Giles Round's 'We live in the office', at the RIBA

Multi-disciplinary artist Giles Round has just revealed his installation for the RIBA’s Architecture Gallery and foyer, entitled ’We live in the office’.

(Image credit: Sophie Mutevelian for RIBA)

By Ellie Stathaki

last updated 21 September 2022

in Features

Bridging art and architecture, the RIBA has just unveiled its latest site-specific commission, housed at its art deco London headquarters – an installation by multi-disciplinary artist Giles Round, entitled ‘We live in the office’.

This is not the RIBA’s first foray into art. The collaboration between Assemble and Simon Terrill last year on the 'Brutalist Playground' exhibition received critical acclaim, so the institute is now back with its second instalment in the series, that aims to open up new ways of engaging the wider public in architectural discourse.

Round was invited to explore the RIBA Collections – the institute’s extensive archive of books, drawings and photographs – to research and experiment with a key, and very familiar, architectural feature: the façade. Drawing inspiration from iconic façades by masters such as Berthold Lubetkin, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and Jane Drew, as well as different architectural styles and periods, the artist created a graphic series for the Architecture Gallery and RIBA foyer using everything from bright colours and abstracted façade patterns, to chain mail curtains. The result? A dramatic spatial transformation that investigates the aesthetic qualities of façades, as well as the way we ‘collect’ and perceive them, explains the artist.

‘Central to the exhibition, an idea reflected in the title, is the re-appropriation and repurposing of buildings that no longer fulfil the functional requirements for which they were designed’, says Round. ‘Working with the RIBA Collections, I focused on particular façades that I found interesting either graphically or due to their back-story. Throughout the exhibition the graphic quality of the selected façades are appropriated, stylistically altered, into new forms and different media.’

The show was curated by RIBA curatorial programmes coordinator Corinne Mynatt, RIBA project curator Colin Sterling and Lotte Juul Petersen, the artists and programmes curator at Wysing Arts Centre.

Through the exhibition, the RIBA's second show to combine art and architecture, Round explores a familiar architectural element: the façade.

Delving into the RIBA Collections – the institute’s rich archive of books, drawings and photographs – the artist drew inspiration from different façade styles and architectural periods.

The result? A colourful and playful transformation of the gallery and foyer space at the RIBA's London HQ that ustilises everything from colour and pattern, to chain mail curtains.

Part of Round's inspiration board: the Minoan palace of Knossos at Iraklion, Crete. This is the façade of the shrine on the central court and its system of colouring by Sir Arthur Evans (1911).

Similarly, Round looked at Berthold Lubetkin's work. Pictured: an unexecuted alternative design for a prefabricated house front, part of the 100 Houses Scheme, Thorntree Gill Housing, Peterlee New Town, Co. Durham (1944).

INFORMATION

‘We live in the office’ is on view until 5 February. For more information, visit the RIBA website

ADDRESS

RIBA
66 Portland Place
London, W1B 1AD

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Ellie Stathaki is the Architecture & Environment Director at Wallpaper*. She trained as an architect at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece and studied architectural history at the Bartlett in London. Now an established journalist, she has been a member of the Wallpaper* team since 2006, visiting buildings across the globe and interviewing leading architects such as Tadao Ando and Rem Koolhaas. Ellie has also taken part in judging panels, moderated events, curated shows and contributed in books, such as The Contemporary House (Thames & Hudson, 2018), Glenn Sestig Architecture Diary (2020) and House London (2022).

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