1851: The Great Exhibition, at the height of the British empire, produced both the ambition and profits for what was mockingly called Albertopolis – Prince Albert’s enclave of cultural institutions in South Kensington. Planned to reinforce Britain’s industrial power by providing education in art and science to the working classes, it embodied the scientific and philosophical ideas of the time: notions of accumulation, rationality and empiricism.
1911: Alfred Jarry set out the many definitions of the alternative science of pataphysics in his book The Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll: Pataphysician. Jarry’s anti-rational methodology – a philosophy of imaginary solutions – was a reaction to nineteenth-century positivism and an attempt to subvert lofty and worthy ambitions.
2014: Unit projects take a pataphysical stance towards the contemporary institutions of Albertopolis by championing the exception and the useless.
Dalia revives the mystical practice of alchemy through petri-dish laboratory cultures, while Yasmina suspends anti-gravity living capsules within a tensegrity structure over Imperial College. Tim creates a non-architecture of air within the backstreets of the university. Anthony and Lara toy with evolutionary science within the Natural History Museum with an elevated world housing an un-natural history institute and a museum of hoaxes. The memory of the Royal Horticultural Gardens is evoked with Shaan’s surreal sunken garden that explores the emotional life of plants. The subjectivity of visual reality is explored by Lee’s observatory in the park while Sophia’s imperfect rehearsal soundscape occupies the space between the Albert Hall and Royal College of Music. Museums are critiqued by Ahmad with his ‘phynancial towers’ that are built for institutional fund-raising and Bodo’s anti-museum in the park – a folly that has no purpose. James addresses notions of curation and voyeurism with his elevated mega-vitrine that contains and exhibits Albertopolis.
Miraj Ahmed
Martin Jameson
Ana Araujo, Pierre d’Avoine, Fabrizio Ballabio, Umberto Bellardi Ricci, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Georgie and Charlie Corry Wright, Nicolas Feldmeyer, Andrew Hugill, Nuria Alvarez Lombardero, Elena Palacios Carral, Victoria Rice, Gregory Ross, Colette Sheddick, Takero Shimazaki, Brett Steele, Patrick Usborne, Manijeh Verghese, Thomas Weaver, Richard Wentworth, Simon Whittle