Astragal
Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art, gave the annual lecture and was brilliant. He reviewed the intertwined stories of films by Fritz Lang and Stanley Kubrick, and the scientists who were involved in the German bomb and rocket programme who subsequently went to America, notably Werner von Braun. But he began with another German ÚmigrÚ to the US who had spent time in Britain, and whose friends hosted a grand RIBA dinner to mark his departure from our shores.The man was Walter Gropius, who was off to Harvard; the dinner in March 1937.The menu made one long for a return to the '30s: oysters, turtle soup, Scotch salmon, Aylesbury duckling, and iced nectarines.
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