Who said architecture is just about buildings? Royal Academy President Sir Nicholas Grimshaw and his practice teamed up with choreographer Katie Green for a dance and architecture performance, with a sneak preview at the RA Courtyard last Friday. Grimshaw’s team created a site-specific piece involving a number of custom-made flexible structures accompanying dancers from the Place London Contemporary Dance School dancers.
Click here to see more of the festival.
The architecture complimented body and movement, with geometric angles and flat surfaces. The dance will be performed in various locations throughout this week, around Clerkenwell and the City for all to enjoy. And if all this made you feel like dancing, you can take part at the Embodied Energy workshop this Thursday at Grimshaw Architects’ office, where a dance-themed exhibition is also currently on.
Southwark Lido
The temporary structure received a fillip with the creation of the Southwark Lido, an architectural experiment that occupies a small slice of South London. A collaboration between French architects EXYZT and the film maker Sara Muzio, the Lido landed in Union Street as a riot of beach huts and awnings, strung together with scaffolding poles and a tower that rose up alongside the adjacent railway arches.
Commission by the Architecture Foundation, as a pop-up social centre, the Lido functions as both drop-in playspace for local children, party venue for the bright young things following this year’s LFA and, above all, good use of an empty site while the machinations of planning rumble on. The Union Street site is owned by Solid Space, Roger Zogolovitch’s bespoke development company, and the Lido marks a welcome move away from dull hoardings hiding barren sites.
London South Central
Wallpaper HQ is in the eye of a construction storm. Our days are punctuated by hammer drills and clattering cranes as the historic borough of Southwark sheds its dreary post-war skin in favour of a contemporary update. ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ is a pop-up exhibition held in the foyer of Allies and Morrison Architects' discretely modern office. A&M are one of the main drivers (and benefactors) behind the architectural renaissance in the area, which also includes new buildings by Renzo Piano, Rogers Stirk Harbour and - possibly - Herzog & de Meuron (again). The exhibition showcases models and plans of proposed new developments, big and small, from the overhaul of the Elephant and Castle to Piano's hotly anticipated 'Shard of Glass', demolition works for which began a few months ago.
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