'Off Cut' | Commissioned by Metwork for LFA 2010

Metropolitan Workshop presents ‘Off Cut’A solo exhibition by Helene Kazan

Private View: 25th June, 6.30 - 9.30pm Exhibition: 26th June - 7th August

This exhibition is part of the 2010 London Festival of Architecture, to find out more information please follow this event on the LFA website: www.lfa2010.org/event

The 2010 Ideal Home Show saw the launch of The Cub, UK’s first carbon neutral Code 5 modular home, an answer for a more sustainable, malleable, and adaptable future. In a year of recovery from deep recession, a general election, leaps in ecological and technological developments, Metropolitan Workshop has started a programme of investigation into new and different forms of creative practice by inviting artist Helene Kazan to create an intervention into their street facing window space.

In 1963, London based experimental architecture group Archigram exhibited their utopian vision ‘Living City’ at the ICA. Coming at a time of radical change, with new developments in technology linked to an increase in mass production and mass consumption, Archigram believed there’s was a ‘message of abstract communication’. Infatuated by nomadic fantasies, Archigram argued that ‘an architecture based on mobility and malleability could set people free’.

In 1967, Amsterdam artist turned experimental architect Constant published ‘New Babylon’. His utopian vision for a situationist city, it comprised of a society of total automation in which the need to work was replaced with a nomadic life of creative play. This derived of a vast network of interconnecting enormous multi level, interior spaces, floating over the planet.

Inspired by these utopian visions of the past, the situation sensitive installation Kazan has conceived for Metwork will comprise of a suspended three tiered, intersloting, three-dimensional drawing. Operating as a focal part of this installation ‘Marmoleum’, traditionally a flooring product is sourced as a building material off cut. With obvious economic and social benefits to the its use, the real decision comes from the idea that excess of this material has only occurred through a desensitization of it by mass production and mass consumption. Shifting the materials context and augmentng its value. Reflecting a projected change in attitude and concern for the production of such materials in the coming future.