Chapter 2 of 24
Malevich Tectonic Designed As Hotel On Hungerford Bridge, London. 4th Year Student Project
While in my fourth year we were given a project which is a Malevich tectonic, which was a kind of architectonic model; and it was implied, through a slide by Malevich, that if this was to be inserted or imposed on an urban context it becomes an architecture. So it's no longer a sculpture but it becomes an architecture. And this was given to us and we had to find a scale for it, we had to give it a site and we had to invade by a programme invented by ourselves and written by ourselves. I just imposed a Malevich-tectonic on Hungerford Bridge in London and a series of layers horizontally which had to do with a very hedonistic kind of living and club facilities. The brief for The Peak, which was about five or six years later as a competition, was very similar to the program for the Malevich-tectonics. Anyway there were certain key people which one should refer to, apart from Malevich. It was also the notion of insertion of architecture and Suprematism into architecture, injection of Suprematism into architecture was very important. That was done by Leonidov and, to a lesser degree, by El Lissitzky. And I think that the implication of that was not only that things would begin to look fragmented or whatever, but that the plan, the new calligraphy of the plan began to be re-inscripted. And what was eventually, for me, was the most interesting of this work, the injection of Suprematism into architecture, the idea was to also liberate certain conditions of the ground or of the architecture whether it's in an urban context or not. So that this led to a series of investigations: first the notion of fragmentation within a certain condition, how can it differentiate between certain kind of invention of a new kind of public space or civic space, the differences between those and much calmer spaces, and this was manifested into dealing with various projects.