Robert Proctor

@rproctor.bsky.social

1245 Followers 439 Following

Architectural historian of the twentieth century.

Orange printed sign saying "LA BASILIQUE EST SOUS SURVEILLANCE VIDEO" on a grey and white veined marble pilaster.
Old stone balconies on a building with an arcade running under it, the balconies propped up with poles and wrapped with green netting, viewed between orange brasserie umbrellas in the street.
A display of colourful fridge magnets representing Annecy.
Reinforced concrete vaults and lines of skylights roofing a bus depot with red London buses in it. Photo of Stockwell bus garage of 1952 by John East.
A long modern building with concrete projecting linear elements into which brick walls have been built with vertical windows with teak frames.
A packet of LU biscuits, Le Petit Chocolat Noir.
A tiny stone houses surrounded by larger houses of c. 1820. It has a central door, two small uPVC sash windows either side, and an off-centre window above, and a there's what looks like timber door in the top left hand corner; the roof slopes down from back to front and the facade is painted white.
An old-fashioned fish and chop with plate-glass windows and blue and yellow sign saying 'Golden Plaice' at the bottom of a 3-storey terraced building of c. 1820s with sash windows.
Cover of Alison Ravetz, 'Remaking Cities', book, dark green with diagonal text in mid green and white.
A big blue double-decker bus viewed side-on showing advert pasted across it saying 'Play your part to STOP the spread' depicting a man with a face mask holding a sign saying 'Remember - only get tested if you have Covid symptoms'.
A tiny red-brick late-19th-century (possibly very early twentieth-century) pub with decorative tiled frontage in brown and green, and green-painted door and window frames, called 'Imperial Inn'.
A niche with project roof canopy containing a colourful heraldic shield relief and two sculpted putti on the side of a modern 1950s building with the street name in white letters, 'Three Cocks Lane'.
An elaborately decorated 4-storey timber house, presumably of the 1600s, next to a plain ribbed concrete facade of the 1960s.
Facade of a Georgian house, plain sash windows, with a pedimented Doric columned doorcase with severe cracks in it, held up inside with a complicated arrangement of steel props.
Photo of man in 1950s suit disappearing down a dark alley; caption saying "mystery / From the matter-of-fact pavement of the busy world we glimpse the unknown, the mystery of a city where anything could happen or exist, the noble or the sordid, genius or lunacy. This is not Withenshawe" [sic].
Text saying "c.27 linear meters".
The very tops of a row of narrow old houses viewed from a height, tall chimneys and pitched roofs visible, and the tops of the top storeys, with glimpses of wall in yellow, red brick, pink and blue. A blue sky and modern buildings just visible behind.
A dead tulip lying on the ground next to a hole where a badger has dug up the bulb and eaten it.
Eighteenth-century plaster casts of portrait busts, mainly of women, a couple of male figures, stacked in rows on three shelves, at the Accademia gallery, Florence.
Sunlight grazing across the deeply rusticated stone facade of Palazzo Gondi, Florence, with arched and square windows.
Bottom part of medieval fresco in the church of S. Miniato al Monte, Florence, showing red-clothed feet, with wooden chairs stacked underneath.
Detail from a Renaissance painting showing the bottom of a crucifixion scene where a skull is lying on its side at the foot of the cross, a lizard standing up on its teeth.
Facade of the church of S. Miniato al Monte, Florence, covered in scaffolding.
Underside of a gigantic stone arch with carved rosettes. It's not quite possible to see but there's a crag martin nest squeezed behind one of them.
Text from book saying 'Chapter Four: Hell, Utopia, and Middlesborough'.
Poster for the film La Grazia showing an old man dressed in black on the edge of a wood, depicted in cool blue tones.
Advert from a 1942 local newspaper, 'A Demonstration of the Making of Molassed Silage'.
Text saying 'Milk Files'.
Architectural plan and section drawings of a complicated house with swirly landscaping inside a rectangular boundary, the house against two sides, little monopitch roofs popping up over living spaces, captions in Italian saying what the rooms are.
Fake newspaper column headline purporting to be by Allister Heath in the Telegraph saying 'How the Marxist infiltration of Nikolaus Pevsner's Buildings of England poisoned the minds of the young'.
Fake newspaper column headline purporting to have been written by Allister Heath of the Telegraph saying 'We are sleepwalking into a totalitarian nightmare disguised as eighteenth-century landscape gardens'.
Ancient Roman triumphal arch at Aosta, Italy, with Corinthian order under a Doric entablature. Quite wrong.
Interior of semicircular St Patrick's church, Coventry, with big wedges of timber-clad roof forming slices of clerestory between them, a stained glass panel of the crucifix over the altar lit from behind, random coloured panels of green, orange, red and white forming the walls between internal butresses.
A beautiful street of historic buildings including lime-washed cottages with a Victorian church tower at the end.
A modernist church with big peaked roof and concrete window made of vertical slots, with an old-fashioned white-rendered church tower with onion dome stuck on one corner.
Detail of a brutalist concrete building with random windows, strange flanges cantilevered out over dark slots on a projecting corner, an overall texture of vertical corrugations.
Archaeologists around a circular stump of brickwork.
Part of a Victorian Gothic revival arcade at Tyntesfield House, Somerset.
Three officials walking through a barrel vaulted corridor.
Two books. Andrea Longhi and Carlo Tosco, Architettura, chiesa e società in Italia, 1948-1978. Carla Zito, Casa tra le case: Architettura di chiese a Torino durante l'episcopato del cardinale Michele Pellegrino (1965-1977).
'Needs grading: 134'
Gluten-Free-Jazz: 'By any chance do you have the source of this statement? I'm currently reading some Colin Rowe and would love to know where he writes about this specific topic!' TomLondra: 'Your source is me. He said it to me, during a conversation in Florence some time around 1996'.
Flyer image for 'Down Under Webinar: Religion and Architecture in Australia', programme - 9.00 (CET) Welcome; 9.05 Practical and Active: Australian Religious Values from the Ground Up (Professor Katharine Massam - University of Divinity); 9.50 Building Faith in Australia's Capital: The Diplomatic Mosque and Other Architectural Narratives (Dr Md Mizanur Rashid - Deakin University); 10.35 Break; 10.45 Constructing Faith in the Antipodes - The Making of the Book (Dr Lisa Marie Daunt); 11.30 End. Free. KU Leuven / KADOC. Monday 8 December 2025 at 9.00 CET (8.00 GMT).
Wall and gate in brick, flint and stone in a range of chequerboard patterns.
Complex pilasters and mouldings in brown stone around a doorcase looking up at Campion Hall, Oxford, by Lutyens.
Two soaring fluted piers of black marble looking vertically up to a coffered ceiling with decoration picked out in gold and green and a round spiky light shade.
A black and white portrait photograph of Sir Edwin Cooper as a bald old man with round glasses.
From the I newspaper: "A 2020 analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies showed that around 30 per cent of both men and women see 'negative total returns' from going to university, and one in five would be financially better off if they skipped higher education".
Part of the Circus, Bath, 18th century curved terrace of houses with classical orders, a shadow grazing it from the right, an old street lamp in the foreground.
Inane and over-polite copilot email reply draft prompted by 'no thanks, it's not my specialism'.
Oddly abstract drawing for 'Proposed Civic Centre at Croydon', modern buildings with slot windows and blank walls, a tall chimney-like object in the centre on the axis of fountains, circular lollipop trees and tall thin cypresses.
A narrow corridor lined with Ionic columns holding up a vault, culminating in a pier of a vault with doors at angles on either side.
Screenshot from Google AI asking it how many 'a's there are in 'artificial intelligence'. The answer is that "There are four 'a's in the phrase 'artificial intelligence'. The word 'artificial' has two a's, and the word 'intelligence' as two 'a's." The answer provides links to further information about these purported facts.
The word 'thingliness' in a journal article.
The word 'relationalities' underlined in red in Zotero.
17th century painting by Frans Snyders, The Poulterer's Shop, in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff. A customer holding a chicken talks to the old shopkeeper, surrounded by his wares, including partridges, a grey heron and a bittern strung up on the wall.
Corner of a Pre-Raphaelite oil painting depicting wild roses in carved gold-leaf frame of vegetation.
Rows of modern housing in Bristol harbour with boats lined up on quays.
1990s harbourside housing block, Bristol, with herring gull in foreground.
The phrase 'heritage bollards' in inverted commas.