The Bank of England in Ruins
An
exhibition by Studio Jacob, Institute of Architecture (IoA)
The Bank of England in Ruins is an exhibition
about architecture, ruins, value, and money. The gallery itself is in the heart of the City of London’s financial district,
inside James Stirling's postmodernist No1 Poultry, opposite the actual Bank of England.
Responding to this context, the exhibition’s centrepiece is a large physical model made by Studio Jacob
based on a drawing by Joseph Gandy showing John Soane’s design of the Bank of England. Soane’s building had only recently
been completed, but Gandy’s drawing (1830) shows the bank in ruins after some unspecified future catastrophe.
The
strangeness of depicting architecture (and a key edifice of the British state) as a ruin is the starting point for a collection
of different projects. These also respond to Soane and Stirling’s interest in fragmentation and reassembly, the reuse of pieces
of history to construct possible futures.
Architecture here is thought of as a product of varied and conflicting
value systems: Economic value, symbolic value, use value, social value and so on. Buildings are caught up in the exchange
of value in many ways: Architecture can be a symbol of value (eg the temple or the skyscraper as the image of a bank, or buildings
used on bank notes), its value can be an economic asset, traded in the market, backed by loans, atomised into credit default
swaps and other complex financial instruments. Architecture is the physical site where competing ideas of value are exchanged.
Both the product of tensions and contradictions between different value systems. and a means to imagine other possibilities.
The exhibition takes Gandy’s vision as a provocation to reconsider architecture’s relationship with value (or values
relationship with architecture).
With contributions by Aslı Çiçek, Bamidele Awoyemi, CAN, David
Kohn, DRDH, Drawing Architecture Studio, Fala, Hugh Strange, Jamie Foubert, Joseph Zeal Henry, Kuehn Malvezzi, Madelon Vriesendorp,
Maria Lisogorskaya, Mary Duggan, MBL architects, MOS, Muoto, Nigel Coates, Paradigma Ariadné, Paul Anderson, Peter Wilson,
Pier Paolo Tamborelli, Piovenefab, Point Supreme, Sam Chermayeff, Sam Jacob, Sean Griffiths, Sergison Bates, Shahed Saleem,
Space Popular, Supervoid
Kindly supported by Hypha Studios, recessed.space, Cheapside, Sir John Soane’s Museum
and the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
