Royal Institute of British Architects, Portland Place W1

Wren

The side elevation of the RIBA on Weymouth Street is enlivened by Sir Christopher Wren surrounded by representative figures of the Artisan, the Painter, the Sculptor and the Mechanic. They were carved by Bainbridge Copnall.

The Artisan

The Painter

The arrangement is an unconscious revelation of the way architecture works.
The Great Man is surrounded by his backup team, unnamed even when they are great artists in their own right. This has got out of hand recently, with 'starchitects' hogging the media with their team lost in obscurity.

The Mechanic

The Sculptor

Funnily enough, though, Wren himself has been suffering from the reverse effect recently with a nasty tendency for attention-seeking critics to claim that his assistant Hawksmoor was a finer architect but has been ignored by history because of his working class origins. This is pure snobbery, enabling the critic to show his superior taste by dismissing the architect everyone knows in favour of one that a tiny minority has even heard of. And it is nonsense.

Royal Institute of British Architects, Portland Place W1

The figure at the centre of the RIBA's Portland Place facade is Architectural Aspiration, by E. Bainbridge Copnal. The Architect stands in a model village with specimens of Western styles of architecture, from ancient Greek through Renaissance classical to Gothic. He looks up, shielding his eyes, looking at some magnficent dome.
Copnal also did the figures round the side, of which more anon.

Royal Institute of British Architects, Portland Place W1

The RIBA is a building with rich layers of irony.
It is both forward looking and reactionary, a simple modernist cuboid but clad in stone, and it is devoted to architecture but helps destroy one of Europe's finest architectural compositions.
Even the sculpture looks rather old-fashioned - international modernism already had its hands firmly round the throat of the architectural establishment in 1932 when the competition to build it was won by Guy Wornum. Fortunately, the carved figures are of the highest quality.
Nottingham-born James Woodford did the man and woman that stand on pylons on either side of the front door with its magnificent bronze doors, also by Woodford. They look admiringly up at the central figure of Architectural Aspiration, of which more later.