Category: {architecture}

Architecture

Roger Hiorns’ crystal world

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A visitor examining Seizure. Photograph by Sarah Lee.

I’d love to see this installation work which opened on Wednesday at 157 Harper Road, Southwark, London. British artist Roger Hiorns has transformed a flat awaiting demolition by growing thick mats of copper sulphate crystals on all the interior surfaces, a work he calls Seizure. Copper sulphate always brings back memories of chemistry lessons at school and childhood chemistry sets. I recall growing the crystals in a test tube but such meagre attempts at efflorescence give little indication of how beautiful these things are at a larger scale. Happily Flickr has further documentation of Hiorns’ work while Adrian Searle reviews it for The Guardian, fittingly referencing JG Ballard’s The Crystal World. “Seizure is a sort of sci-fi nightmare in Southwark, and that this happens in a council flat makes it all the more uncanny and disturbing,” he says. A shame, then, that it wasn’t situated in an empty high-rise block for maximum Ballard overload.

Seizure runs until 2 November, 2008. Artangel has location details and opening times.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• JG Ballard book covers

Hadrian: Empire and Conflict

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The sculpture known as Antinous Mondragone (c.130 AD).

The planned British Museum exhibition I mentioned in January, a major examination of the Emperor Hadrian’s life and influence, opens today and runs to 26 October, 2008. Hadrian means more to Britons than most Roman Emperors on account of the still-extant wall which bears his name, built to divide England from the untameable wilds of Scotland, or Caledonia as it was then known. On a personal level he fascinates for his obsession with his dead lover Antinous and the mausoleum (later the Castel Sant’Angelo) and villa he left in Rome.

Hadrian was a man of great contradiction in both his personality and reign: a military man and homosexual, he combined ruthless suppression of dissent with cultural tolerance. He reacted with great ferocity against the Jewish Revolt in 132 AD (examples of poignant objects belonging to Jewish rebels hiding in caves near Jerusalem will be included in the exhibition), but he was also a dedicated philhellene, passionate about Greek culture. He took a young Greek male lover, Antinous, who accompanied him on his travels around the empire. In AD 130, Antinous drowned in mysterious circumstances in Egypt. Consumed by grief, Hadrian founded a new city, Antinoupolis, close to the spot where he died and had Antinous declared a god, linked to the Egyptian deity Osiris. A cult of Antinous-Osiris sprang up resulting in statues, busts and silverware featuring the image of the newly deified youth.

And proving that this is a subject whose time has come, John Boorman has a film in production based on Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. Given Boorman’s uneven output that could be either a good or bad thing; we’ll no doubt find out soon enough.

• A very modern emperor | Mary Beard on Hadrian
• Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage site
• Virtual Museum: Antinous Portraits

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hadrian and Greek love
• Vedute di Roma
• The Cult of Antinous

Berenice Abbott

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Manhattan Skyline: I. South Street and Jones Lane, Manhattan. March 26, 1936.

I love Berenice Abbott’s photographs of New York in the 1930s which capture the city in transition from a world of 19th century brownstones to the more familiar high-rise skyline. Dover Publications produced their own collection of her photos which I used as one of my key references when drawing Reverbstorm. The NYPL Digital Gallery has a huge selection online, including many which didn’t make the Dover book.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Eugene de Salignac
• Luther Gerlach’s Los Angeles
• The Bradbury Building: Looking Backward from the Future
• Edward Steichen
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Atget’s Paris
• Downtown LA by Ansel Adams