Open House Weekend (well Saturday morning)

I always try to take advantage of Open House Weekend in London and explore some buildings that the public rarely if ever gets the chance to see.

However, with work and other commitments, this was a somewhat truncated trip.

My first stop was in New Burlington Street for an architect led tour of a new office development. So far so boring, but this wasn't a new building, but an old one, and indeed not one old building but two, or at least two listed facades. So the interest is in what was done to make the place fit a new office development. A nice enough atrium, but a little bland.

More impressive were the empty floor plates. They had created large open spaces. Of course sadly its the emptiness that impressed, and when let they will be filled with desks and subdivided. But nice to see in its gleaming state

The striking parts were the windows. On the side that turned into a small side street there were "curved windows". Not curved glass, but just slanted windows, so that the office bends outwards in the middle like a corpulent office worker. The fat middle is a way of extending the floor plate of the middle floor offices, rather like the way Tudor houses jutted out over the road on their upper floors. You get more space than the footing below. And better light on the upper floors (with worse below of course).

The other interesting window feature you can just see at the far end in the photo above is the way that these windows seem cut off at the ceiling. They aren't - the ceiling of the floor doesn't reach quite to the window edges. The problem is that the old windows for the facade didn't leave room for all the services that need to be packed between floors, and also as I said above, this wasn't one building but two so the windows outside are not even all at the same level across the floor.

 The bulge can be seen better here.

 And here is the main street facade. The office space carries right across from the triple bay you can see below to the smaller windows on the right. Inside it looks seamless.

The problem with all the above is just that one was trying too hard to produce big open one size floors for offices to maximise rental, but frankly it would have been nicer to have two buildings. But no doubt less profitable. Some things just don't adapt all that well, however ingenious one is.

From their I took a fairly lengthy walk across to Belgrave Square, a square dotted with embassies. Its a beautiful Square laid out in Greek Revival style in the 1820s by Thomas Cubitt with a dozen houses on each side and 4 mansions filling in the corners. Unfortunately building work in the middle prevented a good view of the whole.

 My first visit was the most interesting of the day, top the Romanian Embassy. Most surprising in that they were playing a video of a documentary of the end of the War and the part played by King Michael, a cousin of Prince Philip, and the last monarch in the Balkans before being expelled by the Soviet puppet government.Anyway, that was fascinating, including his visit to England for the Royal Wedding of our current queen, on which visit he met his future wife.

He was persuaded to abdicate because the Russian puppet, a coarse ex-banker (communists don't tend to be too worried about the stock from which they get their rulers provided they are subservient to their masters and sufficiently ruthless) announced to the King that he had a thousand young Romanians in prison and they would all be shot if he didn't sign up and ship out. Nice chaps.

It seems Churchill had sold out the Romanians (possibly having little choice) in a deal whereby the Soviets would abandon the Greek communists in return for the Allies giving Stalin a free reign in Romania. So starting a long period of suffering until the fall of the Iron Curtain and death of Ceausescu, expelled from his newly built palaces (funny how communists love luxurious palaces which appear necessary for the well-being of the ordinary worker. Essentially they seem to mirror royalty except a lot less caring for their citizens.)

Anyway, so that was really interesting - a history lesson. But one could also admire the fabric of the house itself. The architect of this, and the other terraces, was one George Basevi (whom I had never previously heard of) a pupil of Sir John Soane,(who obviously I did know of).

Its all very tastefully maintained, having been leased to the Romanian Foreign Ministry in 1936

One of the four corner mansions

 I also popped into the Italian Cultural Institute on the same square. Unfortunately the interior has not been so well maintained. It hosed a rather bad exhibition, a modern(ish) library and offices. Only seemed to have one presentable "grand" room.

Thence I headed back to Leicester Square to have a sushi lunch with my friend Thibault (to sort of celebrate my birthday) before heading our separate ways for the rest of the day. My walk to Warren Street took me past this interesting view of the Post Office Tower.