Brief City 2051 -The Mobile Studio with Dr V.A.Watson

Hoxton Gallery, London, 2006

Brief City 2051 presents radical, new, architecture that explores temporality and utopian structures in the context of 21st century London.

Brief City’s title is derived from the 1951 Observer documentary film of the same name, which captures the fading euphoria as the ‘Festival of Britain’
drew to a close.

Brief City constructs a portal into an imagined future. Presented are three artefacts from the projected centennial Great Exhibition and Festival
of 2051: Brief City.

ARTEFACT 1
‘Golden Jubilee’ is a re-appropriated element from a redundant utopia. Jack Cluer’s timber slatted tulip bin was first designed for the 1951 Festival of Britain; it has since lost its utopian aura, becoming a familiar object of everyday use. A model of the original bin is re-presented as a nostalgic memento of a lost future vision. Resonating from inside the bin, the soundtrack from Derek Jarman’s utopian film of 1979 ‘Jubilee’ summarises the punk anarchy of a state controlled London in chaos.

ARTEFACT 2
‘Barnum Jr's, Pavilion ’ draws on the ideas of the sixties avant-garde architects ‘Superstudio’, exploring the idea of ‘Negative Utopia’ as a generator of programme and form. Highlighting the absurdity of the modernist ‘Plan’, Superstudio proposed an endless monument in the form of a massive mirror-glass grid, encircling the globe: a forewarning of the horrors of architecture to come. Beamer consists of two models of hexagonal gold-mirrored pavilions, which represent a utopian structure to be located en-masse along the Thames Gateway. Barnum Jr's, Pavilions fragmenting optical dazzle is purely of the spectacle, decrying all attempts to reconcile image and space.

ARTEFACT 3
‘The Gateway Grids’ are evolutionary, a moment in that trajectory of life which links monkeys to the Great Edifices of the future; a future in which men have been translated into strange, non-reflecting substances: into stone and plant, and all their carefully woven structures of concepts and of feelings have passed into the air. A densely woven model of brightly colored viscose embroidery thread, The Gateways are true grids, not mathematical but magical, a shaping force, which crystallizes the air, thus making of the air a body and a space.