While
having the privilege and pleasure of being let in and working in the former
Spode Factory in Stoke I worked on a project that I call Glaspaleis. Let me start my project description by leading you through
the left-off landscape of the old factory to the room where I chose to work:
The
compound just lies there, sealed off. Gates shut, doors locked, windows facing
the street blinded. Passersby do
not seem to pay attention to it anymore, but physically they still have to make
their way around it, like the edges of a big crater or a reversed city wall,
keeping the city out.
Somewhere on
the insides of this is a black outed room, withdrawn, escaping attention. It
has no windows and no lighting as the electricity cables have been cut. Only a little light finds its way in
through the doorways to the adjacent rooms and walking through you will welcome
the help of a little flashlight or you can choose to slow down your pace
through the buildings and wait for your eyes to get used to the dark. This
adjustment of the eyes will happen faster and faster the more times you return
to the room and get to know it. It is a rehearsal and insistence on seeing.
And in this
act of seeing lies a trace of the room’s genealogy and ideas of visibility; it
is a showroom, where the factory used to present its production to the
purchasing agents of retail chains and department stores. In fact in the core
of the room a remnant of its use can be found; a quadratic display system with
four sides placed at a 45 degree angle in relation to the cube of the room when
seen from the doorways, so that to sides can be seen at once.
It is not
as elegant and elaborately crafted as some of the old wood furniture you find
in other corners of the factory. In fact it is mostly constructed out of cheap
painted plywood, and it is not very old. But the shelves are made of glass. And this attracted my attention.
When glass
first started being used as a building material it had the fascination of
progress as an inherent characteristic. Modernist architects used it to show
off how far industrial production had evolved at the same time as they
developed the new ideas of buildings that would help create an open and
democratic society with healthy and functional living and working conditions. Architecture
scholar Beatriz Colomina uses the term “skinless architecture”; the façade is a
translucent glass skin through which the skeleton of the building can be seen.
Ideas of privacy and public, the boundaries of inside and outside the building
start to change.
In fact
this display unit reminded me of both a model I had seen of Mies van der Rohe’s
Glass Skyscraper and an image I had seen of a 1930’s department store called Glaspaleis. Most definitely more
examples can be found. What immediately interested me about the Glaspaleis, and the reason why I chose
to go with the idea of reconstructing the Glaspaleis
in the showroom of Spode, was that it is a building built to be a display in itself, not as a decorated
and ornamented façade, but a display of the whole structure of the building and
its inside and thereby attract customers. Being an icon of the department store, the building
also featured prominently in advertisements. The whole building actually
becomes an advertisement in itself, a model for a modernist belief system and
system of visibility.
The name Glaspaleis stems frоm the fact thаt
the building іs clad іn а free-standing encasing оf glass around а concrete
structure. There аre nо outer оr inner walls, thus eliminating the separation
between inside аnd outside аs much аs possible. Structurally, іt іs basically а
collection оf pillars, intersected by аnd supporting platforms, surrounded by а
glass encasing, whіch іs suspended frоm the floors. The unusually large size оf
the windows made the building even more transparent thаn the famous 1927 Bauhaus building іn Dessau, whіch wаs praised fоr іts transparency.
It was built bang in the middle of three squares in the centre of the city of
Herleen, an old mining city in the Netherlands.
In my stay
at Spode I dived into this history. From old candlestick moulds found in the storage of Spode, the material memory of the factory, I cast the "pillars" and placed them in the display system. A "product" that is displayed, and the idea of a skelton that is being revealed, but this rveelation is just a sign, a decoration. By "superimposing" the ideas Glaspaleis onto
the showroom in the depths of Spode I hoped to track how ideas of visibility
and display have deeper connections to a location’s relation to its
surroundings, how it presents itself, what characteristics it seeks to present.
And I would be very interested in continuing this work on how a building
communicates itself and point to some of the negotiable boundaries of the
insides and outsides of Spode.
In my
practice I work with buildings and architecture as surfaces and images. The way
we build our houses is a mirror of a society's ideals, dreams and
self-understanding. Through installations often made up of ceramics in
conjunction with photography, I try to delve into the stories we tell to
ourselves about ourselves through our buildings. I'm interested in the haptic
materiality of clay, its possibilities and limitations as a building material
that requires a very special presence, temporality and a bodily presence, and
as such gives the photograph an interesting opponent, and creates an unexplored
terrain between the spatial and pictorial surface.
At the
moment I really want to continue my research into to glass and ideas of
transparency, which are being used and misused in many contemporary buildings.
The fact is that glass actually isn’t always transparent, but is taken as such
for ideological purposes.
The Glaspaleis somehow represents ideas of progress,
openness, technology and capitalist growth that made the old Spode factory
obsolete. It is interesting to
follow its history up until today. The Glaspaleis itself was left to decay and
threatened with demolition up until the 90’s, with nobody taking interest in
the building until it was nominated an important architectural monument of the
20th century.
Јust аs the Glaspaleis hаd fіrst cоme tо symbolise the
rise оf Heerlen frоm sleepy village tо bustling industrial town, аnd then the
decay оf Heerlen аfter the closing оf the mines, іt nоw symbolises the revival оf
the city. It was bought by the city and renovated according to the old drawings
and Herleen now uses its cultural importance to promote itself, to display
itself as a place of modernity. The Glaspaleis wаs never meant аs а monument оf
architecture. But the passing оf tіme has made іt јust that. Maybe it is not so
far from Spode after all.
At last I just have a small comment on the workshops
title “Resurrecting of the obsolete”. In relation to this I would like to mention the writer and
theorist Jalal Toufics book The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a
Surpassing Disaster that
might be interesting to go into – he writes about how documents, objects,
buildings become unavailable or invisible after a disaster or trauma,
that their meaning has to be renegotiated. And that it is the job of the artist
to point to this withdrawal of tradition as
he also calls it. I find his thoughts appealing and intriguing in relation to
the issues of site specificity and resurrection that I encountered at Spode and
in Stoke in general.
