Architecture Season

Hauser & Wirth Somerset has launched the Radić Pavilion (the Serpentine Gallery 2014 Pavilion), designed by Chilean architect Smiljan Radić, at Durslade Farm, Bruton. To celebrate the launch of the pavilion, a season of exhibitions, events and installations exploring the nature of collaboration between architecture and other creative disciplines has been programmed.

The development of Durslade Farm into Hauser & Wirth Somerset marries renovation, conservation and new build, the historic and the contemporary. The Radić Pavilion, which has been installed at the end of Oudolf Field – the garden designed by Piet Oudolf – sits naturally within this landscape. A dialogue has been created between the gallery complex and pavilion, and their relationship with the garden. Occupying a footprint of some 350 square metres, the pavilion depicts a semi-translucent, cylindrical structure, designed to resemble a shell resting on large quarry stones.

Susan Philipsz, the artist known for her sound works, is creating a site-specific installation inspired by the old English architecture of the Threshing Barn at Durslade Farm. Philipsz has developed four different sound works based around themes of dance and movement that will play in repertory; each work weaves lyrics and unravels tones, so that the visitor’s perception shifts from the intimacy of the voice, to the architecture of the barn, and the Cloister courtyard beyond it. The tones come together and fall apart in places, inviting the audience to piece them together as they move through the space.

The Threshing Barn will host a vocal work that takes the outcast dancer Lucia Joyce as its subject. In the Cloister courtyard an instrumental canon is followed by a four-channel voice work. Each of the works is punctuated by a rhythmic percussive interlude. The title ‘As Many As Will’ is a reference to John Playford’s ‘English Dancing Master’ (1651), a popular guidebook for country dancing. These country dances emphasised spatial patterns over elaborate footwork, and the exhibition echoes those formations in a sound installation that fills the barn and spreads out into the courtyard and beyond.

‘LAND MARKS: Structures for a Poetic Universe’ is an exhibition of architectural studies and models which will take place in the Workshop and Pigsty galleries. The exhibition, curated by Nicholas Olsberg and Markus Lähteenmäki, explores the boundaries between sculpture and architecture and the power of structures to transform the landscape and the city into poetic environments – ranging from a Rococo fountain to a ‘living-capsule’ for the electronic age.

Drawing primarily from a private collection, the exhibition displays more than 100 examples of architecture as sculpture, from the work of form-givers like Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright to such conceptual projects as an ideal Renaissance fortress and Superstudio’s Continuous Monument.

A series of talks entitled ‘Converging Lines: Art, Architecture & Design’ has been programmed and will take place within the pavilion between March and June. Speakers include Smiljan Radić, architect, Luis Laplace, lead architect of Hauser & Wirth Somerset, and Ab Rogers, designer and Head of Interior Design at the Royal College of Art.

As part of Architecture Season, Hauser & Wirth Somerset will be launching an architecture competition entitled ‘The Shed Project’, which will offer young architects the opportunity to redesign and develop an original out-building located next to the Maltings studio space in Bruton town centre. The Shed will be used by creative practitioners working with Hauser & Wirth Somerset as part of its residency programme. The competition will be open to all architecture graduates under the age of thirty-five and will be judged by a panel of specially selected individuals from within the creative industries, including writer and collector Niall Hobhouse; graphic designer John McConnell; journalist, critic and curator Justin McGuirk; and artist and former professor of sculpture at the Royal College of Art, Richard Wentworth. The panel will be chaired by Edward Workman, Hauser & Wirth, Director of Global Property.

Dan Graham’s ‘S-Curve’ (2001), will be installed in the Farmyard. Its placement here will engage with the local context, landscape and architecture of the existing buildings. Graham’s pavilions are said to blur the line between sculpture and architecture. ‘S-Curve’ comprises steel, glass and two-way mirror, creating diverse optical effects only seen through the interaction of the viewer.

Open Tuesday – Sunday. Closed Mondays (except Bank Holidays)

www.hauserwirthsomerset.com

Location:
Hauser & Wirth Somerset
Durslade Farm / Dropping Lane
BA10 0NL Bruton / Somerset
United Kingdom