible paperwork.

There are also the lawyers who expensively write and rewrite the byzantine contracts, at hourly rates several times greater than architects', and project managers, who do less, and less useful work than architects for a similar total cost. Worst of all was the waste inherent in BSF's processes: it cost contractors up to £3m to bid for a package of schools. They would expect to win one in three, meaning that they would want to recover £9m from successful bids just to cover their bidding costs.

Gove's department is unable to produce the figures on which he makes his assertions, saying that "detailed data on individual projects was held locally to minimise the regulatory burden on projects and project reporting". It is, however, possible to find out that architects' fees have been between 2.5% and 5% of construction cost. If capital costs other than construction are included, this can drop to well under 2% of the total. If, as happened under BSF, future running costs are included in the contract, architects' fees become a tiny proportion. Most architects working on schools will tell you that it pays less well than almost any other kind of work and is sometimes loss-making. One says that schools work "is threatening to put us out of business".

In other words, in the torrents of waste surrounding school building, good architects are value for money. If budgets get tighter, we will need their skills to make the most of them. If, as seems likely, future work is more about refurbishment rather than glamorous new buildings, architects' adaptability will help. If there is more standardisation of new buildings, it needs design intelligence to do it well. Gove seems to think that architects are all bow-tied ponces longing only to inflict their fantasies on the public. They could be his greatest allies.

Rowan Moore

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Why are we designing factory schools? | Sarah Wigglesworth

The Sheet — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 14:54:58 +0000

Michael Gove's rejection of decent architecture shows he knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing

At the recent free schools conference, Michael Gove said: "We won't be getting Richard Rogers to design your school. We won't be getting any 'award-winning architects' to design it, because no one … is here to make architects richer." The Con-Dems don't mind bankers getting richer, but demonise architects as freeloaders. They say the government supports localism, yet head teachers have been encouraged to choose standardised school designs. Once again, localism is exposed as a meaningless term that allows the Tories to attack Labour's record and pick on an easily vilified group.

Design is often thought of as a commodity produced only by a celebrity designer. In fact, it touches every aspect of our lives. Just like good management systems, good design helps processes run more smoothly and encourages participation and engagement by shaping space, light and sensations. Good architecture creates buildings that are loved by their occupants, simple to use and economical to run and maintain. In schools, pupils feel valued, more alert and more willing to learn. Staff feel energised, inspired and respected. The run-down Hackney Downs School used to be a sink school. Its replacement, Richard Rogers' Mossbourne Academy, is now home to astonishing results in terms of educational achievement and pupil behaviour. That's no coincidence.

Sadly, the government doesn't seem to regard the built environment as affecting our wellbeing. It is well documented that people who live in substandard housing suffer more illness and die earlier than the privileged. People recover faster in well-designed hospitals, tourists flock to attractive places and City firms' sleek, well-designed offices function more efficiently and attract talent to the Square Mile. If these are factsare true, then how can schools defy this obvious logic?

Having attended elite schools with superb facilities, our free school advocates seem unable to accept that school buildings have any effect on those that teach and learn in them. With little experience of state schools and scant knowledge of how buildings are actually produced, they are hasty in their judgments of the architect's role.

In the architect-free Con-Dem future, we can use catalogue designs to build cheap, under-sized state schools occupied on a rotational basis. People will care less about quality and more about profit margins and "shareholder value". But the factory schools of the future will have little regard for the appropriateness of the design to the school's educational aspirations – why should they? We are told that this is the teachers' responsibility. But the question remains: why would a teacher want to teach in such an environment? What message does it send to our kids? Both would soon know their place: they don't matter. How can this possibly aid learning?

In pursuing the current policy we could easily see another generation of disastrous school buildings destined to be rebuilt in 20 years' time. Professional expertise helps, and Gove should be seeking good design in any form, especially now that people are free to set up their own schools with no prior knowledge of how to do it.

There is nothing inherently more expensive about good design: buildings are complex and need experts to design them, and design fees are a tiny proportion of construction budgets. Building Schools for the Future was poor value for money not because architects' fees were high, but because of wasteful, cumbersome and bureaucratic procedures. It did create work for architects, but they are only the most visible part of a raft of consultants, contractors and managers. The focus should be on cutting that bureaucracy and focusing on what brings real value and innovation – an equation that has architectural design at its centre.

In the hands of talented architects and good clients, design can make places more pleasant to be in, improve absenteeism and ill-health and most importantly, make communities proud. These things are hard to quantify, but Gove, the zealot of localist ideology seeking a soft target to blame, counts the cost of everything yet understands the value of nothing. He should remember that design is at the heart of the problems he attempts to address.

Sarah Wigglesworth

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