Playing the Picturesque
Summer Installation in the Architecture Gallery, commissioned by the RIBA as part of London Festival of Architecture 2019.
The RIBA’s HQ in Portland Place sits within the scenic route towards Regent’s Park designed by John Nash around ‘rus in urbe’ – the picturesque illusion of nature within the city. Inspired by this, the installation will take the form of a series of scaled folly structures extracted from real picturesque landscapes, extended into interactive virtual game environments through digital projections. Twisting their traditional role as markers in the landscape, our follies become junctions between virtual and physical. They will grow and change in response to the movement of visitors through the gallery.
Operating across physical and virtual realms, Playing the Picturesque asks whether such boundaries are now so fluid that we can consider virtual worlds as sites for realising architecture in their own right.
The exhibition ran from 4th June to 7th September 2019.
Special thanks to Johanna Just and Ness Lafoy for their contribution and assistance.