tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48225577616159394352024-03-05T07:33:19.525-08:00Giles Reid ArchitectAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09064740758577908305noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4822557761615939435.post-7750419183879027492014-04-08T13:56:00.001-07:002014-04-09T13:53:12.346-07:00Cafe Oto by Assemble Studio<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Assemble Studio is a collective of young architects and artists. Graduating into a recession, they have taken an unorthodox route into practice by engaging in self-build and community projects. Their work involves a strong research element, sometimes into alternative forms of construction. Building not drawing lies at the heart of the studio, though some of their drawings are in fact quite beautiful.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: justify;">They already have a diverse portfolio of built work for fringe venues on minimal budgets in forgotten spaces. Previous notable works include ‘The Cineroleum’ - a temporary cinema in a disused service station on Clerkenwell Road and ‘Folly for a Flyover’ – also a cinema erected in the left over space below the east and westbound lanes of the A12.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Here in Dalston they were approached by Café Oto, who wanted a performance space of approximately 50m2. The music venue has a two year lease and the site is reserved for future Crossrail development. The lease may be extended to allow them to operate here longer.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: justify;">The site was an empty lot. Before that, it was a depot for TfL and before even that a development site for flats. Piles and the ground floor concrete slab went in before the development stopped. Assemble discovered the slab during excavation and have used it for their foundations.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The existing surface was covered with sub base and other debris, which Assemble have used to make the building’s walls. The outside is finished with a thick layer of what they name ‘rubbledash’, which is also full of large chunks of brick and paving. The site is literally pressed into the walls. They foreground this ‘nothing’ material, investing it with poetic qualities, making visible the journey from site to building. Being rendered, the walls are monolithic and massive. They appear archaic, as if long standing and now eroded. The aesthetic is far removed from today’s aesthetic of modular facings and light weight rain-screens.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The walls themselves are also made from rubble bags. However, viewed externally this construction is largely invisible. The only place where the bags are left exposed as laid is along the rear wall abutment with a neighbouring building.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Rubble bag construction is a close derivation of earth bag construction. Robust bags are filled with rubble, laid in courses and rendered. Both methods are inexpensive and straightforward. Both are typically built with semi-skilled labour. Assemble’s Alice and Frances Edgerley (cousins) did the bulk of the manual labour with a group of dedicated volunteers, using diggers, breakers, tampers and shovels. Assemble also obtained technical guidance from CAT (The Centre for Alternative Technologies).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The rubble gathered from the site is crushed to form a balance of aggregate sizes and mixed with introduced sand to improve compaction. The long walls are buttressed for stability. Timber spikes are hammered through the bags. ‘Chicken’ wire is laid at regular courses to improve the friction between the rows. Rope is wrapped around the bags to tie one course to the next.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The bag construction is fully revealed inside. The exposed bags are pliant to touch and the space is acoustically warm. Associations with bunkers or anti flood measures are inevitable, though Assemble themselves do not make this allusion.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Above the walls sits a ply clad structure. Its shape clearly recalls a pediment. Many of Assemble’s projects freely employ classical motifs. They do this without disguise, irony or mannerism. It is reasonably easy to think of other young British architects who also take classical types as an available tool and limiting devise. This frank usage of classicism could be viewed as a generationally defining feature.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The pediment projects beyond the sides of the earth bag walls, protecting them from the rain. This is ‘correct construction’, though less of a requirement than had the walls been earthen. The overhang is as much about proportion as technique. It forms an equal and opposing volume to the walls below. The overhang also creates a zone for hinged panels to flap down inside, providing the room with ventilation.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Inside, a series of thin member timber trusses span between the long walls. These are set fairly low down, giving the space a quasi roof-like feel. The plywood volume construction is basic and albeit far from perfectly level, the detailing is considered. Even though made of standard members fixed with gang nail plates, Assemble take evident pleasure in the ply volume’s articulation. There is something Taliesin West about the quick rhythm of members and stepping of section sizes. Whether Frank Lloyd Wright is a specific reference is not, Assemble don’t say. Frances Edgerley does however speak of the studio having a ‘sweat equity’ business model and that is she notes was a concept employed by Wright.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Assemble Studio’s work demonstrates a specific vision, purposefully articulated and radically practised. They explore the qualities of found spaces and ignored places. The site is the material from which they develop each project for each new building is an act of participation in an existing context. They work with the ‘natural’ waste of industrialisation. By their physical labour and intellectual effort they transpose the site’s man made geology and the forces which have shaped it.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Pace London</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">June 21, 2013
– August 24, 2013<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The set up is simple. Three big
glossy panels rest flat on the floor. Three panels hover directly above, suspended
from a cat’s cradle of wires fixed to the ceiling beams. Six coloured mirrors
mirror each other. Each of these six panels is made up of nine smaller
rectangles: the rear six are black, the front three are respectively red, yellow
and blue; as the work’s title.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">You enter through an arched
opening centred on the room. Opposite are eleven tall windows. Beyond is a view
onto a neighbouring brick wall. Between the planes march the gallery’s white
painted columns. And on paper that is it.
<i>That</i> is the set up. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The suspended plane has been
positioned so that from the entrance it cuts off the heads of the arched
windows and in mirroring the windows, near doubles them in height. They project
an unnatural amount of light into the gallery; unnatural because whilst you
know you are seeing a composite of the real and reflected, you sort of park
that observation and accept them as true. Even then, small details inform the
mind that this image is not quite right. When looking at the ‘real’ windows,
the daylight of course shines down on the glazing bars. However in the doubled half
of the image, the window’s glazing bars are lit from below as if by hidden
lighting.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">When you look towards the
windows, the natural light that hits the surface makes the black super glossy.
But where you get the un-lit zone below the window reflected in the nearest
panels, the black surface appears matt. It is reflecting a surface that is
itself lacking reflected light.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The image of these massive
windows is mirrored in the floor plane. This reflection is mirrored once more
in the suspended panels above. And so on. This recalls a ‘Droste effect’ which occurs
when two mirrors face each other, the image multiplying and receding forever. However
the reflections in this installation differ. Here, the image reverses orientation
with each reflection. The first reflection is upside down. The reflection in
the reflection is the right way up. You can just make out the reflection in the
reflection of the reflection. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">These images continue right
across the breadth of the room on the panels to the left, centre and right. The
mind connects the three images into one. But the image is cut up by the
insistent </span><span style="line-height: 13px;">rhythm</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> of the columns. Imagine Irwin had blown up a photo of the
gallery into a huge silvery print, and then taken a scalpel to it. From the
entrance, the space vibrates between the violent cuts, the multiplying reflections
and the classical order of the existing architecture.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The mind comprehends the
simultaneous existence of the real and reflected, the part and the whole. But
it can only make sense of so much conflicting information for so long. In
seeking a simpler order, it must discard confusion or end up doubting what its own
eyes are seeing. In this, the work induces a sort of dizziness.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The installation is so
immersive, on my third visit I went back and photographed the work through a
camera’s viewer so as to freeze these images onto a stable surface. Only by isolating
the effects could I write about them. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><v:shape alt="P1260735.JPG" id="Picture_x0020_2" o:spid="_x0000_i1026" style="height: 338.25pt; mso-wrap-style: square; visibility: visible; width: 451.5pt;" type="#_x0000_t75">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">When you stand and look towards
the entrance, the panels reflect the gallery’s white walls. From some angles,
say crouching down, the black turns soft white. The white is interrupted by
coloured strips – these strips being the panel sides. From this view, all the
columns classical bases are mirrored. Their shafts rise interrupted through the
suspended plane to the soffit. At the same time, they descend towards that
soffit’s reflection.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The planes are so perfect,
so still, they read like pools of oil. Placing an artwork on the floor already
sets up a degree of danger. You can get so close to the work, you fear for them
as objects. Would the slightest knock break their surface tension? Would the
work have to then be barriered off?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">You see people inch their
foot right up to a panel and lean over, staring into depths. Has anyone ever
fallen in? Perhaps these are reasons enough to be ‘afraid of red, yellow and
blue’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Yet the work is playful too.
You can track people’s reflections around the gallery. They do not see you furtively
studying them, or at least you hope they don’t, but you assume they must
occasionally peek too. The whole room is set up for checking out. You can even
see in the lower reflected reflection people walking down the street that runs
alongside the brick wall, only right way up, which is truly strange. Staring at
the windows proper, these same people do not exist, for they are hidden by the
wall below the windows. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">With much minimalist art,
people get in the way of the experience. You just want to be alone with the work.
Anybody or anything else is a distraction. Irwin’s work is incredibly inclusive
for it drags everything around it into play. It could equally be called enveloping,
for nothing escapes becoming part of the work.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><v:shape alt="P1260707.JPG" id="Picture_x0020_3" o:spid="_x0000_i1025" style="height: 338.25pt; mso-wrap-style: square; visibility: visible; width: 451.5pt;" type="#_x0000_t75">
<v:imagedata o:title="P1260707" src="file:///C:\Users\greid\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image004.jpg">
</v:imagedata></v:shape></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">After many viewings, I began
to tire of this search to pin down mirror effects. Only when I stopped
interrogating it did I discover what for me is its enduring wonder. And it surprised
me that it took so long to see this because it is so obvious. The work is a multiplier
of beautiful colours. Gaze into the blue panel and you see that the image of
the red panel above turns mauve, the yellow becomes orange, and the black purple.
These colours are everywhere and everywhere irradiating.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Now you can see the care
with which Irwin has installed the gallery lighting, and why. The lighting is
positioned just beyond the end of the panels, brightening the floor by the
entrance. Look down into the blue and the reflection of the yellow panel appears
almost orange, but its very end stays yellow because reflecting the floor’s
brighter light.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Minimalist art so encourages
one to focus on construction and finish, that finding some technical flaw in
the work becomes its own reward. But to obsess about alignment, or flatness or
whether one can see faint signs of dust laid upon the surface even after the
ritualistic pre-opening clean by gallery staff is here to reduce the work to
its dumbest facts. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Irwin’s work dismisses such
attempts. For one it is just so damn perfectly executed. But the greater truth
is that making a fetish of the fabrication is to avoid the work’s challenge. Simply
put, there is no reason to be afraid of ‘red, yellow and blue.’ Just let go and
dive on in.</span><span style="font-size: 9pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%;">TEXT COPYRIGHT GILES REID <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%;">AUGUST 2013<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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