'The Alteration'
Monthly Discoveries — March 2026
Some interesting work I’ve come across recently.
Architecture
Heinz Bienefeld (1926-1995)
I must have seen a picture or two of Bienefeld’s work before but never really studied it. A mid-century modern architect in Germany, specialising in churches and private houses in and around Cologne; he comes from the same generation as the Smithsons — a little older than the Foster – Rogers – Siza - Piano cohort but not much. He died relatively young and although well-known in Germany doesn’t have much of a reputation elsewhere.
Bienefeld worked for both Domenikus and Gottfried Böhm — prolific and stylistically eclectic Rheinish church architects, before setting up on his own. The younger Böhm is best known for his ‘magic mountain’ pilgrimage church at Neviges.
The Bienefeld œuvre explores a limited set of profound formal ideas. The houses often feature an interpretation of the Roman atrium or courtyard, alongside other elements of the domus type. The churches are harder to categorise — mixing historicist elements alongside modernist pragmatism and free or expressionist plan forms.
In all cases, the complex whole is simplified and reduced through the consistent use of masonry. This is often formally minimal but intricately textured, with header courses, arches, bands of masonry and rubble stone and bricks of every imaginable orientation and format. The overall effect is like a tapestry or a well worn rug, with spots of colour and banded patterns phasing in and out.
I’m sure Bienefeld must be a point of reference for a few contemporary architects; e.g. the elliptical courtyard in his Jeff Stein House reminds me a lot of this Stephen Taylor design. The absurdly deep flat arch on his Kühnen house would be worth another outing for someone.
There is a good online gallery at Hic Arquitectura, a ‘Local Heroes’ publication by Peter Meijer and Office Winhov, and this article (in German but translatable).
Philip Webb — Jolwynds (1874)
Not exactly a recent discovery but one I’ve been thinking about again. An unusual plan, with a radiating arm hinging around a central square block. The main block is hollow, with an octagonal triple-height hall, a first floor arched gallery, and a second floor (presumably servant) level behind round internal windows.
Webb excels at this kind of spatial layering: the best examples that survive, e.g. the billiard room at Standen, are very enjoyable. The light-borrowing oculi in this proposal appear in other works although never in such numbers.
The house was demolished in the early 1930s and replaced with a distinctly second-rate International Style design by Oliver Hill. Some images are online — an unarguable case of trading down. The story is sufficiently reminiscent of the rebuilding of the Beste-Chetwynde house in Decline and Fall to make me suspect some kind of influence, but the timings actually don’t work.
There are no photos of the finished interior unfortunately — only one under construction.
Listen to the latest episode of About Buildings + Cities —
Books
Kingsley Amis — The Alteration (1976)
The powers-that-be want to cut Hubert Anvil’s balls off to preserve his beautiful voice. He’s not all that keen on the idea — but in a world where the Reformation never took place, even in 1976, it’s hard to say ‘no’ to the church.
At times this is a rather beautifully-imagined parallel universe, lushly atmospheric and full of the chatter and texture of a slower, more rustic, world. At other times, it’s a set of sardonic japes about contemporary personnages in a world of Catholic supremacy steampunk. Kipling was First Citizen of the lone American protestant preserve. Heinrich Himmler is a cardinal called Henricus. Harold Wilson is the bonhomie-dispensing, pipe-smoking Pope (I expect an audience at the time would have recognised him, although I didn’t).
When Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle cropped up I found myself wondering just how self-referential things were about to get. Actually, it’s mostly pretty straight, and the evocation of a strange and different world — Cold War between Christendom and Turkey, European and Native Americans united in resistance to Catholic expansionism — is uppermost. I expect the fantasy of a world without electricity felt rather different within a couple of years of the Three Day Week.
It occurred to me at one point that Amis’s Catholic England is essentially Lyra’s world in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights. I always rather appreciated the concision with which Pullman spells out his alternate history (no doubt knowing that most of the audience won’t understand and don’t care). It’s all in one half-sentence: ‘When Pope John Calvin moved the papacy to Geneva…’
Ferdynand Ossendowski Beasts, Men and Gods (1922)
There is no way to explain how I came across this book without looking like a guy who spends Too Much Time On The Internet. Briefly, I read about Gooning in Agartha → I read about Agartha → I encountered this fascinating memoir, by a White Polish counterrevolutionary attempting to flee Soviet Siberia in the dying days of the Civil War.
The first third of the book reads like a Rider Haggard novel, as Ossendowski and various brothers-in-arms attempt to flee up the Yenisei river and into Mongolia. Horseback gun battles, icy river-crossings, renegade officers, Bolshevik femmes fatales and occasional wizards. Magic is performed, generally in smoke filled yurtas.
It gets a bit less engaging once Mongolia is actually attained — the complex political manoeuvring between Russian Whites and Bolshevik emigrés, Chinese forces and various Mongol leaders are convoluted and ultimately lead nowhere. The Mystery of Mysteries, the underground kingdom of Agarti, finally appears in the penultimate chapter; redoubt of the secret King of the World who will one day cleanse the world of evil, a place of reflection, in defeat.
One more thing
Fiction on Substack: I’ve been enjoying Ian Dunmore’s stories.
Thank you so much for linking to my work -- and I adore the heavy brick-masonry work. I moved into a 1940s home in Ohio partly for that exact reason. There's something undeniably tactile about true brick structures.