Kickstarter

MORE THAN > a building? Architecture on Trial Stirling and Gowan's Leicester Engineering

WHAT WE PLAN TO DO

We are seeking funds to mount an exhibition at the Architecture Foundation in London (in April 2011) that uses video to critically review Stirling and Gowan's Leicester Engineering Building as a case-study in which to test the deceptively simple question: what is architecture?

The exhibition is created by Joseph Bedford and is being designed by vPPR architects, a young London based practice. It will transform The Architecture Foundation's space at Tooley Street in South London by installing a field of interactive video interviews with architects, critics and users of the building (with James Gowan, Michael Wilford, Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, Charles Jencks, Leon Krier and Robert Maxwell among others). This field of interviews will be clustered around a central event space. During the day the event space will screen two new documentary films that present the building in two very divergent ways: firstly as an imaginary object or object of media and, secondly, as a real object or actual building. In the evening the event space will host an intense series of discussions, talks and debates with architects, critics and the public in order to stage a kind of trial of the Leicester Engineering Building. In staging this trial, the project will in effect, stage a trial of the very idea of architecture itself, asking why architecture is significant at all, how it functions and for whom?

HOW WE PLAN TO DO IT

The project has been under development for two years. With initial funded from a £5000 RIBA Research Trust Award 2009-2011 and a CCA Research Fellowship I have spent one month filming at the building, one month filming at the Stirling/Wilford Archives in Montreal, and several months travelled around the UK and the US recording, on video, over 40+ interviews with everybody alive who worked on the design of the building, everyone alive who wrote influential criticism of the building, and many people who have lived and worked in the building.

The exhibition will bring together this material, at the timely moment, when Stirling's reputation is being revived by new scholarship, new books, conferences and exhibitions. In this moment of renewed attention to Britain's most notorious architect, the exhibition will seek to catalyse a greater debate around one of his most significance buildings, enabling us to ask a fresh, and in a new way, one of the most basic, yet perennial questions about architecture: what is it about a building that makes it MORE THAN a building; that is, what makes a building a work of architecture?

WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR

Our exhibition is in need of $2000 to purchase at least 12 LCD tv/dvd monitors to display the interviews and another $2000 to purchase the necessary materials, electrical equipment and printing in order to transform the Architecture Foundation space into a field of cellular spaces suited to the screening and creative navigation of both large documentary films and a field of smaller interactive video screens.

For a document detailing the concept, content and design of the exhibition in greater depth please follow the link to download our pdf:http://www.mediafire.com/?jx52f35si7p7si9

For more information of the Architecture Foundation please follow the link below: http://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/

For more information on vPPR architects. See their website: http://www.vppr.co.uk/