Starts:
07:00pm, Thursday, 15 September 2016
Until:
09:30pm, Thursday, 15 September 2016
Where: Highgate Cemetery, Swain's Lane, London N6 6QX
Tickets: £10
Good Grief is a collaboration between the Architecture Foundation, Sam Jacob Studio, Mushpit and Highgate Cemetery
Client
The Architecture Foundation
Architects
Sam Jacob Studio
Engineers
AKT II
Sponsors
AKT II, Carmody Groarke, RCKA, Zaha Hadid Architects
Drinks Sponsor
Zaha Hadid was the living embodiment of the spirit of modern architecture in the first decades of the twenty-first century. No architect of her generation was more widely lauded and, whether they drew on her example or set themselves in opposition to it, none was unaffected by her influence. It is scarcely an exaggeration to claim that her recent death was also the death of architecture’s present.
Hadid’s sudden absence offers a challenge to her followers and combatants alike. What aspects of her work are relevant to architecture’s future? How has her cultural prominence impacted on the generation that has grown up in her shadow? Could our current professional culture produce a talent of comparable originality and influence?
As part of the Architecture Foundation’s Good Grief series exploring themes of loss and resurrection, this evening debate considers the legacy of one of the most significant architects to have worked in Britain. The dominant architectural paradigm has lost its figurehead. Is this a moment when a very different set of architectural priorities can gain support?
Speakers
Chair: Ellis Woodman, Director of The Architecture Foundation
Jason Whiteley, Matheson Whiteley Architects
Jessica Reynolds, vPPR
Hugh Strange, Hugh Strange Architects
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, AY Architects
Plus Edward Jones, Hanif Kara and Jayden Ali battling it out in The Graveyard of Ideas
About the tomb
Sam Jacob Studio's A Very Small Part of Architecture (2016)
The Good Grief series is staged in and around a specially-commissioned temporary tomb designed by Sam Jacob Studio entitled A Very Small Part of Architecture.
A Very Small Part of Architecture resurrects Austrian Modernist architect Adolf Loos’s 1921 design for a mausoleum for art historian Max Dvorák. Though never built, the image of Loos’ design has haunted architectural culture ever since. Here the heavy dark and masonic form is recreated at 1:1 scale using a lightweight timber frame and scaffold net: A ghostly reenactment of an unrealised architectural idea.
Adolf Loos's Mausoleum for Max Dvorák (1921)
It takes its title from Loos’ essay Architecture (1910) in which he argues that “only a very small part of architecture belongs to the realm of art: The tomb and the monument”.
Built within Highgate Cemetery, amongst the many monuments and memorials to the dead, A Very Small Part Of Architecture makes a different kind of memorial. Not one dedicated to a person, an event or a moment in time, not designed to remember the past but instead to imagine other possibilities, altered presents and alternative futures.