BUILDING APPRAISAL

摘要

There's a photograph of the nave of Nicholas Hawksmoor's Christ Church, Spitalfields that sticks in my mind like few others. Taken by Bill Toomey in 1974, the photograph shows not the pristinely restored interior familiar to anyone entering the church today, but a scene of dilapidation, something akin to a Roman ruin. Despite the stacks of old mattresses, piles of newspapers and bits of old broken pew, we see an architectural space that even after years of neglect and mistreatment still bears its characteristic strikingly Baroque grandeur.