The Black Maria installation is the second commission for RELAY, a nine-year plan of contemporary art programming, commissioned by curators Michael Pinsky and Stephanie Delcroix, to punctuate the regeneration of Kings Cross – initiated by the site developer, Argent.
Wentworth had been impressed by the work of Gruppe, winner of the coveted 2012 Swiss Art Award for Architecture. A very young practice, the Swiss collective consists of Boris Grusic, Christoph Junk and Nicholas Lobo Brennan – the latter a graduate of Chelsea College, London Metropolitan and the RCA. They now teach at ETH Zurich with Tom Emerson, director of London-based 6a architects – and friend of Wentworth.
Gruppe’s work is disarmingly elegant, yet hard to describe; its delicate fabrications show an intense interest in structure, affect, and in the everyday rather than the spectacular. Mirroring the works’ modest purity, Gruppe’s design sensibility is at once simple and poetic: ‘It’s about the way that things come together – which is how the world is put together, really,’ says co-founder Brennan.
It’s easy to see how Wentworth would be seduced by Gruppe’s aesthetic; the propositional, pared-down tectonics have a slightly uncanny quality, a making strange of the every day, thereby echoing Wentworth’s own work. ‘When you’re talking to Richard, you start with the things around you. You might look at details, but treat them as larger ideas about the world,’ says Brennan. Indeed, the design process for Black Maria – named for Thomas Edison’s early cinema studio, rather than the moniker for prison transport vans – started as a ping-pong exchange of images between Gruppe and Wentworth. Gruppe’s 2012 award- winning structure, tellingly titled ‘Putting Things Together Taking Things Apart’, shared the spirit of Black Maria – a performance and event space that perched on top of an escalator, accommodating 25 people for a series of talks by artists and designers.
Likewise Black Maria is intended to be a freely interpretable event- space, this time with the idea of using the projected image as an extension of the structure. It is intended to ‘awkwardly invite formal events’, says Gruppe, but more naturally be taken up by CSM students and visitors.
Both Wentworth and Gruppe have mixed feelings about Stanton Williams’ building; they agree that time will tell how successfully it is appropriated by its users, or whether its ultra-polite logic resists the rubbing off of its rather severe corners. ‘It’s like the building is learning to be an art school, and the art school is learning to be in this building,’ says Gruppe.
The project was devised by Richard Wentworth and GRUPPE, but perhaps unusually, the hard graft of "putting things together" was executed by the designers too. The structure was built on site over a few weeks by GRUPPE and Lars Wagner, with engineering by regular collaborator Marcel Aubert.
As such, Black Maria will exist as a work in progress, with room to mutate – finished by its users, but explicitly referencing the local condition of incomplete, iterative construction. ‘It’s important to me that it’s a space for exchange, for things to happen,’ says Wentworth.
A full program of events at Black Maria including film screenings, performances, talks and music, is available online – including Blueprint’s own event, INSTITUTIONALISED, featuring Dan Hill, Jeremy Till and Wouter Vanstiphout on 12 March 2013. Don’t miss it..
