The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

the “well-serviced shed.” (Coincidentally, the Bernard Matthews turkey
farm we visited when researching New Holland links with Foster’s references
to aviation in the Centre, as this “farm” is located on a former U.S. air base,
with the barns built directly on the old runways.) Visitors approaching the
Centre were confronted with a bland but imposing structure clad entirely
in nonreflective, polyester-coated pressed steel (as preferred by planning
committees). The structure referred primarily to a modern farm building,
but it would be equally acceptable in a retail park or industrial estate. In the
beautiful grounds of the Sainsbury Centre it could be seen as the “country
cousin” at a smart garden party, or yet another infill development in an unspoiled
rural idyll.
The house and garage music further played on the notions of rebellion
in the piece, with the mechanistic succession of repetitive beats
evoking the now-traditional invasion of the countryside for weekender
raves, while at the same time considering the absorption of youthful dissent
into the blind hedonism of mainstream consumer culture. Parallels emerged
between the barn’s containment of music related to black culture and
the Sainsbury Centre’s containment of ethnic (African, Oceanic, pre-
Columbian, and oriental) objects: in each structure, the cultural product
could be grasped as representative of some “primitive other.”
As well as being the name of a leading manufacturer of farm machinery,
the title “New Holland” called to mind historic links between the
Netherlands and East Anglia, including patterns of trade and the engineering
methods used to reclaim land from the sea.
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Live Adventures
As is evident from these three projects, it is important that all our finished
installations have a material presence and be experienced in a particular context.
Each piece is manifested as physical objects positioned in real space,
but each is the result of a process of interaction with a wide range of systems
and organizations, from local turkey barn builders to the National Remote
Sensing Centre. This way of working not only gives us a continually changing
insight into some of the forces shaping the built, natural, and social environment,
but it also exposes our emerging ideas to indifference, criticism,
and the test of relevance to “everyday life.” We are constantly surprised and
reassured at the amount of time given to us by people who have no direct
connection to the art world.
Our works are of course realized within a capitalist economy: the
material objects we use and the spaces into which we place them are inevitably
part of the commodity system. Yet even though producing these