Brutalist Architecture Inspires Simon Terrill’s Foam Playgrounds

We’re familiar with the sight of brutalist towers in Britain, but less well known are the strange playgrounds built at the same time, which are the inspiration for a new installation at the RIBA by the artist Simon Terrill and design collective Assemble. With their rough surfaces and dangerous drops, these surreal concrete structures were very much a product of their time.

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  Churchill Gardens estate in Pimlico, London, 1978This playground is on the modernist Churchill Gardens estate designed by Powell and Moya, but clearly built at a later date. Before these postwar playgrounds were built, children would have been playing in the bomb sites left after the war. It’s possible the architects were referencing that in their design.

  All captions by Simon Terrill 

  Photograph: John Donat/RIBA

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  Churchill Gardens estate, Pimlico, 1956The flying saucer looks like it has crashed and there’s a mysterious cruise-liner chimney. Brutalist buildings are built out of bush-hammered concrete and the playgrounds are made out of the same material.

  Photograph: John Maltby/RIBA

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  Balfron Tower playground, Poplar, London, 2015
  Ernö Goldinger, who built the Balfron Tower, was interested in play and children’s toys. But this playground looks inhospitable. Apparently the slide once had metal on it – now it is just the concrete, so you wouldn’t want to go down it – it would take your skin off.

  Photograph: Simon Terrill/Assemble

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  Park Hill estate, Sheffield, 1963Part of the Park Hill estate, designed by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, who were tutored by the Smithsons – the founders of new brutalism. The estate was famous for its experimental ideas, like walkways in the sky, and that approach was reflected in the playground.

  Photograph: Arch Press Archive/RIBA

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  Park Hill estate, Sheffield, 1962The same shapes appear in brutalist playgrounds around the country: hexagons, ramps, holes in walls. The children would have had a very physical encounter with the concrete – crawling over it, feeling it under their hands, grazing their knees. It’s a very different way to experience brutalism than the way most adults did.

  Photograph: Arch Press Archive/RIBA

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  Churchill Gardens estate playground, Pimlico, 1963 These unconventional structures encourage children to take risks, to explore. There is an element of danger which you might not get in soft play areas today.

  Photograph: John Maltby/RIBA

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  Assemble and Simon Terrill’s foam playground at the RIBA headquarters, LondonWe talked about using concrete, but it would have been impossible in a museum. And it would have been inappropriate for children to play on. So we used foam, which by coincidence has a very similar speckled look to bush-hammered concrete.

  Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

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  Children playing on Assemble and Simon Terrill’s playground at RIBAThe colours are standard issue, and relate to the density of the foam. Pink foam is denser than blue. The brutalist ethos was to expose the function of a building, and honour the truth of your materials. Brutalist playgrounds were a truth to concrete, ours is a truth to foam.

  Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

The Thoughtfulness Of Nonverbal Space – Shin Noguchi

SHIN NOGUCHI

Published on June 5, 2015 on Aint Bad Magazine.

Shin Noguchi is an award winning street photographer based in Kamakura and Tokyo, Japan. He describes his street photography as an attempt to capture extraordinary moments of excitement, beauty and humanism, among the flow of everyday life and has a discreet, poetic and enigmatic approach that is sensitive to the subtleties and complexities of Japanese culture without using posed/staged and no-finder/hip shot. “Street photography always projects the “truth”. The “truth” that I talk about isn’t necessarily that I can see, but they also exist in society, in street, in people’s life. and I always try to capture this reality beyond my own values and viewpoint/perspective.” Today we take a look at Shin’s series titled Nonverbal Space.

“Nonverbal Space”, it is unstable, distorted, and contradicts what we have created. And [Ma], exists in there.

The characteristic of the Japanese [Ma] is very beautiful, also delicate, and if you are not always aware of the very small amount of undulation of [Ma], it loses balance immediately.

I tried to listen to a lump of invisible voice (or the voice that was confined) of [Ma] existing in nonverbal/unstable spaces of our daily lives, and I aimed to visualize the two invisible elements, [Ma] and human [Gou] (karma/conduct) that underlies in [Ma].

Also, in this project, I dared to express the human being as the existence (visualization of [Gou]), not as an individual but by making the whole nonverbal space the subject without including people in the frame. this way, i am managing the awareness of the relationship between individuals, society and the surrounding environment for the viewers.

Danshi Tatekawa said that “Rakugo is an affirmation of human [Gou] (karma/conduct), that is, inconsistency”, and Alexander Pope also said that “To err is human, to forgive divine”.
As they talked towards “people”, could their words really be said in front of the “Nonverbal Space” which is more closer to the “society”? and could that “forgiveness” recreate another type of hope or a new possibility in this land where everything had changed to something that looks irreversible?

I shoot the “Nonverbal Space” (it is unstable, distorted, and something contradicts what we have created) while being aware of their words which were created by human beings as well.

Finally, by expressing the subjective viewpoint of the photographer, this project is, so to speak, an antithesis against the new topographic photographs.

To view more of Shin’s work please visit his website.

The Rock Trust Postcard Art Exhibition and Auction 2015

I have some work up for auction as part of The Rock Trust Postcard Art Exhibition And Auction 2015. This is taking place in Edinburgh from 5th June – 2nd July in the Summerhall . There will be some well know artists alongside artist like myself auctioning off postcard sized artworks. All proceeds go to helping youth rebuild their lives. If you are in Edinburgh you can check out the work in person. For those not in Edinburgh you can see all the works online and still bid on any works you may like.

THERE IS ONLY ONE CATCH AND THAT IS CATCH-22 – Y GALLERY, NYC

THERE IS ONLY ONE CATCH AND THAT IS CATCH-22
A project curated by Blanca de la Torre

May 15th – June 28th, 2015.
Opening Reception: FRIDAY May 15th from 7pm to 10pm.

Y GALLERY is pleased to present “There is Only One Catch and that is Catch 22 ”,a group show curated by Blanca de la Torre at Y Gallery. It will be the first exhibition at Y Gallery’s new space in the Lower East Side in the fifth floor of a historical building located in 319 Grand St. NY 10002.* This exhibition features the work of seventeen international artists, and will be comprised of drawing, photography, video, installation, sculpture and mixed media works by:

Artemio, Greta Alfaro, Alberto Borea, Juanli Carrión, Danilo Correale, Chueca, Leonardo Herrera, Christian Jankowsky, Enrique Jezik, Ximena Labra, Antonio Vega Macotela, Detext (Raúl Martínez), Kate Newby, Alejandra Prieto, Wilfredo Prieto, Avelino Salas and Joaquín Segura

About  “There Is Only One Catch and That Is Catch 22”

Participation in the present moment implies the tacit adherence to a cult of certain contradictions. This is a world of crossed messages, symbolic traffic, and sudden transformations in which it becomes clear that there is no idea of “sense,” beyond that present in the multiple nature of this concept.

This is an exhibition that takes this basic problem as a point of departure. Catch 22 is a logic trap initially suggested by Joseph Heller in his eponymous novel published in 1961. Set during the II World War the novel develops this idea but in close relation to the operating area of ​​military bureaucracy, strict and absurd at the same time. The term later became part of the English vocabulary because of its accuracy to refer to certain unsolvable puzzles in which the only way out is denied by an inherent fact of the problem itself. Furthermore this impossible scenario appeals broadly to current circumstances such as arbitrary political decisions, militarism, and absurd bureaucracies worldwide.

The artists included in this exhibition provide works that connect to different explorations of what is considered a biconditional tautology. The works outline different vanishing points, either referring to military and political connotations of this construct; or to that section of invisibility of certain processes or social situations, as well as the efforts to maintain that invisibility.

On the other hand, the technique chosen by each artist plays a key role in representing this paradox by operating as a dialectical device that allows us to enter the circuit where the intractable political liability inherent to the material sets its own speech and takes us into the eternal dilemma of the concept before or after its formal resolution. Thus, the works venture into a double connection with the Catch-22: the conceptual approach of them, together with the hoop stress and the disorder between the material and the concept represented, which also canceled its value in use and intensifies the fetish of merchandise.

– Blanca de la Torre, 2015

Artists in this exhibition: Alberto Borea, Alejandra Prieto, Antonio Vega Macotela, Artemio, Avelino Sala, Christian Jankowski, Chueca, Danilo Correale, DETEXT, Enrique Ježik, Greta Alfaro, Joaquín Segura, Juanli Carrión, Kate Newby, Leonardo Herrera, Wilfredo Prieto, Ximena Labra

at our NEW SPACE

319 Grand St 5th floor
New York, NY 10002

www.ygallerynewyork.com

HIDING BEHIND SQUARES – SEOKMIN KO

Seoul-based Korean artist Seokmin Ko’s photographic series The Square evokes both a peaceful sense of being at one with the world around us and a feeling of being lost. Addressing ideas of normalcy and identity, the artist holds up a giant mirror to reflect his surroundings and camouflage himself from the viewer. “We live locked by each other’s view and even our eye views sometimes serve as surveillance over each other. When individual views tamed by cultures and customs in societies aggregate and then serve for views of groups, each individual has no choice but stays as a standardized human being hiding himself or herself. Like this, under society strongly influenced by views of group, a real individual can’t co-exist… We begin to change ourselves to become ‘A normal human being.'” (via)