Club saved by last-minute architectural theories

What a rollercoaster of a week it was. Our original speaker for this month's meeting was Matthew Howard, with an address entitled Berlin—It Will Blow Your Breath Away' (The reference to Berlin is a running gag connected with the monthly online NSC pub quizzes, and there is also a reference, to the popular song Take My Breath Away from 1986 by the group Berlin.)

However, we were then threatened with both a rail strike and a tube strike for the day in question, meaning that few people would have been able to make it in; Matthew was determined not to give his talk by live video link, as we did during lockdown, so he decided to postpone to a later date. In the end, however, the tube strike was called off, but by that stage Mr Howard had made other plans. So at the last minute Luca Jellinek kindly jumped in with a talk entitled Life and Complexity in Architecture. Nevertheless, the rail strike meant that we were still thin on the ground—thanks to the eight people who made it in!

Luca has given us previous talks about architecture, and indeed has another coming up later this year. On this occasion he was presenting a digest of the theories of Nikos Salingaros, who developed a system to try and quantify a building's architectural merits by awarding points for such things as symmetry, the use of curves or rectilinear elements, the use of colour, or the presence of unexpected elements to jar the viewer out of complacency. I'm probably doing the whole thing a disservice by misrepresenting it, as it was quite rarified, but jolly fascinating too.

Many thanks to Luca for putting that together at such short notice. You can see a video of the talk on our YouTube channel at youtu.be/TKM8F2tBXh4 and you can see a few more snaps from the evening at https://www.flickr.com/photos/sheridanclub/albums/72177720311714377.