Sam Jacob is principal of Sam Jacob Studio for architecture and design, a practice whose work ranges from urban design through architecture, design and art to curatorial projects. Sam is interested in how architecture and design can take ideas and make them real. Inspired by context, his projects try to embody stories, sensations and feelings in space, form and materials. His projects are striking yet also are full of familiar references, creating places and spaces with character and surprising beauty. Past projects have included nightclubs, social housing, community centres, parks, TV studios and exhibitions. Recent projects include a new mixed use building in Hoxton, offices for Art Review, exhibition designs for Somerset House and the V&A’s Cromwell Road entrance. Current projects include the National Collection Centre and the William Morris Gallery. He has been a professor of architecture at UIC since 2011 and has taught at the University of Hong Kong, Yale, Karlsruhe HfG, ABK Stuttgart, TU Vienna and the AA. His work has been shown at institutions including the Art Institute Chicago, the MAK, the V&A, and the Venice Biennale, where he was co-curator of the British Pavilion in 2016. He is a columnist for Art Review and is the author of Make It Real, Architecture as Enactment (Strelka Press, 2012). Previously, Sam was a director of FAT Architecture.
Good evening thank you all for coming um I want to warmly welcome everyone who came from outside like the Vienna audience and faculty un students um it’s amazing to have a full house so there were were times like where this was um online only and afterwards it was a bit difficult to
To um make people come and this is fantastic um I want to warmly welcome you s Jacob so we kick off this liver with um our new professor taking over studio uh three from H Rashid and I just want to um give a big thank you to Maya
Oswal who is the curator of our sver lecture series and I would also like to thank um us the twi for taking care of this place and the drinks later so I wish you um a wonderful evening and I’m very much looking forward to your lecture thank you thank you very much
Welcome everyone it’s really great to see such a full Square finally uh I want to welcome you to the first lecture of this year’s Li lecture series called tempor realities it is a constructive notion and um in this case the word my computer is really trying desperately to correct
It uh and inste my beloved machine is offering me the the only one alternative so maybe I need to perform some more some more training on it uh and it proposes the term temporality so okay let’s start with that temporality as a term got domesticated by different contexts from philosophy physics all the
Way to social sciences but in its most General usage it does refer to something being bombed to time it is not the same thing as time but related to it and just as Central to our conception of the world it also refer refers to the fundamental Human Experience of time in which IT
Addresses the subjective sense of past present and future that we all experience hence temporality can be considered as integral to our perception of reality as it shapes how we understand the unfolding of events and our place within it so rather in the manner of creating operative histories
Which unfold within the present or the collapse of the classical dimensions of past present and future altogether whether from the phenomenological standpoint of an individual experience uh of the world or as registers of material transformations of um micro and mro stes linear nonlinear or recurring being in
Sync or being out of time from real time to deep time this L series is set up as a collection of six acts six creative acts which Propel this so-called Tempo realities so to act one tonight it is my pleasure to introduce Sam Jacob the principal of Sam Jacob Studio whose work
Spend scales from objects to architecture Urban spaces Master plans and strategies born in London educated at the University of Cambridge and daa he entered the architectural scene with a design Collective called fat fat architecture the abbreviation for fashion architecture taste and in 2014 he went solo since then he built a new
Mixed use building in hon offices for art review exhibition designs for Somerset house and the B BNA Cornwell road entrance current projects include the National College Center and the William Morris gallery he just sted internationally from E uh to AA over Germany all the way
To Hong Kong and his work has been shown at institution institutions including the Art Institute Chicago the mck the DNA and the V Bali where he was curating the British Pavilion in 2016 St Jacob’s work has had a significant uh significant influence also on the Contemporary architectural discourse particularly in the cont of
Postmodernism and pop culture references within architecture he is a columnist for art review and is the author of Make It Real architecture as an acent published by sta uh press in 2012 and to quote Amelia hinski for Jacob architecture emerged when fictions were freely recombined across time and
Space in Acts of anacronic uh uh radicalism and just in this Spirit he often moves through his talks like Doctor Who as a Time Lord using time travels and flashbacks to create unexpected episodic entanglements when moving from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to John Ruskin or josing images of Stonehenge
With spotted UFOs UFOs and the Rolling Stones at the same site hysterical realism architecture constraints and Imagination is the title of of his lecture tonight and without further Ado I’m happy to hand over to S [Applause] [Applause] Jacob thank you so much for the introduction and thanks uh to The Institute for such an amazing welcome these few days have been really fantastic and I hope the beginning of a really brilliant relationship um and I’m looking for forward to everything that that we can do that happens here and uh
Yeah that’s been great thanks so much um yeah so uh the talk is called hysterical realism and uh this was a a term that was used by a a literature critic um who was a pejorative term so kind of insight uh by the critic James Wood
And it referred to novels that he found to be absurdly elaborate in their use of characters and plots um it’s a genre that he claimed tried to tell readers this is in quotes how the world Works rather than how somebody felt about something and in I in brackets I would
Say as if that’s a bad thing so I suppose what he’s talking about is a kind of extension of magical realism another literary genre um uh and especially I suppose postmodern literature um he thought these were novels that turned fiction into social theory and he meant authors like zav
Smith like Thomas pinin Don Dillo uh these are books which are big and ambitious and he thought that this was detrimental to let’s say the realism of the novel like expecting novels to be depictions of life as it really is rather than descriptions of ideas
Concepts or the use of the novel as a form as a way to explore contemporary reality say um of course fiction is made up uh an architecture design and ities a real life yet of course they also contain fictions histories events characters that all animate the built environment
In fact we could really understand the world as a fiction that’s made real through architecture that ideas have turned into stone into concrete materials are reorganized uh in ways that these kind of abstract ideas are manifested in ways where you know you can Bang Your Head on
It or stub your toe on it that kind of real and I think sometimes it’s very difficult to understand the unreality of of the architecture of the Cities which surround us and that can be fatal because it means we can’t begin to imagine how anything could possibly be
Different and if there’s any moment where we need to imagine that things could be different it’s Now I’m going to start with a project which is based on a Don D novel uh it’s a project called the most photographed BN in America and it comes from this amazing Noel uh white noise and there’s a passage in it where the two of the characters go off to see
The most photographed bar in America which is a real place in wami and when they get there this is how d L’s uh historical realistic description of that encounter goes uh so this is the quote we drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington there were Meadows and apple orchards
White fences Trail through the rolling Fields soon the sign started appearing the most photographed Barn in America we counted five signs before we reached the site there were 40 cars and a tour bus making in the makeshift l locked we walked along a cow path to a slightly elevated spot set aside for
Viewing and photographing all the people had cameras some had tripods telephoto lenses filter kits a man in the booth sold postcards and slides pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot we stood near a Grove of trees and watched the photographers Mar maintained it for a long silence occasionally scrolling
Some notes in a little book no one sees the barn he said finally a long silence followed once you’ve seen the signs about the barn it becomes impossible to see the barn he fell silent more once more people with cameras left the elevated sight replaced by others we’re not here to capture an
Image we’re here to maintain one every photograph reinforces the aura Can You Feel It Jack an accumulation of nameless energy there was an extended silence the man in the booths of postcards and slides being here is a kind of spiritual surrender we only see what the others
See the thousands who were here in the past those who will come in the future we’ve agreed to be part of the of a collective perception it literally colors our vision a religious experience in a way like all tourism another silence ensued they are taking pictures of taking pictures he said
Now I’ll show you the most photographed m in America this is it and lots of photographs of the most photographed fun in America um I love that passage because it talks about the kind of construction of an aura of a building through the way in which it’s Medi
Through the way which it’s seen or turned into media itself and it suggests to me that there’s a much closer relationship between let’s say built reality and other kinds of perception other ways of understanding the world around this these are what images which were taken off the internet so low res pretty
Random sometimes out of focus sometimes beautiful sometimes terrible and I think we found about 300 400 of these um uh which became the start of a kind of little project about how I suppose the representation of Architecture is also a way to produce architecture so we used um uh some
Software like photogrametry is software which is the kind of stuff which can take 2D images uh into its you orbit and kind of calculate a threedimensional model from it so this is what it begins to do so it takes a picture of the barn it recognizes key moments and then it
Can extrapolate from there and work out where each photograph was taken relative to each other and and from that it can begin to reconstruct uh an image and a threedimensional form from that information so the process begins to produce things like this things which are on the one
Hand recognizable if the very very average very nice very very vacular but kind of famous because it’s because it’s the most generic in a sense the most americ most generic American Bar um but you can also see that it’s failing to describe the building what is really describing
Is the set of photographs that it’s referring to so it’s a model not of the most photograph bar in America but of the photographs of the most photographed bar in America so it’s the construction just like Jack says uh of of the image of the bar through the representations of the barn
So it’s somewhere in the glitch in the kind of inability to describe the real thing the thing which we know it should be that I feel it’s kind of revealing something about our relationship to the world around us and maybe particularly to to architecture itself as a form of of
Media these are the texture maps and then these are various like 3D prints of the model in in different states of kind of understanding what the form might be in some sense this is a a kind of example of uh a project which tries to think about the
Relationship of concept to form so one definition maybe of historical realism and one definition I understand is the is that ideas are things or the reverse that things are also ideas there’s a way of looking understanding designing making where the physical things that we do make are seen
Are somehow utterly full of significance oscillating with symbolisms and narratives and meanings which sometimes go beyond what we can control that their expressions of culture or their ways of understand understanding culture the ways of remaking culture of rewiring or short circuiting the understandings that come to us ways that
We can kind of respond to that we find ourselves subsumed by this is Al also I think thinking about objects buildings um as as things always in relation relation to context whatever that context might be in Rel ation to their era and in dialogue with the world around
Them I think it also understands objects as communicative that they oscillate like radio waves they’re full of meaning even if just like radio waves we’re don’t always sure we can tune in to exactly what they’re saying this is the ceiling in part of John s’s hand
And it’s a part which is really fasc it’s not most one of the most remarkable parts of of this very remarkable building but for me it’s a moment I love and it’s where you have the real scening so this is in his little writing office a little passage before you get into the
Spectacular part of the back with the sarcophagus and the picture gallery and so you have the real ceiling like proper architecture and then this little Skylight which is formed by part of a model from one of s’s projects and I love this moment where you see a kind of
A kind of combination of the representation like model as representation of architecture and architecture itself and at this moment you kind of look from one to the other and think hold on maybe these are not so very different after after all where the thing and the idea are kind of
Seamlessly join together into into a new uh singular thing or maybe it’s in a piece like this that uses a quote from John Ruskin the quote is a false description of the thing destroyed which is Ruskin basically kind of his attitude towards restoration he like don’t touch anything
Don’t um because it will become a false description of the thing destroyed uh this is an artifact uh which is both I guess real like a real fragment of a Roman uh jug of some description and the idea of it whole with the kind of weird formless form is B to
It or maybe it’s in a project like this The Villa runda Redux which was a fat project um where a shwar model of the Villa retunda was used as the origin for a process really about the Reconstruction or the reproduction of an idea of a piece of
Architecture um so this like you know kind of 3D Warehouse model which have been downloaded like 30,000 times was then put through a process it was made into a mold and then a cast was made from the mold so you have like the process laid out in front of you mold and cast
Positive and negative which was really I think a project about the transmission of architecture and what happens when architecture is transmitted of course the vill runda project itself which is made kind of through reconstruction in a sense references from the past reassembled into a new uh typology um but also as something which
Has itself been reproduced so many times not just by padio in his uh four books but also copies and copies and copies of copies so I think it’s exploring the idea of architecture as transmitted information translated from one state to another and I guess in the most straightforward sense there’s always a
Sense of translation of like sketch to drawing to building site to finished project but I think we can understand that sense of transmission much more in sense of a cultural disciplinary idea of how ideas or thoughts or forms or materials or space moves from moves from one state to another and what happens
When it does do that when here you can see the traces of the of the transmission are recorded and part of the display uh so in this sense yeah idea and thing thing and idea simultaneously if we can understand architecture as a form of fiction maybe a form of fiction that’s most hysterical
Or maybe architecture is the thing which happens which is not part of the brief thing which are not really asked to do but uh it’s the thing which makes it into real architecture um so maybe fiction uh sometimes hysterical is the thing which makes things real um and we can understand that
Through the lens of narrative a narrative can take many forms and I’ll talk about some of these different forms and the first one is very direct narrative as sign so we’re in Columbus Indiana in the midwest um in Columbus which is a you know famous town with um kind of uh
Whole range of modernist uh projects venturi’s fire station um Empire’s uh Library saronin churches both older and younger saronin Henry Mo uh um it’s and this all happened because of this guy win Miller and his wife uh who uh ran the Cummins uh kind of engine company
Which is a global uh Global uh concern um made a lot of money and he was his his thought was that maybe modern architecture can improve people’s lives and maybe it can even make people better people um and so he said to the city look if
You pick an architect off my list I’ll pay their fees and they can get on there and so that’s how this small town in the basically the middle of nowhere like south of uh Indianapolis has got this incredible collection of of of amazing buildings Um and it funded not just you know really statement bits of architecture and art but also other kinds of design projects so this is the Main Street Washington Street of uh of Columbus top is kind of as you know Americana signs everywhere and bottom is a designer called Alexander Girard his proposal for
How that could be managed this is back in the 50s and 60s so the idea of design becomes really kind of infus infused right through the the whole of the kind of uh yeah the idea idea of the Town expressed in so many different forms um but in that kind of modernist
Idea or American version of a modernist idea that the design architecture can improve lives it also recalls maybe other histories other histories that may be more uh American in their kind of uh uh construction histories of Ideal communities that are embedded in the idea that the US has of itself in the
Midwest of Robert Owen and the owenites in a place like this this is Robert Owen’s dream for a place called New Harmony New Harmony is real but it doesn’t look like this um but these kinds of people Ro own was not religious but he did have a a kind of idea about social
Reform he believed that you know there could be new worlds of Happiness Enlightenment and prosperity believed in education Science and Technology but he also believed in communality a communal living um and the kind of respect for the ways in which workers might might be uh kind of rewarded so kind of Proto
Socialism before the fact uh and these kinds of communities of course are part of wide range of experiments that happened across uh across the us when the Europeans were imagining this s of clean slaves this is angus’s book which talks about many of these communities really fascinating
Study of course these are happening in the imaginative European IM kind of mind um that this is a new world that there is nothing there and of course that was far from the case a Utopia for some but definitely not for others colonization disease dispossession in other words who’s Utopia Utopia
Itself is a imaginary well this is Thomas Moors the second edition you the second edition of Mo’s Utopia which is written as if it was an adventurous Journal so it’s a kind of parody of the kinds of reports which um Spanish and Portuguese adventurers or explorers were
Sending back to to to to royalty who were funding these Journeys um saying like this happened and that happened and they saw this wonderful thing so Mo’s book is a kind of very ambiguous document um it’s part joke it’s pretty ironic but it is also let’s say utopian
The word which didn’t exist before the book of course the word itself is quite ambiguous no place in the book there’s all kinds of reversals so you know Jewel TOS are not the most valuable thing they’re the least valuable thing they’re given to children to play with gold is not used
For the most important of objects it’s used for chamber Parts um and in in this second edition uh you get a map tle obviously on the left but the map is designed if you look in the right way to look like a skull it’s a kind of death
Optimism and on the right is the absolutely incredible alphabet that Thomas Moore designed and this is you can see it bit pixelated there you get the alphabet at the top and then the first sentence is translated and the alphabet is absolutely amazing it looks like it comes out of the bows or
Something it’s like triangles and circles and squares really beautiful so this was a project in the Midwest for Columbus in Indiana I mean a place that’s named after Columbus and the state named after Indians already full of optimism and moral uh kind of uh ambition but it was a project which
Tried to use signs to both tell stories but also uncover stories Robert Indiana his real name wasn’t Indiana but he was from Columbus so here is love his famous uh print turn sculpture translated in to Thomas Mo’s utopian um it was a project which looked at symbols signs and symbols so from the
Ways in which uh EUR the Europeans kind of laid out grids which would allow possession and ownership of these new territories the devices that they use to measure the equipment that they use to you know travel across the sea and Survey the land but also the kinds of you know cute
Americana that we see here um maybe there’s some kind of relationship between these different forms of communication maybe there’s also something that Echo between the arrangement the communicative possibilities uses of the of the sales on the ships that these Europeans used with the kinds of roadside Americana that’s Scot Brown and Robert
Venturi’s um analysis of Las Vegas road signes so maybe there’s something between the two maybe there’s a reason why those kinds of structures are part of the American landscape or maybe there’s ways of understanding civicness which perhaps combine these very different stories roadside more historical forms of let’s say Civic expression
Then looking at different kinds of design traditions on the left quilts very much part of a vernacular uh craft uh American tradition and on the right these are designs by Alexander J this guy who’s working hard on the U on the kind of Columbus project symbols which then kind of
Derived from all of these sources so skulls Henry Moore the monsters at the side of the map in Utopia eyes from Alexander Gerard these a Shaker drawings of uh of um uh the holy city these are gift drawings the Shakers of received in some kind of Mystic stains which then combine into different
Kinds of expression phrases from Mo Utopia this one this one reads is those of you who can’t read utopian this one says far from trouble and anxity no unequal distribution make as little wrong as possible all upon a level ease the miseries of others U and they kind of all congeal
Into these kinds of again Civic moments right so this is a uh an object which is a Weather Vein The utopian L is Point South northbest a telescope an the na the Stars which the ships use to navigate across the Atlantic banners etc etc highly legible but also illegible
Because they’re written in a language no one can possibly understand maybe there’s something funny about midwesterners walking out of their front door and suddenly feeling like this place is quite an alien in uh kind of constructed Environment it was quite a dream for me to remake Henry Moore as a neon sign um explicitly science explicitly playing with the kinds of languages and narratives and symbols to make kind of I guess like sort of Mega meta science but maybe there’s other ways in which
Narrative can play out maybe material is also a form of narrative so this is a project for the Victorian Al museum in London but this very extravagant entrance very small project as part of this very entrance so the B an applied Arts museums very similar to the to the
M um uh and it’s also a product of very specific moment in time so it’s uh it’s it’s uh clearly Victoria and Albert Museum named after queen and the uh Prince um comes out to the great exhibition as kind product of Empire one might say collections full of things
Which are maybe less dubious than the British museum but somehow still dubious but an architecture which is full of narrative it’s even got Queen Victoria’s narrative crown made in stone on the top of it but it’s got all of these kinds of figures on it you know there’s the
Figure of architecture knowledge and inspiration it has the pane in of who’s a good designer on it um so it’s a very kind of Rich it’s also one which thought about like the experience of the museum so this is at it’s kind of early Inception its director Henry Cole commissioned
Designers to make rooms for the cafe people like William moris um which I think is I mean it’s such a contemporary idea right that you don’t just look at stuff you actually experience it you make the kind of design as an active part of the the museum going experience but this is kind
Of uh late 19th century um so my job was like looking at some small bits like something to do with the entrance to help improve its environmental performance that would also help um the kind of uh internal uh environment from a conservation point of view um it was a
Project which Drew on aspects of the museum itself so kind of manifesting its Museum as often pretty much through material so this is the entrance simply made from glass tubes massive ones like kind of uh like kind of like that then a little bit smaller a little bit smaller which then
Produces a kind of weird visual effect transmission of light but also the the kind of lens effect where it distorts the movement of people through the space which is carried through to other elements in the in the kind of entrance sequence so in a sense this is like
Referring to the way in which the museum itself is organized often around materials itself so this is the glass collection so that maybe things which are exhibits can also become part of let’s say the functioning uh apparatus amature of the museum the same with Ceramics this is part of the Ceramics
Display and when we’re in the toilets we now meet some of the characters from the Ceramics collection life siiz in the cubicles an unexpected encounter with some of the kind of embedded history within the Museum’s collection itself but also materially here so this is Wedgewood uh Jasper jiah Wedgewood
One of the figures is’s on the outside of the museum um so 18th century really rather than 19th century but one of the beginnings of this sort of new industrialized uh kind of design processes and this was the kind of stuff that he produced which is still being
Made here he is holding one of his pots on the outside of the of the museum looking very Stern um so in we were working in the toilet as as you as you guessed uh no chance for changing any kind of space changing anything spatially but materially room for invention so we we
Talked to Wedgewood about collecting stuff from their production and from their seconds and waste things things which are absolutely really beautiful that you wouldn’t have to be an expert to say that’s that’s no good so we collected about two tons of this stuff started to smash it up and just is
Really beautiful the colors are amazing but it’s also all the way through so it’s not a coting it’s the stuff itself until we had a kind of aggregate of these beautiful mixes but let me show you how that happen so all all smashed up it became the kind
Of aggregate in the tro which was then line lines the uh the buffers we love this partly because it’s using a kind of you know waste material something which would otherwise go to landfill there a kind of idea of reuse there’s an idea of things you might see
Upstairs in the museum being cared for and never broken here it is all smashed up and also for it kind of you know the the the idea that you can go to the toilet the most functional of spaces and somehow encounter different reading of the museum or the Museum’s kind of
Project um as you do so other ways of thinking of narrative narrative is form we’re in baty park in London working with um school children who we sent out into the park to record different elements they saw making photographs from those photographs Made Real Models of fragments and then we
Work with them where they assembled them made drawings of them which then became Furniture which sits in a gallery which is in the middle of the park so it’s a kind of reassemblage of the landscape which is around it Barbara heworth was a table pieces of column bits of
Gothic the maybe Narrative of social infrastructure we’re in Rotterdam now the outskirts of Rotterdam making a park and a community center in place which uh has in Dutch terms kind of social issues maybe different from I guess other uh conceptions of what social issues might be it’s a project which working on a
Very tight budget very almost like a generic form of architecture kind of replayed the language of the landscape back to that landscape So within the landscape Huts which dream of becoming much more exciting Cathedral perhaps Bridges which dream of becoming houses signs which talk in a visual language rather than through
Text objects which refer both to boun of nature but Alo also to to uh highly industrialized processes communication which becomes infrastructure itself text as bridge and building which is on the one hand completely generic and on the other hand incredibly specific to that place so you can see in the
Distance the oil refinery absolutely gigantic you can see the chimneys which poke out there and at night get fire and smoke and somehow that’s reflected in the way in which the timber paneling is applied to the front of this uh fairly generic building the entrance of extravagant artificial
Trees the the incorporation of text is direct communication and a kind of rear relevation to the park itself which becomes like a freeze or a cartoon STP um which narrates essentially a vision of the character of of that place so this is really a kind of image you
Could say like a kind of almost like a stage set but a stage set which then becomes inhabitant so this is it as a wedding set up for a wedding for sports for God knows what that is submarine bicycle for different kinds of festivals where it staged quality
Actually be becomes part of the performance of the community or kind of extension of it through monkeys etc etc so in a sense this I like this image perhaps most of all you see the detrius of inhabitation and the kind of backdrop that the architecture itself represents narative is
Figure another Fat project the blue house in London this is one of our first buildings a house and an office a house and an office really direct right um at this point we were very interested in the idea of communication architecture is Media even architecture as Billboards which you can
See here on the left the building appears to be just a little bit you know like a couple of ctim thin on the other side maybe much more threedimensional but also enjoying the possibility of playing with senses of scale the ways in which a kind of theatrical performance of building
Can itself have let’s say different realities that coincide in different ways from its very flat exterior to an incredibly threedimensional interior object inside objects things you walk around things you walk through fragments of things gaps so you have this kind of difference between the flatness of the outside and a kind of
Endless uh endlessly surprising spatial interior or maybe narrative as all encompassing Ron Detra one of fat last projects a house for aics was designed with an artist of called Grayson Parry um and it came from his idea so Grayson was sort of kind of asked to come up with an idea for a
House um which he did with in a way which is completely un architectural this is a house in Grayson story built as a tribute by the husband of a woman called Julie who had been killed by a mopet delivered bring some fast food you can see judie on the top you
Can see the wheel of the moped which killed her and you can see the way in which the entire kind of fabric of the building is given over to storytelling through it ceramic kind of uh cladding but also through the ways just the interior works this is Grayson’s sculpture of judie
Herself this this is the setting duly reappearing tapestries which narrate the life of Julie wallpaper balconies a kind of intense threedimensional artwork um that’s kind of never stops telling you what it’s what it’s trying to what it’s trying to tell you also quite threedimensional in the
Way that they work so sort outside of let’s say the narrative aspect of the building there’s a spatial experience too so you have two sides one is a kind of Chapel with all of the big artworks in it and then something much more domestic at the back
A kitchen on the ground floor on the left hand side two bedrooms on the top floor and the way that those domestic moments work I think has some kind of extra narrative quality to so on the one hand when you get into the bathroom you find yourself on AIS looking out uh through
The window so you’re completely nuded looking out in perhaps the most important part of the plan but the other part of this is the bedrooms the two bedrooms have doors which lead into wardrobes and then you walk through the Wardrobe onto those balconies which project into the main
Space now one of Grayson’s thing gra Grayson’s a kind of pretty much a celebrity in the UK he started as an artist but now he makes TV shows and goes on tour he’s kind of much more of a kind of public cultural figure than just
His AR works and one of the reason that he’s famous is because he has this extravagant presence as a as a transvers CL and so I think this is one of the it was a very coverly form of you know gender playing um so not uh like the kind of arguments which
Exist maybe this wouldn’t have been possible now but he was very accepted and welcomed into the British mainstream but something about this arrangement in the plan I get back to it I think speaks maybe to that idea of performance of gender or performance in in in totality so you you come into the
Bedroom you go through the Wardrobe and then you take your place on that balcony next to Julie herself so maybe there’s something about the Wardrobe that equips you to emerge and present yourself to the world which I think is is really interesting um and a kind of another way of understanding how
You can take a series of Fairly straightforward domestic typical domestic elements and rearrange them to give ritual significance so that’s yeah that’s where you’d emerg from those two do either side of Julie herself so if a lot of these projects deal with a kind of idea of Architecture
Is language you could say almost claustrophobic certainly in the case of the last project like there’s so much narrative speaking to you all the time there’s little space for anything else how could narrative or at least certain kinds of meanings work with things without language and things before language say the
Prehistoric so neic structures like this this is man at in cor so one of the neic stone constructions that we find a lot around kind of western coast of of Europe um I’ve always been fascinated with these kinds of things I love a description of them by the uh by a guy
Called Julian cop who was for those of you who are fans of 8s Post Punk the frontman of a teardrop explodes after that he became an expert on neic structures and he claims they are they are serious mofos um but he also says that actually there’s something really important
Happening here there’s a kind of there’s a kind of Turning Point this is the moment where Society is becoming agrarian the stopping being madic and that somehow this turning of stones from Flat to Vertical is a kind of rejection of nature or kind of the most artificial thing you could do was
Take a stone from how it lays to how it shouldn’t lay so in some senses you could say this is a a kind of early expression of Architecture is something which is kind of against nature but against in so many different ways against as in next to against as in
Contrasting against as in protecting against as in anticipating resisting facing touching challenging opposing defending defying against as a de against as towards against as before against as comparison against his compensation against his contradicting against preparation against as supporting this is a a uh which is maybe the most important the near ethic sites
In England near to Stonehenge earlier than Stonehenge and it’s a whole kind of landscape Network um with a huge Stone Circle Center but all of these roots around it this is the swinden stone uh next to a road uh it used to be a gate I’ll show you a drawing of that the
Second and some more photogrammetry where we’re kind of recording the forms of these stes and to produce a replica onetoone replica of one of the very ancient new lithic stones in the setting of Milton keing which is one of the last postwar New Towns the
1970s still part of a kind of um kind of uh postwar reconstruction but right to this end right to the point where consumerism Los Angeles cars Freedom have become part of that that vision and so here is an Avery Stone thousands of years old but remade with a custom car
Spray paint finish you look at it from different directions it changes color so this is the Swindon Stone and this is the road to Swindon and you can see that it was part of a Gateway sadly one of those stones has gone missing sometime in the 18th
Century it’s no longer there and a local myth uh tells the tale that the stone crosses the road at midnight this is the swinden stone as a bean bag so now it’s nomadic folk story can actually happen as you move it around your room this is part of a exhibition
Uh just earlier this year called called against nature um Stone H is a neon floating in the space rather than heavy Stone thing which the sun cast light onto suddenly a source of light but perhaps also recalling the myths about Stone Edge the stories about Stonehenge for example that Merlin magicked it from
Islands or that he got the Giants to build it so stonehand not just as a physical historical object but stonehand was a myth which keeps reoccurring throughout the retelling of of histories but in interventions into etchings and prints of these kind of mic structures exploring their kind of formal quality suggesting different
Kinds of ritualistic use and a set of paintings uh which take oil paintings which were bought off eBay never pay more than £25 was was the rule with shapes inserted into them so black shapes and the black shapes themselves are always derived from the geometry of the frame of the edge of the
Painting So from kind of a third to a third to a middle top corner to bottom top corner to to Middle bottom so sometimes at the top they kind of think you know the paint is like on the surface of the painting by the time it hits the landscape somehow
Inserts itself into the pictorial space of of the painting you’re not quite sure how you’re supposed to read it sometimes obliterating the center of the scene this is simply the shape of the frame kind of reduced into the m but all a kind of a type of painting
Which itself derived say probably from the picturesque the picturesque as a as a as a kind of art historical um uh language and language was really to do with view could say and idealized views of nature which emerged from these earlier uh images which work with watercolors done by then Prince
Charles Prince Charles is a keen wor colist he loves to paint Landscapes mainly Landscapes that he owns for once owned a lot of Scotland likes to paint in India and he likes to paint in this way it’s quite you know amateur amateur water colorist um and these are clear objects
Placed into Prince Charles’s vision of the world remember Prince Charles had a a moment in the UK where he made a TV show in a book called a vision of Britain which is basically like modern architecture is terrible it should all be built like and built his own Small Town pound
With Leon career which has a lot of supposedly historical vernacular elements it’s very weird it’s more like being inter in history I have to say um but these are I guess these black shapes are like interruptions into that nostalgic view of Britain interruptions into being able to see things in such a
A kind of a singular way that they suggest a kind of a problem with this view of the landscape and that view of the landscape is problematic because of what it contains because of the history this is a very low resolution gaines’s painting Mr and Mrs Andrews wealthy Aristocrats here posing in their
Land but showing one of the tricks of the picturesque which is the foreground and the background merge so the invention of the the haha this device which from one side you look across and it looks like the landscape is continuing from the other side you see a big stone
Wall an obsession that the English especially have with landscape this is another Aristocrat looking at the landscape through what was called a clawed glass so a kind of black uh con concave mirror which you would look at the landscape in a reflection of and somehow that Distortion and the color
Shift uh would make it look like a painting by CLA uh a little bit like a kind of early Instagram filter you know to make it look like these kinds of paintings like Claude pan so on and they were so enamored of these kinds of paintings that they began to reform the
Landscape itself to look like these paintings this is capability brand sketch you can see what’s happening so many curves trees place as figures in the landscape the exact opposite of what have existed before in terms of aristocratic Landscapes which was French and German French and Dutch geometric uh
Uh forms of landscape you know The Gardens of aah so this is a kind of specifically English expression which is making the landscape look as if it was an ideal painting it’s fascinating partly because it’s doing a couple of things first of all it’s sort of naturalizing power it’s making power
Wealth of the aristocracy look like nature so look like it cannot be questioned looks like it has always existed and maybe on another level it’s interesting the relationship of representation to the reality of landcape that actually the painting and the landscape become the same like the model in son’s house the model ceiling
And the real ceing become become one and of course these Landscapes are only possible because of these complex webs that the British aristocracy wor Empire industrial history etc etc and the combination complex combinations of histories which then get Rewritten into the landscape a really profound transformation this is rupon from Ron’s
Red book where he shows you the before and after that’s the before that’s the after the picturesque manifested and he would show that to a Aristocrat and say Hey you can have this and say at the same time there were of course Des centers from this this is um
The diggers the diggers had a different vision of how Society should be organized much more Collective um to to Gerald winstanley and his declaration the Digger started to set up communities which were often quickly dismantled and so in this there’s a very nice combination here the dates coincide with
Winstein his declaration and the painting by uh by Claude chap in the same year so this is a quote from that declaration make the earth a common treasury of course the big black shap is is obscuring the entire point of the picturesque which is the view so it
Shall be if it’s denied for one it should be denied for all so the picturesque is about a kind of I guess a vision of nature which is actually ideology it’s about landscape of system landscape is a form of organization landscap is procedure this is a grid for the
National Collection Center kind of Sol the way laid out which will accept and organiz the objects which will come to sit within you so it’s a kind of procedural landscape I could say but it’s also about an idea of the project of the Interior we do a lot of exhibition
Designs and we love to do exhibition designs partly because they’re an extreme form of architecture they’re imaginary spaces highly theatrical but they’re also intense in their encounter that audiences have with ideas with materials experience and maybe it’s even possible to argue that the old idea of exterior and interior City versus room
Is entirely Obsolete and maybe has been for a long time maybe it’s been obsolete since the great exhibition a building like this with an interior like that an endless interior the moment of Empire sucked the world inside it the interior becomes exterior exterior becomes interior so on and so
Forth thinking of the Gallery space as a kind of um conceptual space these are quotes from Brian Do’s 1978 text uh inside the White Cube so he said the idle gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it’s art the work is isolated from
Everything will detract from its own evaluation itself this gives the space presence possessed by other spaces where convention preserved in the repetition of a close system of values then we get to the good bit some of the sanctity of the church the formality of the courtroom the Mystique of the experimental laboratory joins
With Chic design to produce a chamber a unique chamber of Aesthetics so yeah he continues to talk about the kind of ideological space of the Contemporary artp of the gallery space but something I think really special can happen within those spaces it is separate from the world but it’s also
Adjacent to the world or mainly also about the world space can kind of fulfill its potential so space as frame the meaning of space changes the way in which you look at things it’s a sequence of Galler spes this could be a quick history of of how G can organize themselves
From ideas of space the grids to a picturesque c a kind of extreme barck formed out of curtains where you’re never quite sure if you’re inside or outside so a very ambiguous type of space the ways in which space is defined and the references that it might
Use to the ways in which thresholds are constructed so the way spaces are defined one to the other or the way you move from one world to another or you encounter a chapter heading the frame through which one walks the threshold is a very specific moment controlled through the way which is Designed at the moment you step into an exhibition what you’re walking through how that changes the way that you engage with the work itself and of course the things you can do in the short term you could never do for something much longer transforming the entrance to Somerset house in the go
Here into a hell M for exhibition of our horror uh last year and of course the idea of staging and sets and theatricality and how those can become part of an occupiable experience not just something that you look at or something you inhabit and of course the possibilities
Of material which you can’t use elsewhere you don’t have to wor rain you don’t have to worry about longevity in an exhibition there’s a freedom in uh in the ways in which you can experiment and maybe also in most this is the T Liverpool this a place where school kids Goble to learn
The whole of the curriculum so maths geography through arts and through a collection of artworks which are come stored on S which can be switched out very quickly so ways of presenting you know even you know uh way of presenting allows them to be seen in different
Ways maybe all of these interests in reference in language in form materialis is never in its Singularity but always in plur plurality how one can be many how architecture can be inclusive rather than exclusive at least an next expression so hybrids of remembered plans or colored plans world of
Interiors this is a lockdown project glow rendered as an endless interior or in the ways in which architecture itself can become multiple in this proposal for the Chicago Tribune Tower so on the left the famous ad entry 19 20s competition and on the right the reality on Michigan Avenue designed a
Building designed by Raven Hood Gothic skyscraper whose base is studied with these fragments of buildings like from all over the world maybe some kind of expression of the Chicago tribun as a newspaper and its Global reach but also a very odd uh experience at the bottom of the the Golden
Mile he here one this each of those fragments gets imagined as a strip in a building that could be recombined in various ways so no longer just a fragment but the building itself as a kind of hamburger number McDonald’s is headquarted in Chicago which then is
Resolved onto the site at the bottom of Michigan Avenue with the same massing as L’s to here’s another reproduction of AD his melum unbuilt uh resurrected as a ghostly form in Highgate Cemetery at one to one soort a kind of Life-Size model of something which never existed where heaviness becomes L
Where solidity becomes ethereal where forever becomes a few weeks and finally in the kind of trajectory of the hybrids uh the hon mule so this is a building that’s on a SP where this guy Thomas Fairchild U had a significant history Thomas Fairchild was um a gardener a kind of plants plantsman
And he had a big Nursery just on the kind of Northern edges of the city of London this is in the 18th century and he was the first person to scientifically produced an artificial hybrid he produced something called fach Child’s mule which was a cross between B
Was in the middle there was a cross between Sweet William and car and he produced it by brushing the Poland from one onto the stat of the other which then produced this now now that’s become part of the agre business this was the first time that someone did it and controlled it
Like it had happened before people were like what the hell is going on here and so this was 1761 and this was the kind of gardens which he this is from his book The the about government you can see how his G were laid out this was on the site of
This project which was a small community center place called hawton in London you can see it was in a terrible State propped up by pieces of the wood because brick was bowing so much owned by a very small charity had somehow inherited the lands were unable
To find a way to develop or even repair the the uh the premises a building which had been part of this kind of traditional London streets game Terraces you can see here the history of the side eventually becomes Terraces Terra teres until at some point post war not necessarily through bombing but also
Through slum clearings and pulling down houses because they were thought to be uninhabitable the complete dis disassembly of the typical London Urban plan so it’s a project which draws on I guess quite specific local vernaculars so buildings like this shops on one side side we can’t see and a strange wide
Deck access on the back with apartment above the kind of almost gleeful experiments of early forms of social housing expressive rubbish shoots deck access a kind of looseness to the urban plan you can see a strange stepping back to these blocks which doesn’t quite make any kind of sense or
The logic of what it was intended to produce never arrives kind of idea of buildings as objects where the plan of the city disolves and instead we have big housing blocks vorian schools which sort of map out the urban context through their physical presence rubing through Street ping blankness
Walls with nothing on them as important Urban elements gaps leftover moments and an urban plan which kind of feels like it doesn’t quite make sense increasingly doesn’t make sense when you realize that the site plan is a you the usap was drawn by a planner at
Some moment in time nothing to do with the history of the city whatsoever um which became the beginnings of the project as you can see it’s basically a UAP so the drawn element that kind of the line that a pen once marked on a piece of paper redrawn redraw redraw extruded
Upwards to make the form of the building so it’s a building which then kind of follows this this this this perverse logic of something imposed on the city which then absorbs all kinds of references some highly local those kinds of deck access um the kind of uh ad hoc
Elements which stick out of it but also High architectural references from I guess too to um John H um toov and probably more a small building who sort of ambition is much larger his presence is much larg larger than it than its actual form that in itself is a kind of mule a
Kind of cross a kind of hybrid between a whole range of different H mats and whose character essentially comes from this idea a of hybridity what happens when you begin to put things together that shouldn’t necessarily Belong Together and which even begins to refer back to itself so the shower curtain as a
Uh as a br wall all the handles in the kitchen a replica of the side plan so maybe just a quick word about representation this is really the subject the studio is going to be looking at um but it’s through representation of think that the realism of architecture’s material and spatial presence is
Animated through things like thetic the symbolic so on and so forth just like those novels that James Woods found so absurdly elaborate in their use of character and plot I think this is a kind of possibility of representation attention perhaps it’s even more appropriate for architecture than a novel to explore how
The world Works rather than how somebody felt about something to understand how architecture turns fiction into social theory that is fictions the things that it writes into the world things which become real to understand that really as a genre of political fiction and that the key part of how to
Understand this alchemic process is to understand architecture as always a form of representation the drawing model and building far more similar than they may often Be Imagined to be that perhaps we should understand architecture itself as representation thank [Applause] You