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SAM JACOB : EMPIRE OF ICE CREAM Empire of Ice Cream

Sam Jacob

Every piece of architecture is a world. Each an empire within its own Empire of Ice Cream produces plans that will never be built, drawings borders. But outside of these perfect islands of architecture the that evolve according to their own patterns: A stream of consciousness they make up renders them fragments. We experience them as frag- and a mania of production. mented sequences of different worlds. And the city itself remains in a constant state of construction and destruction. They might be maps of fragmented empires, half remembered buildings, parts and fragments dissolving into one another, forming Empires within empires, worlds produced between worlds, always in conglomerations and aggregations that breed but never settle. Felt tip flux through the fleeting arrangements of things in space and time. pens trace their way across the graph paper leaving plans of enclaves The city becomes an inescapable field of archeology and speculation and exclaves, borders and passageways, unified yet sprawling worlds whose vanishing point is the end of the world. where everything is exactly the same but always different.

Most often architecture presents itself as a conscious choice, driven by logic and intention. But equally, during its own long presence on the earth it has become its own entity. We grow up in and amongst its syn- thetic worlds. We learn how to live within the frames that it provides. Its thresholds organise and structure us so that we are as much its prod- uct as it is ours. Architecture produces us as much as we produce it.

We are so immersed within architecture that we have absorbed into the deepest recesses of our psyche. Internalised, its solid structures are remade as the psychic landscapes of our imagination. In our dreams it’s form shatters and bifurcates, swelling and eroding like tides, mapping our desires and fears, filled with mem- ories and forgetfulness. No.1, 2011 ink on graph paper 21 x 29.7 cm No.2, 2011 ink on graph paper 21 x 29.7 cm No.3, 2011 ink on graph paper 21 x 29.7 cm No.4, 2018 ink on graph paper 21 x 29.7 cm No.5, 2018 ink on graph paper 21 x 29.7 cm No.6, 2018 ink on graph paper 21 x 29.7 cm No.7, 2011 ink on graph paper 21 x 29.7 cm No.12, 2019 ink on graph paper 59,4 x 84,1 cm

No.11, 2011—2018 ink on graph paper 59,4 x 84,1 cm No.10, 2018 ink on graph paper 29.7 x 42 cm No.8, 2018 ink on graph paper 29.7 x 42 cm No.9, 2018 ink on graph paper 29.7 x 42 cm A False Description of the Thing Destroyed, 2015 1st century AD Roman Pottery Jug fragment, plasticine 29 x 26 x 16 cm A False Description of the Thing Destroyed, 2015 3rd Century BC Greek Ceramic Shard , plasticine 12 x 29 x 24 cm Lenin’s Urn, 2015 compact foam, paint 54 x 27 x 27 cm Conceived between 2011 and 2019, ‘Empire of Ice Cream’ is a series of ited by Vladimir Lenin – the communist politician that led Russia and then thirteen meticulously filled graph paper drawings that show the remnants the Soviet Union from 1917 until 1924. The finial piece was 3D-scanned, of architectural plans gathered from an assortment of historic and contem- enlarged and then carved on a computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) porary referenes. These elements are sometimes grand and monumental, router to produce a faithful recreation of the original object. Two sculptures others banal and generic, but all are summoned impromptu from Jacob’s both entitled ‘A False Description of the Thing Destroyed’ combine found memory; segments from Ancient Greek temples, football pitches, something fragments from antiquity with fired plasticine, one a Roman pottery jug 1st Meisian, parts of a church, orchards, fountains, straightforward corridors, century AD found amongst a ship wreck and the other a 3rd century BC a chunk of Parliament, and a Buzzcock’s single cover are some examples. Greek ceramic shard.

Jacob first conceived the series in 2011 as part of an invitation to participate Sam Jacob is director of Sam Jacob Studio, established in 2014. The studio in the second edition of San Rocco Magazine: ‘The Even Covering of the has just won the Victoria and Albert Museum’s competition for the transfor- Field,’ which explored the idea of ‘the field is where we live’. In their own mation of its main entrance on Cromwell Road (planned to complete in description of the field, these drawings investigate space as a sprawl of 2020). Forthcoming work includes a new mixed use building in London’s fragments that stretch to the horizon. They probe contemporary space as an Hoxton, curation of The Lie of the Land at the Milton Keynes Gallery, a new all-consuming , an inescapable terrain that encrusts the earth and public toilet in London’s West End and work for the National Collections assimilates everything – the densities of , the grandest of monuments, Centre in Wiltshire. the conventions of everyday life, everything built, and even what might be The studio’s recent projects include ‘Fear and Love’ at the Design Museum, left of the wilderness. They are maps of empires with enclaves and exclaves, public realm design and cultural strategy for borders and passageways, and ever-amalgamating components that make a south London market and the V&A’s first international gallery in Shenzhen. up a sprawling world of conglomerations and aggregations. Jacob’s work has been published and exhibited internationally including at ‘Empire of Ice Cream’ sits in a tradition that includes Piranesi’s “Campo Marzio” the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016 and 2014 (where, as part of FAT he and Archizoom’s “No-Stop City”; drawings that elucidate architectural ideas was co-curator of the British Pavilion), ‘Spaces Without Drama’ at the Graham as much as they do real places, and that give graphic form to concepts and Foundation (2017), Chicago, ‘A Very Small Part of Architecture’ in Highgate sensations as much as physical structures. Cemetery (2016), the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017) and ‘Disappear Here’ at the RIBA Architecture Gallery, London (2018). As Sam Jacob describes: Sam Jacob is currently a professor at University of Illinois at Chicago and ’Every piece of architecture is a world. Each an empire within its visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong and has taught at Yale, own borders. But outside of these perfect islands of architecture Karlsruhe HfG and the AA in London where he also established AA Night- the city they make up renders them fragments. We experience school, a programme that opened up new ways of sharing of architectural them as fragmented sequences of different worlds. knowledge. He has been a columnist for the AJ, Art Review and Dezeen And as the city itself remains in a constant state of construction and is the author of ‘Make It Real, Architecture as Enactment” published by and destruction.’ Strelka Press. Jacob’s synthesis of fragmented structures and half-located memories take Previously he was a founding director of FAT Architecture, a practice that was physical form through the three sculptures in the exhibition. They were ini- hailed as “changing the architectural weather” for its idiosyncratic approach. tially conceived for the exhibition ‘pieces’ at the Soane Museum in 2015 as a FAT’s built projects included the Heerlijkheid Hoogvliet in Rotterdam, A response to the museum’s collection of ancient sculpture fragments. Lenin’s House for Essex with Grayson Perry, the BBC Studios in Cardiff and the Blue Urn explores “the effect of history on objects,” and takes its cue from the House in Hackney. shape of a Victorian railing finial outside the Tavistock Square house inhab- SAM JACOB CV

Selected Projects

2019 Transformation of V&A Cromwell Road Entrance, London, DKUK 2, 2014 Graham Foundation Grantee Gallery & Hair Salon, London 2012 Shortlisted Housing Architect of the Year 2018 Dido & Aeneas, Staging Design, Shatwell Opera, Somerset 2009 RIBA European Award: Heerlijkheid Hoogvliet 2018 Ideas Depot, Exhibition Design, Tate Liverpool 2008 World Architecture Festival: Heerlijkheid Hoogvliet shortlisted 2018 The Sun, Living With Our Star, Exhibtion Design, Science Museum, 2007 RIBA European Award for St Lucas Art Academy London 2007 FX Best Museum: Museum of Croydon 2017 V&A Shekou, Exhibition Design, Shenzhen, China 2006 Architecture Foundation Next Generation Award 2017 The Stack for Mini Living, London Design Festival Landmark Project 2006 AR Future Project Award for Masterplanned Communities: New Islington 2017 DKUK, Gallery & Salon, London 2006 Best Public Housing Project: Brick Development Association Awards 2016 Fear And Love, Exhibition Design, Design Museum, London 2006 Regeneration Awards: Regeneration Partnership of the Year- Great Plac 2016 Dar Abu Said, Installation, Venice Architecture Biennale es, Urban Splash, FAT and Card room Estate 2015 MK Menhir, Public Art, Milton Keynes 2005 40 Under 40, Architects Journal 2015 Architecture Curator, ArDe, London 2003 Second Prize: Young Architect of the Year 2015 V&A East, Brief & Concept Development, London 2015 Cambourne Pavilion, South Cambs Selected solo exhibitions 2015 MK Menhier, Public Art Commission, Milton Keynes 2015 A House For Essex. Living Architecture, Essex 2018 Disappear Here, Architecture Gallery, RIBA, London 2014 Curator, British Pavilion, 14th Venice Architecture Biennale 2015 A Clockwork Jerusalem, AA Gallery, London 2012 Roath Basin Studios, BBC TV Studios, Cardiff 2014 A Clockwork Jerusalem, British Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Italy 2011 Middlehaven: 84 unit residential building, Middlesborough 2010 Ornament is Crime, MAK, Vienna 2009 Selfridges: Design of 3rd floor retail space, London 2009 Duplicate Array, Lucy Mackintosh Gallery, Lausanne 2008 Heerlijkheid Hoogvliet: Park and cultural centre Rotterdam, The 2006 In a Lonely Place: Florence Hall, RIBA, London 2006 All You Can Eat: Stroom, The Hague. NL 2007 St Lucas Art Academy, Boxtel, The Netherlands 2000 Kill the Modernist Within, Cube, Manchester 2006 Islington Square, affordable housing development, Manchester 2006 Museum of Croydon: Museum within listed building Selected group exhibitions 2002 Ten: Offices for advertising agency in Antwerp, 2001 The New Civic: Three public art installations, ’s Cross, London 2017 Spaces Without Drama, Graham Foundation, Chicago 1998 Kessels Kramer: Design of offices for advertising agency , Amsterdam 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, USA 2016 Fragments, Soon Museum, London 2016 XYZ, Etage Projects, Copenhagen Selected awards and competitions 2015 All Of This Belongs to You, V&A, London 2013 Book of Copies, AA Gallery, London 2014 AR Future Project Award, UIC VPAC proposal 2012 Museum of Copying, 13th Venice Architecture Biennale 2014 Shortlisted, FX Awards Exhibition Design 2012 Image for a Title: Placebo Effects in the Cultural Landscape, London 2008 From Now to Eternity, Biscuit Building, London Teaching 2006 Gritty Brits, Carnegie Museum of Arts, Pittsburgh 2005 Intimate Space: MOT Gallery, London 2019 Visiting Professor, Hong Kong University 2004 Extreme Houses: Munich and Liepzig, Germany 2011 - Clinical Professor of Architecture, UIC, USA 2003 Home Time: British Council Exhibition of British Design in China 2018 Visiting Professor, Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karls 2003 International Architecture Bienalle: Sao Paulo, Brazil ruhe, Germany 2003 Sign as Surface, Artists Space, New York 2016 Visiting Professor, Yale University 2003 Architecture Biennale: Rotterdam, NL 2014 Visiting Professor, Yale University 2002 Trespassing – Shaping Spatial Practices, Secession, Vienna 2012 -2016 Director, Night School, Architectural Association, London 2001 Space Invaders: Lisbon/ Pasadena/Tokyo 2013- External Examiner, KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm, 2000 Manifesta 3, Ljubljana Sweden 2000 FAT, FOA, MUF: arc en reve, Bordeaux 2014 Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor, Yale University, USA 2009 - 2012 Unit Master, Architectural Association, London Selected Books / Catalogues 2010 Bishop Professor of Architecture, Yale University, USA 2007 Louis I Kahn Professor of Architecture, Yale University, USA 2015 Chapter, The World of Charles and Ray Eames Catalogue, ed Catherine 2000 - 2004 Diploma Unit Master, University of Westminster Ince, pub Thames and Hudson 1996 - 2000 Degree Unit Master, University of Greenwich 2015 Perspecta 48: Amnesia (MIT press) 2015 Radical Pedagogies : Architectural Education and the British Tradition, eds.Daisy Froud & Harriet Harriss, RIBA Publishing 2015 Catalogue text, Formal Economies, Marte Eknæs, Dolon Books 2015 Introduction, The Politics of Flatness, Jimenez Lai 2014 A Clockwork Jerusalem, British Council / Vinyl Factory 2013 Landscape Futures, ACTAR / Nevada Museum of Art 2012 Make it Real: Architecture of Enactment, Strelka Press 2011 Radical Post Modernism. Editor (with Charles Jencks), AD 2010 Malfe, Bedford Press 2008 L.A.W.U.N Project 19: The Disreputable Projects of David Greene (ed. S. Hardingham, AA Publications) Perspecta 41: Grand Tour (MIT press) 2006 5 Codes: Architecture, Paranoia and Risk in Times of Terror (ed. S. Trubey, Birkhauser) 2006 Perspecta 38: Architecture After All (MIT press) 2006 Making the Impossible Possible: The Dream of Flying. The Dream of Paradise (ed. Claudia Weber, Gerlinde Schuller, Map One) 2006 Perspecta 37: Famous (MIT press) 2002 This is Not Architecture (ed. Kester Rattenbury, Routledge) Price list on demand

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