First, an apology. To every architect who
has ever tried to strike up a conversation with me at a party and been
sidelined by my rabid interest in their career of choice.
Sweetly bearded and sporting the obligatory
black-rimmed glasses, they try in vain to steer the conversation away from
their work. To music, to film – I don’t want to hear it. Just tell me more how
buildings happen, how the spaces we inhabit from the first breath to our last
come into existence.
The thing is, I’m sure it’s not just me.
Architects are painted as a separate breed in pop culture from Ayn Rand to How I Met Your Mother, as heroic visionaries shaping the
future and rescuing us from the Big Box. No matter that a surplus of
bright-eyed graduates serve beers and wait tables in cities around the world –
architecture is still seen as a calling, and an exclusive club.
Apparently London designer Fabrice Le Nezet
has fallen under the spell too, creating his latest series of sculptures, Measure, inspired by the concepts of
tension and compression in architecture.
In his dramatic works of concrete and
steel, once symbolic notions of weight, mass and measurement give way to a
purposeful making visible of the forces which govern the natural world.
Blurring the boundary between
representative space and physical space, constrained by weight and mass, Le
Nezet’s works seem to refute gravity.
The tension comes from our own perception
of the connecting cords, which contain
an uneasy balance of apparent sturdiness and potential movement.
No matter how cold and static we know the
sculptures are, and no matter how little we know about architectural theory, it
is impossible not to view them as somehow on the verge of shattering movement.