The Bank of England in Ruins

The exhibition responds to this context of architecture and finance through the lens of 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.

With contributions by Studio Jacob and 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, Witherford Watson Mann

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.