The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Live Adventures
as a main point of entry. This came through East 1997, an international
group show curated by Lynda Morris at Norwich School of Art in association
with the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia.
We were invited by Nicola Johnson and William Jeffett to produce a sitespecific
installation at the the Centre, which was designed by the architects
Foster Associates to house the Sainsbury’s art collection. Norman Foster had
insisted that the building should relate to the scientists of the University of
East Anglia: “The site chosen terminates the major linear sequence of university
buildings—being adjacent to the School of Biological Sciences at the
end of the cranked teaching block and related to what is seen as the ‘domestic’
scale of Norfolk Terrace.” 2 Another aspect of the site is that the Sainsbury
Centre is set in an artificial landscape: a former golf course complete
with lake created from a flooded gravel pit. Similarly, what appears to be a
lawn immediately in front of the center is in fact a Dutch-built “green roof”
covering the Crescent Wing galleries underground—also designed by Foster—and
creating an apparent fusion of architecture and landscape.
New Holland grew out of a consideration of the relationships
between architecture, economic activity, and cultural responses to the
landscape in a consumer society. The installation consisted of a new steel
structure based on an industrial/agricultural building, positioned outside
the main entrance to the Sainsbury Centre. In size and proportion—
10 × 20 × 33 meters—the structure referred to a “Bernard Matthews”
turkey breeder unit, though it had neither doors nor windows. The heavy
mechanical beat of a blend of rap, house, and garage music from CD compilations
could be heard pumping out from the darkness inside.
On one level, New Holland exploited tensions between English romantic
representations of landscape, exemplified by Henry Moore’s nearby
sculpture, and the realities of modern industrial agriculture as experienced
in Norfolk’s intensive turkey farms. The structure was at once entirely appropriate
yet uncomfortably out of place in its physical and institutional
context.
Spatially, the work simultaneously divided and linked the Sainsbury
Centre and the Henry Moore “reclining figure” sculpture. Foster’s
building, which proposes a technocratic patriarchy, and Moore’s vision of
nature as “Mother” signify two sides of modernist ideology in architecture
and agriculture. Positioning our work outdoors questioned the Centre architecturally
and institutionally, yet the piece was not created in terms of
a simple opposition: instead, New Holland occupied a space of controlled
rebellion.
Architecturally, the barn’s system-built construction methods and
materials addressed Foster’s award-winning structure, with its rationale of