Peter Palumbo, Baron Palumbo
Peter Garth Palumbo, Baron Palumbo ( born July 20, 1935) is a property developer, art collector and architecture connoisseur as well as a Member of the House of Lords.
Biography
School time
Palumbo is the son of Rudolph Palumbo and his wife Elsie. He went to the Scaitcliffe elementary school in Surrey, and then on Eton College and Worcester College, Oxford, where he graduated with a Master of Arts in Law.
Family
Palumbo married Denia Wigram in 1959, and got her a son and two daughters. They divorced in 1977. After Denia Wigram had died in 1986, he married Hayat Mroue, a daughter of the Lebanese newspaper publisher camel Mroue, with whom he had one son and two daughters.
His children from his first marriage alienated at an early age by her father. In 1994, his son Jamie Palumbo launched together with his sister Annabella Adams a lawsuit in which he claimed that his father had the foundation for the family fortune embezzled, who had been by his grandfather Rudolph, a successful property developer, furnished. In 1997 Peter Palumbo resigned as trustee and new trustee appointed to manage the Familienanvermögen. In 2010 began a new process in relation with another family foundation, this time with Annabella Adams and her younger sister Laura Tikoo.
Art and Architecture
In 1972 he bought, designed by Mies van der Rohe Farnsworth House, has also acquired designer furniture by Mies van der Rohe for the Palumbo. He expanded the grounds of the house by buying adjacent land and undertook known sculptors such as Anthony Caro and Richard Serra, to create works of art for the site. Palumbo sold the property in 2003 to a group of Mies van der Rohe enthusiasts. Palumbo also owns Kentuck Knob, a private house by Frank Lloyd Wright in the mountains east of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and had for a while Le Corbusier's Maisons Jaoul in Neuilly -sur -Seine, near Paris.
Palumbo was from 1978 to 1985 and a trustee of the Tate Gallery from 1986 to 1987 Chairman of the Tate Foundation. He formerly served as a trustee for the Whitechapel Art Gallery and is a trustee of the Natural History Museum and Chairman of the Trustees of the Serpentine Gallery. Margaret Thatcher appointed him from 1988 to 1993 as Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain.
In 1994, Palumbo had the Mappin & Webb building in London demolish and erected in its place No. 1 Poultry, which was opened by Margaret Thatcher. He was also the former chancellor of the University of Portsmouth and the chairman of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery. He was also in the Board of Trustees of The Architecture Foundation. Palumbo is the chairman of the jury of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Palumbo led the repairs of St. Stephen Walbrook Church in London, a building designed by Sir Christopher Wren, which had been damaged during an air raid in World War II. The sculptor Henry Moore was commissioned by Palumbo, produce a white stone altar for the church. The former rector of St. Stephen Walbrook church, Dr. Chad Varah, was also the chaplain of the family.
Kentuck Knob
Policy
Margareth Thatcher appointed him on 4 February 1991 as Baron Palumbo of Walbrook in the City of London, after the area around St. Stephen Walbrook for life peer.
Social life
Palumbo was a polo team partner of Prince Charles, and the two were friends, until the prince in 1984 Palumbo's plan publicly criticized to build an unrealized design by Mies van der Rohe near St. Paul 's Cathedral, which he described as " a glass stump, the better would fit to Chicago " designated. He is also the godfather of Prince Andrew's daughter, Princess Beatrice.