EXHIBITIONS

We live in the office, The Architecture Gallery, RIBA, London
22 September 2016 - 05 February 2017

Factories have been abandoned, offices have been emptied; schools and university campuses have been created in industrial areas; historic buildings have been transformed into banks and information technology centres; artisan sheds have become ateliers for design and fashion; industrial deposits have been recycled tocreate shopping malls; warehouses have become homes or theatres; offices have become art galleries or hotels; garages have become recording studios; basements havebecome research laboratories. One works at home and lives in the office.

Andrea Branzi, Weak and Diffuse Modernity, 2006

We Live in the Office...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.

e-flux, 2016

Installation views: Giles Round, We live in the office, The Architecture Gallery, RIBA, London
Photography 1-6: Sophie Mutevelian
Photography 7-10: Giles Round

The Architecture Gallery
Royal Institute of British Architects
66 Portland Place
London W1B 1AD

https://www.architecture.com/

EXHIBITIONS

We live in the office, The Architecture Gallery, RIBA, London 22 September 2016 - 05 February 2017

We live in the office, The Architecture Gallery, RIBA, London
22 September 2016 - 05 February 2017