Sainsbury Wing contractors find 1990 letter from donor | Hacker News Reader

Sainsbury Wing contractors find 1990 letter from donor

theartnewspaper.com

359 pointsbpierre114 comments

Reminds me of Filippo Brunelleschi; in the 1400s he grokked structural mechanics far better than anyone else and protested supporting the domed ceiling of the Pazzi chapel with columns. All the engineers of the time made the case he was wrong, and such a large dome needed support — he built the columns and had them finish a few inches short of the ceiling. This was discovered many years later and has become part of architecture lore.

There's a similar story about Brunel building Maidenhead Railway Bridge, which 160 years later still has the widest, flattest brick arches in the world (if that makes sense). The authorities absolutely required him to support the arches while the rest of the bridge was built, but he refused, knowing it was safe. He eventually relented but built the supporting structure a (visible) foot too short, just to prove his point.

> Maidenhead Railway Bridge

Excuse my ignorance, but, uh… what stops the bricks from just falling down (onto peoples’ heads) when their surrounding mortar/cement fails?

A proper arch shape supports its own weight and the load above it because of its shape, without needing any mortar or cement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch

This sort of thing is brilliant. Folks put things inside walls a lot.

When doing a bathroom repair I needed a few additional tiles that would be impossible to find (was an old house). Guess what I found when we busted open the wall… the leftover tiles from when the house was built like 70 years prior! I could almost feel some tile layer from generations prior giving me a little smile and pat on the back.

The customary place to put those is in the attic, where they can be easily found.

https://alsyedconstruction.com/what-is-attic-stock-in-constr...

A) very cool to learn about that term.

B) that page must be ChatGPT authored, right?

Possibly, that page has only been around since March according to the internet archive. The domain has been around since 2020 though, predating chatgpt.

That said, it's a generic company website, the owners and their website building company will put a lot of general information and padded fluff on sites like this to try and increase SEO.

We don't have an attic, but there was some leftover floor laminate (which we used to fix bent planks due to dog accidents) and shower tiles in there. Always good to buy a bit extra for breakage and repairs.

What kind of dog accidents bend planks?

Urine, soaks into wood and warps it.

Pretty sure that was laziness, not foresight on their behalf. Builders leave a lot of trash in walls.

Not very useful to find once you've crushed up half the existing tiling.

Breaking up the 50 year old concrete pad near my house, I found old 1970s crushed beer cans buried under the concrete (the kind that predate the attached pull-tab). Kind of a neat link through time, imagining them sweating in the same sort of heat that I was.

Of course, it might also explain some of the other 'questionable' issues in the construction that I keep finding...

I think this is a case of both. For example my parents did a remodel of a 19th century house and found a bag of glass catseye marbles in the ceiling.

After many years of hiring contractors, my belief is many are drunk all day long. I have found empty hard liquor bottles on finished work sites many times. It could be because their bodies are in pain, but I have a good friend whose a painter who began his career at 16 in NYC and he said they always had a case of beer at 3pm.

They're definitely drunk and reckless in the afternoon. Here in Sydney, at least, utes (aka pickups) drive like absolute maniacs around 3pm, no doubt as they're heading to/from the pub.

I often see things like this on TV and it annoys me to no end.

Our main character drives up to a pub/bar/restaurant of some sort, sits by the counter and orders an alcoholic drink. Proceeds to drive elsewhere later as though DUI laws didn't exist.

The legal limit is not 0 in most places.

While any driving under the influence is inadvisable, most likely an adult having a single drink of the kind of beer you’d today get in a bar like that, is probably under the legal limit. Unless you weigh 120lbs or something.

As long as you’re not chugging it, drinking a 12oz 4.5% ABV beer probably won’t be over the limit.

I personally like the characters who seem not under the influence of law.

There are a lot of functioning alcoholics in the world, in all sorts of professions... there are probably a lot of people working in offices drunk most of the day.

There is probably a historical element. Bricklayers and other tradesmen have traditionally been drinking beer (or cheap, watered-down wine) at lunchtime throughout Europe for centuries, since it was cheap, refreshing, and packing calories; in the past, alcoholic contents were significantly lower-grade, so it didn't interfere dramatically with their work.

Add to it that, in the XIX century, "functioning alcoholism" was basically the norm for most men.

Obviously things are different today: alcoholic drinks are now built explicitly to get you drunk as fast as possible, and hence are increasingly incompatible with modern living and working practices.

My neighbours found loads of trash in their back yard as they were digging it up because the original job was shit too, they found a complete / intact toilet pot and things like that.

I got some pet rabbits that roam free in our yard and as they've been working on creating various burrows all over the place, they've been pulling out insane amounts of bricks and stone rubble.

Impressive on the rabbits end, pretty infuriating on the builders end.

> Folks put things inside walls a lot.

Makes me think of those old razor blade disposal slots.

They were basically a slot you shoved used single-blade razor blades to dispose of them... into the interior of the wall.

On the other hand, much nicer to the garbage men.

EDIT: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=razor+blade+wall+slot&iax=i...

That's hilarious. I suppose it's actually a good idea though a bit dangerous if/when you open up that wall.

I use something like this which is the same concept, though not integrated into my house: https://www.amazon.com/Feather-Styling-Razor-Disposal-Case/d...

Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_bottle. Casually found in walls.

Sounds like cheap anti-evil insurance.

The columns: https://atlive-wp.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uplo...

Ha, was looking for this, just read 3 articles about these columns without a picture of the layout. Resorted to a video tour, are you sure it wasn't the larger ones here? https://imgbox.com/nh1Wx8JF

That would make more sense! I was misreading this article: https://architecturetoday.co.uk/learning-from-venturi-scott-...

Thanks for the correction!

which of those are the 'two large columns in the foyer'?

I have no idea, there is a severe lack of graphic context in these articles about a specific architectural detail. In the original article it looks like people are standing by the column the letter was found in.

Yeah it's insane that they have an article about these columns and don't show which ones it is prior to showing the people next to the deconstructed one without any context of where they are located.

No, that's up on the first floor. The "unnecessary columns" were the ones in the foyer on the ground floor.

I think it's two of the five columns on the right in this image: https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/6352/6dc1/66b7/442f/b...

Note that they are absent from this render: https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/6352/6d02/da69/b45e/2...

> located on the ground floor near the former cloakroom, halfway between the street entrance and the stairs and lift leading down to the basement. Three adjacent structural columns have needed to be retained.

Why would the architect want those columns to be there? It makes absolutely no sense.

In architecture, there is this phenomenon where people may have an irrational fear of collapse. Adding (the suggestion of) redundant structural support may take away that fear.

Same reason why the WTC windows were smaller than they needed to be, to give people a sense of security.

You triggered memories of being in the south tower observation deck with my feet a foot and a half from the window and my forehead braced against the glass, staring 1200 feet straight down.

> there is this phenomenon where people may have an irrational fear of collapse.

That's most appropriately a "phobia."

> may take away that fear.

I'm also not aware of any materials that suggest a way to deal with generalized megalophobia is by adding by false lobby columns everywhere you go.

for some reason this makes me think of gauls who purportedly believed that the sky was about to fall on their heads. now i imagine them lining all their roads with tree trunks and large stones, and wait, now i got the purpose of stonehenge. ;-)

On the other hand, this comment reminds me of a project I started working on midway through, in London many years ago, demolishing and rebuilding an operational train station under a 20 storey building.

My first site meeting with the contractors we were standing across the street and looking at the massive new columns they installed on the side street holding the transfer beams for the building above. And I am not saying anything looking, just looking at the structurals and back at the building and counting the columns. Not wanting to make a fool of myself, but there was no way of avoiding it, but there was one more column on the structural drawings than on the building.

So I mentioned it, and the head contractor goes pale and cancels the meeting. The next time I went to site there was an extra column. Redundancy is not just there for phobias and earthquakes.

London Bridge?

Architects' whimsy doesn't always "make sense" from a practical standpoint but often has some kind of reasoning behind it. In this case it's right there in the article - for purely aesthetic reasons, to invoke the sense of entering an underground "crypt" sort of space when the real treasures (the artworks themselves) lie on a floor above. Makes a little more sense when you know what the article doesn't obviously state, that the whole extension uses a lot of pastiche of ancient Egyptian style, Tutankhamen's tomb and all that, and that the street level entrance is lower than the original main entrance of the National Gallery itself.

It's disappointing to see you being downvoted for asking a genuine question. Such silly downvoting is pointless, counterproductive to conversation, and needs to stop.

That first link is spot on. Looking at the third image in the article, they are standing next to the destroyed column, and it is clearly one of the columns you indicated.

https://cdn.sanity.io/images/cxgd3urn/production/0a733d1463e...

Oh wow (having never been to the museum) I was picturing much classier looking columns. Those are terrible and Lord Sainsbury was absolutely correct.

The guy was right, but as a donor surely someone there could have just instructed the architect not to add them in.

Here on one side of the argument is a rich guy who's giving you millions, and on the other a glorified hired hand who's looking to be expressive or whatever. Money talks, usually, I'm surprised how the architect got away with this one back in the day.

If you hire a world famous architect and then start micromanaging their design they will walk away from the project and publicly tell everyone it’s going to be shit. They don’t want to be associated with something that is not their design; it’s bad for their brand.

This reminds me of the letter in the pond https://thatcanadiangirl.co.uk/2008/05/30/the-letter-in-the-...

How do I set up Git to thank future generations for removing code I regret checking in?

Git hooks? https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks

Add a server side hook listening for the change

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36327382/git-precommit-h...

If I know I’m writing the code under protest or to deal with a bug in a library or elsewhere in the system, I put it in the commit message, and set up the commits so the worst change can be reverted by itself.

Essentially here’s the reason we “had” to do this. Subtext: here is my blessing to revert this when it’s not necessary anymore.

In a way it’s my Chekov’s Gun. Load the weapon, leave it lying around and wait for the third act.

Ah, the antidote to Chesterton's Fence.

I sometimes make a test that will go red with an "X has changed, now you must do Y" message.

This is easily, without a doubt, the most British thing I've ever seen. Glorious.

    // TODO: evil hack!! refactor this

// if you've found this comment oh god i'm so sorry

    // TODO: Print this code out and burn it.

In case people miss the back story, this is "the carbuncle" which prince (now king) charles disliked immensely.

here's a recent story about the work to add this entry

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/nov/06/nationa...

So, it seems like the architect died in 2018, and Sainsbury in 2022. This could all have been extremely awkward if they'd done the work a few years earlier...

I'd like to think they'd have just had a laugh about it.

Perhaps they'd use it as the foundation to support a new friendship with each other /weak architecture joke

Or maybe it would turn out that the false columns were actually structurally significant to their friendship, which would subsequently fall apart.

Yeah, I can't imagine an argument where this was the compromise was a particularly bitter one.

I'm sure that the donor made his opinion known given that he went to the trouble of leaving a letter.

Learning from Las Vegas is Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's seminal work and the ideas drove their work. In a nutshell, buildings are either ducks or decorated sheds. [0] Their clients hired them to design decorated sheds and that is why there were non-structural columns.

That doesn't mean the columns did not have a purpose. Columns can create points that organize spatial experience. Columns are cultural iconography (e.g. the Parthenon vs Johnson Wax).

There are certain ironies in the fine article:

1. The criticism of the non-structural columns for non-functionality in the context of an art museum.

2. If Venturi and Scott Brown had designed a duck (very common among museum commissions) removing the columns would have been difficult or impossible [1].

For context, Charles Windsor's architectural opinions are contrary not just to the ideas of Venturi and Scott Brown but to the aesthetics of the last 150 years.

[0]: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/lessons-sin-city-arch...

[1]: Architects with functional dogma will incorporate structural columns into their designs to achieve iconography and spatial organization because structural use justifies their inclusion.

Surely that's an inherent false dichotomy. The mere utterance of "decorated shed" implies the existence of an undecorated shed, where nothing lacks structural purpose.

>The criticism of the non-structural columns for non-functionality in the context of an art museum.

The letter reads as if the columns are criticized not for lacking structural purpose, but rather for being unnecessary obstructions. "We [will] live to regret our accepting this detail of his design." That would have to be because the columns are either ugly or a hindrance.

Because they are sheds, most sheds are undecorated. They are unremaked upon for the same reason.

But to be clear, Venturi and Scott Brown’s distinction is in the context of architectural practice. Learning from Las Vegas started as a studio in Harvard’s GSD. The radical idea was looking at actual buildings built for ordinary reasons in ordinary ways…the radical idea was valuing the study from contemporary vernacular architecture.

It seems, then, that Venturi and Scott turned out to be like the torpedo fish. That the columns should confuse and disorient the visitor as if entering a crypt.

Wright had the reverse problem. He didn’t want structural elements where nature and physics demanded them. So his stuff sort of falls apart.

The last factoid in the tour of his house was how he removed a load bearing wall from his sister’s house and did not replace it.

That whole tour was supposed to be for Wright fans but it just made me loathe him with every fiber of my core. Can you tell I’m an applied sciences person?

There are lots of reasons to dislike Wright and though his house has historical significance, it is not among the works I find interesting enough to recommend…for me, his houses don’t resonate because they reflect lifestyles I dont identify with.

His more public work is another matter. I was struck by the color of the sky against the blue roof the first time I passed Marin County Civic Center from the highway. And Florida Southern in Lakeland is spectacularly good.

They weren't criticized for simply existing without purpose. They were criticized for blocking the view of multiple points of interest and confusing navigation.

Thanks for this, I've never thought about it that way before. I've never liked cosmetic structural-looking parts, but I've never thought about the fact that had the architect been instructed to have no cosmetic parts, they might have been included as structural parts anyway, making them impossible to remove!

> Columns are cultural iconography (e.g. the Parthenon vs Johnson Wax).

Flashbacks to every McMansion I ever had a client at. It's always gotta have columns. Just jammed in. No sense, no style, no awareness of the form, just "put a column there for no reason."

Columns used to represent something that was _difficult_ to build and place and often carried artwork and detail of their own. The days of them being iconographic lobby structure are long gone.

> Columns can create points that organize spatial experience.

These columns are ugly, do not match their surroundings, and are sat right in the middle of a transition that has no point in being divided. They're also sat in a pair side by side in what is possibly the worst arrangement of column I've seen yet.

> had designed a duck (very common among museum commissions) removing the columns would have been difficult or impossible [1].

This is a wing on the campus of an already existing historic building. Which itself has traditional columns. In an appropriate and iconographic style. I'm with the author, the wing's columns are gaudy and completely misplaced.

I don't understand all the ins and outs of UK Historic designations, but Wikipedia asserts the Sainsbury Wing is a listed structure. Venturi and Scott Brown got the commission over Richard Rogers perhaps in part because Charles Windsor called Rogers' design "a monstrous carbuncle."

The columns have been there for thirty years and one of the learnings in Learning from Las Vegas is designing for that kind of lifespan is a reasonable architectural practice (thirty years is a typical mortgage term in the US). I think it is particularly relevant that the columns are in an ancillary space. Foyers get reconfigured every time a building program changes (e.g. signage and graphics as shows come and go). Now that Elizabeth Windsor is dead, it is ok to change the design she dedicated.

a wing on the campus of an already existing historic building. Which itself has traditional columns. In an appropriate and iconographic style.

Or it's kitsch. Beloved kitsch, but kitsch nontheless. Villa Rotunda was centuries old when the National Museum used its domestic idiom for public purpose and Palladio had already looked back a millennium for the Villa Rotunda’s kitsch back then. The original building made the same claims as those McMansions you hate. Or the Caesar's Palace Venturi and Scott Brown wrote about.

> contrary not just to the ideas of Venturi and Scott Brown but to the aesthetics of the last 150 years.

I have a half-developed theory that the reason NIMBY and excessive use of listed building conservation are so popular is that most people don't like the aesthetics of postwar architecture. They not unreasonably assume that anything new will be ugly and/or user-hostile and campaign against it.

(London managed the extreme of user-hostile architecture, a building that could set random onlookers on fire https://londonist.com/london/history/walkie-talkie-death-ray )

I also think the "decorated shed" category is unnecessarily dismissive of good decoration. St. Pancras station, famously saved by John Betjeman, count as a "decorated shed" by this categorization.

The point made isn't that the architect should have build a duck, it's that the decor they picked for the shed was inadvisable.

I bet the architect knew

The whole Architectural Uprising movement sort of started in 1984 when the young Prince Charles gave a speech at the Royal Institute of British Architects 150th anniversary gala evening. During his speech, the prince said that a proposed new modernist extension to the National Gallery was ugly. Or to be more precise, he called it a carbuncle in the face of a dear old friend.

The Venturi columns seems to lack entasis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entasis

Notice the supermarket company still had a Telex number in 1990.

Even though they had likely possessed a fax machine for quite some time already.

Telex was still pretty big in the UK in 1990...

If you have working telex, fax isn't an upgrade.

The fact that telex was immensely faster, lower bandwidth, operated on terrible PSTN networks (not regular telephone networks) with absurdly low quality, could work internationally with no special hand-off equipment or special fax lines being required, and had multicast and store-and-forward built-in to the protocol and had an image printer protocol extension that was superior in quality to fax and again, required no special equipment for international transmission, could work even when the mains electricity was down (phones and telexes were on separate networks), teleprinters could be powered directly from the telex connection, could work over low bandwidth ham radio connections, and is still in use today in certain parts of the world where it is critical the information gets through, there's a reason that a lot of companies still used the telex well into the early part of the 21st century.

Not meant as a explaining type of response, merely as a "this is an interesting piece of useless information."

I worked at companies that had telex in the mid-to-late 1990s. They were the preferred method for some overseas communications.

I note that if future generations had decided the columns were great and should stay the letter would never have been found.

if they’re smart they’ll keep the letter in the inevitable case architectural fashion reverses itself 40 years from now.

This might be the most British thing I've ever heard of

This is brilliant!

I always leave stuff for future remodelers or archeologists when I do remodeling or building.

Mostly coins, I throw a few in the concrete mix or inside walls for future generations to discover.

It’s always a treat to find long forgotten artifacts when remodeling old houses.

A little treat for people working on something I built 40 or 400 years in the future.

I think he was probably right, an adornment.

"Stone-columning" is the new "bikeshedding".

So funny. The perfect passive aggressive told you so ever.

This might be the most passive aggressive thing I have ever heard. England truly elevates passive aggression to art form

EDIT: Someone downvoted me, so I should say I grew up in England until I was 14 so I'm allowed to say this! Downvoting itself is a form of passive aggression

A true pillar of passive-aggression /joke

Or a false one

Good one!

In that case you might enjoy „DON’T MAKE FUN OF RENOWNED DAN BROWN“: https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-make-f...

This is classic, and just might be my favorite book review of all time.

> They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man.

I find myself regularly thinking about this sentence

> He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.

Haha classic

> paced the bedroom, using the feet located at the ends of his two legs to propel him forwards

Oh, that's great!

For someone unfamiliar with Dan Brown, is there a reason for this? Is he high-strung/sensitive about his books/reviews?

i think it's more that he fills his books with a ton of filler. could probably reduce the books by 1/3 and lose nothing of interest/value

Thanks for that - five minutes well spent!

Had a quick peek at the first couple of paragraphs, here.

And now, I want to go back and reread some of that turgid text!

Big discussion a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36818501

“Spectacular,” morbidly obese retiree tomcam replied to the renowned Hacker News poster Mr Buddy Casino. “I nearly peed myself, it was so hilarious. Thanks a million!”

I BELIEVE THAT THE ABOVE FLAMEBAIT IS A MISTAKE OF THE AUTHOR AND THAT WE WOULD LIVE TO REGRET OUR ACCEPTING THIS COMMENT

I'm from the UK and I took it as a compliment.

They should amend Sainsbury's tombstone to say: "as passive-aggressive in death as he was in life".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com