/////D\\\\\: May 2011

Sneaking behind Bank of England

Conversation with the external guard of Bank of England while trying to cast latex on the building . The conversation ends with him accompanying me to the House Guards, who despite all the efforts to convince them (that I am a humble art student doing my final major project WHICH WOULD NOT DAMAGE A SINGLE MOLECULE OF THEIR BUILDING) they still rejected me. They suggested I sent a letter to the press office and acquire permission. I told them I had already done but without hearing back. They said contact the Governor to complain about them not answering.

I could tell no one wanted to take responsibility of the fact that there might have been 0.0001% chance of damage (which there wouldn't). It was a clear authority decision that proves my point of phallocentric buildings and their character.

Goof: 'Permission from my college' - I meant support letter from the Head of Third Year David Coventon.

Quotes on walls series no2

A sneaky picture of the printed impressions of walls series using blind de-bossing and letterpress.

full size 750x550mm coming soon

Casting experimentation

Blind de-bossed textures

Proofing of the plates. Big prints coming soon.
© Despina Rangou 2011

Photopolymer Plates

Finally got my head (and wallet) around these polymer plates, all depicting wall textures from the Vicinity Book series. Blind de-bossing prints coming soon. Thanks to Irene for recommending StudioTone - they are cheap and super fast.

Different method of impression

Trials of casting building texture using latex and plaster for my new project. (coming end May)

Forms of Authority by Lebbeus Woods

Monument to the March Dead, Berlin, 1921, by Walter Gropius.

Monument to the Open Hand, Chandigarh, Punjab, India, built 1972, by Le Corbusier.

Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 1960s-1980s
by Croatian sculptor Dušan Džamonja.

'From the art of resistance to unreasonable authority to the architecture celebrating it
(authority is always unreasonable), that’s the journey from the last post to this one.

Authority is a fascinating, disturbing, in some ways exciting and in others depressing topic for architects. It is at the root of our social relationships and the structure of our social arrangements. Social classes, chains of command and decision-making, distribution of wealth, the enactment and enforcement of civil laws—these and more are based on concepts of authority, or who has the right to act in the name of others to determine both the general shape of society and its particulars.

The monuments that concern us here are those designed to commemorate and legitimize the enduring authority of the winners of great conflicts, political, military, and ideological. It is the winners who write history and commission the monuments as a form of that writing. However, it is a curious feature of most such monuments that their abstract character ends up commemorating the artist or architect who designs them, especially as the memory of the conflicts themselves fades from public memory. The poem by P.B. Shelley, quoted below, evokes this effect with grace and subtlety, as does the tale—no doubt apocryphal—that the great Lighthouse of Alexandria had a plaque naming the (long-forgotten) Pharaoh who commissioned it, designed to fall off in a hundred years and reveal yet another plaque, naming only the architect who designed it, holder, in rhese cases, of the most enduring authority of all.

Sic transit Gloria mundi—So goes the glory of this world.'