RSA: New Contemporaries

The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh

April 13 - May 8, 2013

 

Installation with four components in group exhibition. Separate titles: 'New Beginnings', 'Slice', 'Hieros' and 'history'.

'Hieros' is based on the temple of Hera in Olympia – the oldest preserved temple of the Doric order.

'Slice' is a cast from a mould taken from a thin section of one of the columns of the Royal Scottish Academy, a neo-classical building from 1822 imitating the Doric order.

The exhibition took place during large scale construction work on a new tramline in Edinburgh, 57 years after the city retired its old tram network.

No fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years.

Walter Benjamin, 'On the concept of history'

So long as the concept of hierarchy dominates architecture (as it presently does), architecture will stay rooted in classical models, at the urban and building scales alike. So long as architecture stays rooted in classical models (as it presently does), it will continue to express an old, even archaic, idea of knowledge. So long as architecture expresses another idea of knowledge than that which best serves the present conditions of living (as it presently does), architecture will be a regressive force in the world of human affairs.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Heterarchies'