Giles Round: We Live in the Office / Life of Clay: Experimental Practice at Grymsdyke Farm

This autumn RIBA presents two exhibitions that explore the various ways in which the lively possibilities and processes of clay relate to architecture—from the potential of in-situ architecture to an on-site ceramic production line in the Architecture Gallery at RIBA.

Giles Round
We Live in the Office
Architecture Gallery, Ground Floor

We Live in the Office, a commission by multi-disciplinary artist Giles Round (b. 1976), takes its cue from Andrea Branzi’s publication Weak and Diffuse Modernity (2006). The exhibition sets out to explore a series of tensions in the buildings that surround us through representations of the façade found in the RIBA Collections. By turning the Architecture Gallery at RIBA into a production studio and shop, Round unravels how frontages betray function and how expressive pieces of architecture are preserved, collected and even purchased today.

Through a series of transformations within and beyond the gallery, Round further detaches façades from their built structures as he translates the imagery of the front elevation into hand-painted murals and onto familiar homeware items. Unexecuted pre-fab structures flank the gallery perimeter in the form of a wallpaper frieze and abstracted versions of historical façades by architects such as Venturi Scott Brown, Jane Drew and Bertold Lubetkin are hand-painted onto ceramic objects. Round turns buildings into objects and objects into buildings as the individually decorated items over the course of the exhibition will forms a new sculptural city-scape in miniature within the Architecture Gallery. Collectively, these transformations speak of the challenges that occur in designing or repurposing structural elements intended to both conceal and communicate. In so doing, they cause us to question the hidden functions that define our deceptive urban landscape today.

Curated by Corinne Mynatt and Colin Sterling, RIBA with Lotte Juul Petersen, Wysing Arts Centre.

Exhibition sponsored by Wedge Group Galvanizing Ltd. With additional support from Cockayne –Grants for the Arts and the London Community Foundation, and Arts Council England. The RIBA has worked closely with Wysing Arts Centre in the collaboration with Giles Round. 

Life of Clay: Experimental Practice at Grymsdyke Farm
Practice Space, 2nd Floor 

What happens when technologies collide? In a converted farm in rural Buckinghamshire architects, artists and designers are using robotic arms, sausage makers and potter’s wheels to experiment with clay processes and explore the potential of site-responsive architecture. This exhibition brings together the clay works of Grymsdyke Farm, from finely glazed ceramics to intricate 3D printed screens. It displays the trial and error processes involved in creating new forms from an old material and the possibilities of clay.

Curated by Guan Lee and Eleanor Morgan.

Exhibition funded by RIBA Research Trust Award, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL and Grymsdyke Farm.

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