Thread by @OSaumarezSmith

Nominated by @gilliandarley for 10 buildings I love.

1. Laon Cathedral - here I am sitting in empty nave. Laon wears the then-new Gothic style with such graceful & intellectual ease I wondered if all later Gothic a debasement. I'm not normally into perfection - but here it is.

2. Weltenburg Abbey. I wonder what the Benedictine monks were up to when they commissioned the Asam brothers to concoct the showbiz-rococco church, with histrionic George, dragon & princess. A building so jolly my cheeks hurt with smiling *&* there is a beer garden right outside.

3. The Wedgwood Memorial Institute in Burslem (1863-9), a sumptuous Victorian Venetian concoction of sculpture, red bricks, & terracotta friezes. It is currently empty & needs a new use - and like a lot of the beautiful things in Stoke pulls at my heartstrings.

4. Penllech (1840). Increadibly hard to pick amongst many magical @friendschurches for my 10 (its a terrific organisation - do join). Penllech is on the Llŷn Peninsula & you have to go through a farm 1st. The interior is bright & calm. It is a cliche but centuries dissolve here.

5. Francis Pym's thrilling brutalist extension (1964-72) to the classical Ulster Museum (1924-9). Mark Girouard described it as 'like one of those incomplete Michelangelo statues in which a highly finished torso emerges out of a block of rough hewn marble.’ I have a model of it.

6. The delightful, slightly wonky, 9th century abbey gatehouse at Lorsch.

This was a highlight of @EmilyGuerry & my tour of Germany two summers ago, in which we saw 16 cathedrals, 15 Abbey churches, & 13 UNESCO world heritage sites in 9 days.

7. The Clarendon Building, Oxford. Hawksmoor is an important architect for me; my childhood window had a view of St Anne's Limehouse. But thinking on a summer day about sitting with friends at the KA & looking across to this banger:

8. Place Bonaventure (1964-7) in Montreal. This is *the* great sixties megastructure - a vast corduroy concrete block, not easy to photograph (so less famous than Habitat) - with a train line running through it, and a dreamlike sequence of interior spaces of piranesian vastness.

9. Santa Maria e San Donato in Murano. I teach a term in Venice, & taking @WarwickHoA students here, with its dazzling floor of 1140, one of my favourite things - the east end with its sweet colonettes & embedded stones is more elaborate, I think, because it faces the canal.

10. Gillespie Kidd & Coia's St Bride's, East Kilbride. I love this building. Asked Isi Metzstein whether he was influenced by Amsterdam School (how did I not include one of those!), & he said no, there is only so much you can do with bricks. This does a lot with *just* bricks.

Sad to come to the end of this - so many left. Can I have 10 from @EmilyGuerry (who drove me to many of the above), @WalkerArchHist, @MorleyRA, @sundaegirl, @tontita00, @EwanMHarrison, @IntrWr, @Grindrod, @MunicipalDreams, @PEMcCullough, @Rosamund_Lil, @izzy_kent, @TMOWilkinson?

11. I've enjoyed this too much - might go to a 100.

Ledoux's Arc et Senans - built as the Royal Saltworks, so essentially its an 18th century factory. Its a really spooky place but I get a big kick out of Ledoux's punchily austere, inventively rusticated classicism.

12. Great Coxwell Barn, built around 1295. A secular cathedral. Luckily not too national trustified - I like how you just walk in, & the interior always a surprise as one's eyes adjust to the vast, intricate space.

13. This chapel built into a megalithic dolmen in Alentejo.

14. Sverre Fehn’s tree pierced Nordic pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 1962. I've enjoyed teaching this building, its conceptually so simple: two walls, a corner pier, and then this marvellous open trabeated roof. I'd love to see his museum in Hamar.

15. Our Lady Star of the Sea and St Winefride, 1933. A delightful oddity in Amlwch, Anglesey. Built by Giuseppe Rinvolucri, an Italian engineer living in Conway.

16. Described by Ian Nairn as ‘the scream you wake up on at the end of a nightmare’, R.L. Roumieu’s rogue gothic masterpiece, 1868. It is somehow right that this pungent panoply of gables was built as the depot for a Worcestershire vinegar-makers.

17. I recently fell very hard for Puglian Romanesque, & its hard to pick which of the fabulous sequence of cathedrals in that part of the world to highlight, so instead here is the Abbazia di Santa Maria a Cerrate - a perfect distillation of their virtues on a charming scale.

18. Closer to home, the Trinity Almshouses (1695), in Stepney, a delectable & heartening group built for "28 decay’d Masters & Commanders of Ships or ye Widows of such", which I walk pass most days.

19. Langley Chapel, Shropshire, with wheat fields coming right up to the door, and a poignant early-17th century dissenting interior.

20. Howell Killick Partridge & Amis's SCR for Downing College, Cambridge (1967-9) - described by Gavin Stamp as 'a strange brutalist primitive hut', I think it an exceptionally urbane & witty response to fitting in.

I wrote about it for @C20Society: jstor.org/stable/24644446

21. Joseph Bonomi's St James', Great Packington (1789), an estate church alone amongst parkland in North Warwickshire, with a highly idiosyncratic interior with fabulously chonky, yet inexplicably isolated, doric columns, amongst a very odd paint job - could be by Robert Venturi.

22. Leeds Town Hall, by the wonderfully named Cuthbert Brodrick (1858). I saw Opera North's Ring Cycle here a few years ago, & the building is as epically theatrical as the opera.

23. Triumphal arch in Catania, Sicily (1768), with thumping black and white rustication. The whole of Catania has a similar atmosphere of tough grandeur.

24. The brilliantly yellow Great Arthur House by Chamberlin Powell & Bon, part of the Golden Lane Estate, the Barbican's jubilantly colourful 1950s baby brother. My Masters was on Golden Lane & I think it a superb, ebullient piece of city making. I wish I could afford a flat.

25. The iron & glass facade of Arighi Bianchi in Macclesfield (1882-3). I nearly killed myself to get this photo as they built a dual carriageway hard up against it in the seventies. Tempting to read as proto-Modernist. Is it a myth that there is an identical version in Belgium?

26. Hildesheim Cathedral was (unforgivably) badly bombed in the war, but thankfully the bronze doors, commissioned by Bishop Bernward in 1015, survive - each half was the result of a single cast, using the lost wax process, and weigh 1.85 tonnes.

27. My photos don't capture the scale of the Teatro Farnese in Parma (1618) - which gives a sense of what the huge amount of temporary Renaissance architecture must have been like - a nice combination of stately festivity, but with a DIY aspect too & lots of clever illusion.

28. Open air school, Amsterdam, by Duiker and Bijvoet (1927), a building as a breath of fresh air. I’m currently trying to envision how I’m going to conduct seminars next term & the health-giving stack of outdoor class rooms might have found its moment again...

29. The patterned facade of the chiesa di Santa Maria del Casale, poignantly located in a desolate industrial estate near Brindisi airport.

30. St Mark’s, Brithdir, by Henry Wilson, 1895-8, another magical @friendschurches church. It’s hard to find, deep in overgrowth, so the interior hits like a revelation; the arts & crafts at its most inventive & spatially complex. Unseen windows make the beaten copper altar glow.

31. A wonderful jumble at Hook Norton’s tower brewery (1898-1900). Good beer too, & it is still powered by the original steam engine. 🍻

32. Chic Berthold Lubetkin refreshment pavilion (1934-7) - part of a delightfully playful landscape of modernist objet at Dudley Zoo.