Meta architecture is an exhibition created by two recent M.Arch graduates, Sean McAlister and Stephen Mackie, who spend their days working at Grimshaw and Neu Architects, respectively. Opening this week in east London, the go-getters describe the exhibition as somewhere between a measured survey and a cinematic experience. The pair has surveyed two different spaces – a studio flat and the exhibition space itself – and inspired by David Hockney’s photomontage ‘joiners’, they have experimented with a technique of a ‘video joiner journey’ to visually represent the subjective experience of travelling through the spaces. The film will be projected on a screen in the middle of the gallery and accompanied by a soundtrack (to be performed live at special screenings) to create an immersive environment, protectively surrounded by hand-drawings and solvent-transfer prints.
Mackie and McAlister use the analogy of a window overlaid with a stencil to describe their intentions for the seven-and-a-half minute film. Viewers have the freedom to look and make up their own mind, but will find their attention cast towards particular observations and details. By presenting the visual field as a much bigger, ‘warped and mashed’, picture than simply what our eyes see, the proactive pair is proposing that subjectivity, not objectivity, is the true representation of architectural space.
The project arose from the duo’s restlessness with the conventional design process. Its proactive nature reverses the usual client-architect relationship, which sees the designer entering once the project is initiated and reacting to a site and brief. ‘It’s only yours if you see every single step,’ says Mackie, ‘we learn new skills as we go, if needs be’. Though, in their eyes, none of the roles have stepped out of the realm of architecture. The motivation to pursue an extra-curricular project in part derives from the feeling of alienation at work, when no one architect or group feels total ownership over a project. McAlister likens the feeling to ‘constantly being handed someone else’s baby to look after’. Through a contact with a friend, as is often the case, they approached Lo & Behold with the concept for meta architecture. The record label was keen to enter the gallery game and step on new territory itself, taking advantage of the art scene on the doorstep of its home by Redchurch Street. 
It is important to the young architects that this project stands up intellectually in order to understand what’s next. There will be a zine for visitors to take home, ‘partly to substantiate the ideas behind the work and partly to keep the exhibition in people’s heads,’ they explain, later followed by a book with the power of critical hindsight. In this vein, the pair has invited Lorens Holm, Mackie’s tutor during Part 2 at the University of Dundee, to give a public talk in the gallery space. ‘He believes it’s important to talk about subjectivity in architecture because we’re all subjects, and his new book has been influential on the way we both think,’ says Mackie.
Following graduation from Dundee came the rude awakening of coming up against money-making, over creative, agendas. McAlister observes, ‘university provided an invisible framework to hang ideas from that dealt with any obstacles. But “business-heads” can deal with the money in the same way’. They have been positively surprised with the support of others – both Grimshaw and Neu Architects have sponsored the project. The pair reflect that a healthy dose of naivety will get you a long way if you’re confident in the strength of the idea: they only calculated the cost of the exhibition recently and the sum might have deterred them at the beginning.
Some of the youngest and freshest architectural minds emerging from university today cannot bear the thought of resting on their laurels for one moment. The experience of working in practice rarely offers a real-life match for the richness and denseness of education; there seems to be a few pieces missing from the jigsaw (no doubt, to be found stuffed in the closet of the polymath-architect from times gone by). Through pursuing self-initiated projects, young architects have the freedom to choose exactly what they learn and which skills will be tested.
Bustling cities such as London, and in particular the East End, prove an ideal place for such projects as they undergo transition themselves. If you’re not in the right place at the right time, the temporary existence of these intimate projects might just pass you by, but their potential to affect the relationship with our city is not to be underplayed. In the words of muf’s Liza Fior when discussing east London’s Olympic legacy: ‘the temporary can be described as a test of the possible … a reason to suspend belief and experience the risky unknown.’ The makers of self-initiated projects have nothing to lose, unlike commercial practices.
Meta architecture opens this Thursday, 3 February, as part of Time Out’s First Thursdays and runs until 16 February at Lo & Behold, E2 7DS. Lorens Holm’s evening talk will take place on 10 February.
If you are embarking on a self-initiated project and would like to feature in an article on proactive architecture, please get in touch with Blueprint: info@blueprintmagazine.co.uk
