Artists : Dan Havel and Dean Ruck
Thursday, 14 May 2009
Anish Kapoor
Short description of the project Fabric sculpture spans 135m between supports. Surface area of 3500m2 and was fabricated into a single piece. The surface curvatures required by the artist were much more extreme than conventional membrane constructions.
Misc. project details
References Techniques & Architecture février-mars 2003
Duration of use
Temporary or permanent structure Temporary
Material of the cover
Cable-net/Textile/Hybrid/Foil Fabric
Type (code) II
Material Fabric/Foil Polyester
Material coating PVC
Main dimensions and form
Covered surface (m2) 3500
Total length (m) 135
Total width (m) 28
Maximum height (m) 28
Maximum free span (m) 135
Form of entire structure Anticlastic
Short description of the project Fabric sculpture spans 135m between supports. Surface area of 3500m2 and was fabricated into a single piece. The surface curvatures required by the artist were much more extreme than conventional membrane constructions.
Misc. project details
References Techniques & Architecture février-mars 2003
Duration of use
Temporary or permanent structure Temporary
Material of the cover
Cable-net/Textile/Hybrid/Foil Fabric
Type (code) II
Material Fabric/Foil Polyester
Material coating PVC
Main dimensions and form
Covered surface (m2) 3500
Total length (m) 135
Total width (m) 28
Maximum height (m) 28
Maximum free span (m) 135
Form of entire structure Anticlastic
Venice Biennale 2008
Year of Completion: 2008
Architect/Designer: Gustafson Porter
When landscape architects Gustafson Porter conceived the idea for their Venice Biennale installation it was designed to “respond to the challenge of how to cultivate one’s garden, or how to tend to our affairs”. Exploring the themes of memory, nourishment and enlightenment, they wanted to introduce a fabric sculpture as the centre piece for the garden.
As fabric specialists and a company who loves to take on the more unusual projects Architen Landrell undertook the manufacture and installation of the fabric sculpture. Intended as an area of contemplation, the space has white cushions strewn around it as the swathes of fabric waft above.
While an idyllic vision, it was not an easy task to create the ephemeral fabric clouds. Using several helium weather balloons, the fabric was lifted into the air and the balloons tethered to the ground, the idea being that the sculpture could be seen from the gardens entrance and from various points within the city. According to one journalist the fabric feature formed ‘an exquisitely lovely floating white canopy of spinnaker fabric, supported by tethered white balloons’.
Installation of the structure was in a derelict garden area of post industrial military usage. The garden was reclaimed and landscaped with berms to produce a sculptured, lawned area over which the ethereal clouds were flown. Due to Venice’s archeological and historical rules only shallow ground anchors of the helical type could be used to anchor the balloons and sculpture. These had to be installed by hand within the existing vegetation in order to create as little disruption as possible. Additionally, in order to minimise the visual impact of the rigging for the balloons, 3mm dyneema line with a dark sheathing was used.
The fast track programme of this project made an exciting challenge for the team. Design approval to completion on site was achieved in just 7 days ready for the grand opening of the Biennale!
Declared by critics as ‘a triumph’, ‘enchanting’ and as the festival piece which blew everything else away, the installation was an undoubted success and one which we are extremely proud of.
Wednesday, 6 May 2009
'Tunnel' links New York to London (Friday, 23 May 2008)
By Matthew Price
BBC News, New York
People in New York see as far as London
It was possibly the most laborious and least informative interview ever conducted.
It took about five minutes, yielded a one-word answer, and gave little real flavour of the subject.
Still - it was conducted using two whiteboards, two marker pens, and it was done over a distance of 3,471 miles (5,585 km).
How? Well there are two answers to that.
If you believe artist and inventor Paul St George then his "Telectroscope" connects New York and London via a (very) long tunnel running through the earth's crust, with the images bouncing back and forth using mirrors.
The other explanation is that it is all done by optical fibres - take your pick.
One end of the "tunnel" emerges next to Tower Bridge on the banks of the Thames in London - the other is next to Brooklyn Bridge on the banks of New York's East River.
It looks like something HG Wells might have imagined.
Each end has a giant telescope-like construction which appears to punch its way out of the earth.
There are dials, and levers, and thermometer gauges on the side of the 20m long brass and wood construction.
Peer into it and you can see people on the other side of the Atlantic.
Wave at them, they wave back at you.
Write on the whiteboard, and ask a question, and they will write back.
Mesmerising
It is rather like using a giant web-cam, live streaming (though we are told the internet is not involved and there is no audio connection) between two of the world's biggest cities.
So now you know why the following interview took so long.
Once you have got the whiteboard, and written your message on it, you have to angle it correctly so they can read it over in Europe.
"What is your name?" I wrote.
The stranger at the other end, standing in front of Tower Bridge and surrounded by onlookers, picked up his marker and replied.
"Mik," came back the answer, once he had angled his board correctly.
"Where are you from?"
It is a piece of art, and it's also a sort of curiosity in a public space
Peter Coleman
New York organiser
"Bangladesh."
"What do you think of this?" I asked. (Top journalism, huh?)
"GREAT!" came the reply.
Told you it was informative.
Still it is kind of addictive and mesmerising, which strikes me as strange in a world in which we type, text, and Twitter every day, within seconds, to individuals on the other side of the planet without even thinking about it.
Peter Coleman is the producer for the New York end of the project.
"It is a piece of art, and it's also a sort of curiosity in a public space. London and New York are cities with millions of people.
"They can't believe that those are actually people in another city looking at them. That's what I find all these people are sort of amazed at. It pulls you right into it."
English sarcasm
A group of children from California now cluster round the "Telectroscope" - waving and writing messages to the London end.
"That's so cool - they can see us!" one says as they get a wave back from Tower Bridge.
"They're like way over there, and you're sort of talking to them. This is so much fun!"
A New York policeman stands in front with a message. A man at the other end writes something down.
"How's the band?"
"I'm with the NYPD, not the group The Police," the copper writes back.
English sarcasm clearly does not work down a tunnel.
A New York football fan who presumably supports the English club Chelsea steps up: "Man U. Suck!" he writes.
The view through the "Telectroscope"
Tunnel vision - the view of London from New York
The people in London look perplexed, and a little annoyed to be frank - until someone points out that perhaps to them it reads: "Man, you suck."
Then everyone gets very excited.
There are two women at the London end who are from New York City - they are writing where exactly they come from.
They hold up their sign.
"Bay Ridge Brooklyn, yer, go Bay Ridge!!" the New York crowd shout, and for a moment, two groups of strangers, in two cities thousands of miles apart, jump up and down and smile at one another.
By Matthew Price
BBC News, New York
People in New York see as far as London
It was possibly the most laborious and least informative interview ever conducted.
It took about five minutes, yielded a one-word answer, and gave little real flavour of the subject.
Still - it was conducted using two whiteboards, two marker pens, and it was done over a distance of 3,471 miles (5,585 km).
How? Well there are two answers to that.
If you believe artist and inventor Paul St George then his "Telectroscope" connects New York and London via a (very) long tunnel running through the earth's crust, with the images bouncing back and forth using mirrors.
The other explanation is that it is all done by optical fibres - take your pick.
One end of the "tunnel" emerges next to Tower Bridge on the banks of the Thames in London - the other is next to Brooklyn Bridge on the banks of New York's East River.
It looks like something HG Wells might have imagined.
Each end has a giant telescope-like construction which appears to punch its way out of the earth.
There are dials, and levers, and thermometer gauges on the side of the 20m long brass and wood construction.
Peer into it and you can see people on the other side of the Atlantic.
Wave at them, they wave back at you.
Write on the whiteboard, and ask a question, and they will write back.
Mesmerising
It is rather like using a giant web-cam, live streaming (though we are told the internet is not involved and there is no audio connection) between two of the world's biggest cities.
So now you know why the following interview took so long.
Once you have got the whiteboard, and written your message on it, you have to angle it correctly so they can read it over in Europe.
"What is your name?" I wrote.
The stranger at the other end, standing in front of Tower Bridge and surrounded by onlookers, picked up his marker and replied.
"Mik," came back the answer, once he had angled his board correctly.
"Where are you from?"
It is a piece of art, and it's also a sort of curiosity in a public space
Peter Coleman
New York organiser
"Bangladesh."
"What do you think of this?" I asked. (Top journalism, huh?)
"GREAT!" came the reply.
Told you it was informative.
Still it is kind of addictive and mesmerising, which strikes me as strange in a world in which we type, text, and Twitter every day, within seconds, to individuals on the other side of the planet without even thinking about it.
Peter Coleman is the producer for the New York end of the project.
"It is a piece of art, and it's also a sort of curiosity in a public space. London and New York are cities with millions of people.
"They can't believe that those are actually people in another city looking at them. That's what I find all these people are sort of amazed at. It pulls you right into it."
English sarcasm
A group of children from California now cluster round the "Telectroscope" - waving and writing messages to the London end.
"That's so cool - they can see us!" one says as they get a wave back from Tower Bridge.
"They're like way over there, and you're sort of talking to them. This is so much fun!"
A New York policeman stands in front with a message. A man at the other end writes something down.
"How's the band?"
"I'm with the NYPD, not the group The Police," the copper writes back.
English sarcasm clearly does not work down a tunnel.
A New York football fan who presumably supports the English club Chelsea steps up: "Man U. Suck!" he writes.
The view through the "Telectroscope"
Tunnel vision - the view of London from New York
The people in London look perplexed, and a little annoyed to be frank - until someone points out that perhaps to them it reads: "Man, you suck."
Then everyone gets very excited.
There are two women at the London end who are from New York City - they are writing where exactly they come from.
They hold up their sign.
"Bay Ridge Brooklyn, yer, go Bay Ridge!!" the New York crowd shout, and for a moment, two groups of strangers, in two cities thousands of miles apart, jump up and down and smile at one another.
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
Frieze Magazine
Tunnel Vision
Informant
A new exhibition about New York’s underground earth works reveals a quasi-mythological mirror image of the city
image
Workers are lowered into the Tunnel Boring Machine Launch Area, 26th Street and 11th Avenue, New York (2008)
‘Stocks Dive’, ‘Prices Plunge’, ‘Markets Plummet’. We’re in the midst of a declension, an Icarean moment in time when aspirations turn vertiginous and ladders become snakes. A new exhibition in New York suggests that perhaps there is some kind of life beneath the cold asphalt rushing up to meet us. ‘The Future Beneath Us’, currently on show at the New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex, and at the Science, Business and Industry Library, speaks of a mirror city to New York, a benighted, unglamorous metropolis of dark shafts and damp thoroughfares in which air is hewn out of rock, rather than rock heaped into air. It paints this portrait quite accidentally while describing the eight massive subterranean construction projects currently taking place deep beneath the city’s surface.
The simultaneous creation of a thicket of tunnels, hubs and work plants has seemingly resulted in an alter-city being formed, a sunless empire hidden entirely from the view of most of the city’s denizens. Chief among the projects is the gargantuan Water Tunnel No. 3, one of the largest engineering projects in the world. It has a diameter of seven metres, stretches for almost 100 kilometres, and reaches depths beneath the city of over 250 metres, as deep as the Chrysler building is high. It is a work of monumental size and beauty, a gargantuan concrete tube laid down amidst a glistening backdrop of quartzofeldspathically-banded garnetiferous muscovite-biotite schist. The only shame is that it will never be seen. Its entombment is part of its creation. It is a true earth work.
Such colossal underground structures have traditionally been the domain of morlocks and mole people, both antitheses of civilization and its warped reflection. Here too in New York there is something of this. The tunnels are created by ravenous giant leech-like boring machines with ever-spinning circular jaws, which are, in turn, operated by thick-skinned workers known as sandhogs. Compounding the feeling of a subculture beneath the substrata is the fact that many of the sandhogs are second or third generation tunnel workers, their forefathers having worked, and sometimes died, on Water Tunnels Nos. 1 and 2. A popular sandhog saying, ‘If it’s deeper than the grave, the sandhogs dug it’, further stresses the quasi-mythological elements of this underworld: for what is deeper than the grave but Hades itself? It comes as little surprise that the robotic submarine used to explore the city’s existing water tunnels is known as Persephone.
Not that such a ghastly reading of the project is anywhere present in what is a strictly civic exhibition. With a beady eye on the vast stimulus packages set to be thrown at public works across the country, the show seemed more interested in attempting to instill its subjects with a whiff of New Deal human triumphalism. In this it appears a little misguided. The time-span allotted to these projects is less human than geological in nature. Work on Water Tunnel No. 3 began in 1969 and is not expected to finish until 2020. The Second Avenue Subway was first proposed in 1920, and has been under construction since 1972. The Croton Water Filtration Plant has been mooted since 1890. If any kind of memorial to the human spirit is being created beneath the city proper it is not a triumph of the common man over economic adversity but rather a fossil kingdom of public policy.
Indeed while the utility of these works is unquestionable, history would suggest that not even usefulness is a necessary feature for the creation of triumphant public works. Take the story of Joseph Williamson, a tobacco merchant from Liverpool, who, in the early 19th century, began employing hundreds of workers in the Edge Hill area of the city to build a series of secret subterranean passages and huge underground halls beneath the streets. In the words of Charles Hand, President of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, and a fairly early (1916) explorer of Williamson’s creation, the construction was: ‘a nightmare maze of constructed tunnels and caves. Nobody knows their extent. They are grotesque beyond description … dungeons carved out of the solid rock with no light and no ventilation … all apparently without the slightest objective or motive.’
The reasons for the creation of Williamson’s tunnels have been much debated. Some suggest that he was a member of an extremist religious sect and that the tunnels were built to provide refuge for himself and his friends come the Day of Judgment. Others propose they were used to smuggle contraband to and from Liverpool’s port. Yet amidst all the conspiratorial chatter, Williamson’s insistence that he had them built purely for ‘the employment of the poor’ rings truest. Over 130 years before the New Deal and its mass employment programmes sought to revivify a country, Williamson instigated a one-man philanthropic Works Progress Administration, making sure his workers ‘all received a weekly wage and were thus enabled to enjoy the blessing of charity without the attendant curse of stifled self-respect’. Unbounded by usefulness, created purely to relieve unemployment, his tunnels are the epitome of an economic stimulus, suggesting that during dark times, to seek the light at the end of the tunnel, you first need to build one.
George Pendle
George Pendle is an author and journalist living in New York.
Tunnel Vision
Informant
A new exhibition about New York’s underground earth works reveals a quasi-mythological mirror image of the city
image
Workers are lowered into the Tunnel Boring Machine Launch Area, 26th Street and 11th Avenue, New York (2008)
‘Stocks Dive’, ‘Prices Plunge’, ‘Markets Plummet’. We’re in the midst of a declension, an Icarean moment in time when aspirations turn vertiginous and ladders become snakes. A new exhibition in New York suggests that perhaps there is some kind of life beneath the cold asphalt rushing up to meet us. ‘The Future Beneath Us’, currently on show at the New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex, and at the Science, Business and Industry Library, speaks of a mirror city to New York, a benighted, unglamorous metropolis of dark shafts and damp thoroughfares in which air is hewn out of rock, rather than rock heaped into air. It paints this portrait quite accidentally while describing the eight massive subterranean construction projects currently taking place deep beneath the city’s surface.
The simultaneous creation of a thicket of tunnels, hubs and work plants has seemingly resulted in an alter-city being formed, a sunless empire hidden entirely from the view of most of the city’s denizens. Chief among the projects is the gargantuan Water Tunnel No. 3, one of the largest engineering projects in the world. It has a diameter of seven metres, stretches for almost 100 kilometres, and reaches depths beneath the city of over 250 metres, as deep as the Chrysler building is high. It is a work of monumental size and beauty, a gargantuan concrete tube laid down amidst a glistening backdrop of quartzofeldspathically-banded garnetiferous muscovite-biotite schist. The only shame is that it will never be seen. Its entombment is part of its creation. It is a true earth work.
Such colossal underground structures have traditionally been the domain of morlocks and mole people, both antitheses of civilization and its warped reflection. Here too in New York there is something of this. The tunnels are created by ravenous giant leech-like boring machines with ever-spinning circular jaws, which are, in turn, operated by thick-skinned workers known as sandhogs. Compounding the feeling of a subculture beneath the substrata is the fact that many of the sandhogs are second or third generation tunnel workers, their forefathers having worked, and sometimes died, on Water Tunnels Nos. 1 and 2. A popular sandhog saying, ‘If it’s deeper than the grave, the sandhogs dug it’, further stresses the quasi-mythological elements of this underworld: for what is deeper than the grave but Hades itself? It comes as little surprise that the robotic submarine used to explore the city’s existing water tunnels is known as Persephone.
Not that such a ghastly reading of the project is anywhere present in what is a strictly civic exhibition. With a beady eye on the vast stimulus packages set to be thrown at public works across the country, the show seemed more interested in attempting to instill its subjects with a whiff of New Deal human triumphalism. In this it appears a little misguided. The time-span allotted to these projects is less human than geological in nature. Work on Water Tunnel No. 3 began in 1969 and is not expected to finish until 2020. The Second Avenue Subway was first proposed in 1920, and has been under construction since 1972. The Croton Water Filtration Plant has been mooted since 1890. If any kind of memorial to the human spirit is being created beneath the city proper it is not a triumph of the common man over economic adversity but rather a fossil kingdom of public policy.
Indeed while the utility of these works is unquestionable, history would suggest that not even usefulness is a necessary feature for the creation of triumphant public works. Take the story of Joseph Williamson, a tobacco merchant from Liverpool, who, in the early 19th century, began employing hundreds of workers in the Edge Hill area of the city to build a series of secret subterranean passages and huge underground halls beneath the streets. In the words of Charles Hand, President of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, and a fairly early (1916) explorer of Williamson’s creation, the construction was: ‘a nightmare maze of constructed tunnels and caves. Nobody knows their extent. They are grotesque beyond description … dungeons carved out of the solid rock with no light and no ventilation … all apparently without the slightest objective or motive.’
The reasons for the creation of Williamson’s tunnels have been much debated. Some suggest that he was a member of an extremist religious sect and that the tunnels were built to provide refuge for himself and his friends come the Day of Judgment. Others propose they were used to smuggle contraband to and from Liverpool’s port. Yet amidst all the conspiratorial chatter, Williamson’s insistence that he had them built purely for ‘the employment of the poor’ rings truest. Over 130 years before the New Deal and its mass employment programmes sought to revivify a country, Williamson instigated a one-man philanthropic Works Progress Administration, making sure his workers ‘all received a weekly wage and were thus enabled to enjoy the blessing of charity without the attendant curse of stifled self-respect’. Unbounded by usefulness, created purely to relieve unemployment, his tunnels are the epitome of an economic stimulus, suggesting that during dark times, to seek the light at the end of the tunnel, you first need to build one.
George Pendle
George Pendle is an author and journalist living in New York.
Monday, 27 April 2009
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