coalescence
Intertwined presents the work of architecture studio Bureau de Change in conversation with textile artist Ptolemy Mann. Both practitioners begin from a shared premise: weaving and building are one constructive logic expressed through diverging materials. This link is both conceptual and etymological: the words 'architecture' and 'textile' descend from the same root, teks – 'to weave, to fabricate' – a lineage Mann in particular has spent three decades excavating at the intersection of cloth and structure. This exhibition articulates how both disciplines compose a continuous surface from one repeated unit: in this case, the brick and the thread.
Mann’s long-term interdisciplinary curiosity found a new focus when the artist came upon Bureau de Change's The Interlock, a five-story mixed used building in Fitzrovia, on a walk, an encounter she recounts in her own words in the section below. The building’s façade is built from five thousand bespoke bricks in forty-four different shapes, laid so that it appears to torque and swell, and inspired by the proportions of the neighbouring 19th Century terraces.
Mann took its sculptural elevation as her own subject, translating its movement into dyed warp and shifting gradients of colour, abstracting the building's skin through thread. Bureau de Change then, in turn, have responded to this work by evolving the façade and re-imagining it in bioresin, fabricated by Materials Assemble, as a freestanding sculptural object. The Interlock’s façade has now passed from building to woven image and back to object; each studio taking up the other's discipline as raw material through which to think, and reflect on, their own making.
This iterative process forms such a wonderful reflection of Forefront's central premise: that architecture, understood as an expanded discipline, is always in dialogue with the cultural fields adjacent to it – textile, image, craft, and, of course, the long history of making that binds them.
Photography: Carin Thakrar