Part Egyptian tomb, part Masonic temple, the 1930s headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects has always exuded a cult aura. Located in London’s famous Portland Place, among a motley of embassies, consulates and oligarchs, it’s a royal headquarters fit for an indentured profession that has long styled itself an exclusive gentlemen’s club.
If you’ve ever attended an event there, you probably haven’t paid much attention to the dull brown mural at the back of the auditorium. A dirty, poorly lit and badly worn screen tends to get lost in the background of the surrounding art deco splendor. And there’s a good reason why the RIBA doesn’t want you to look too closely at this.
Thandi Loewenson’s response was a drawing of a mine in Zambia, one of the first sites of British colonial mineral extraction and now one of the most toxic places on the planet.
“This is one of the most racist things I’ve ever seen in my life,” says Thandi Loewenson, a Zimbabwean-born architectural designer and researcher. “And that’s saying something.”
Take a look and you’ll see groups of half-naked figures from all corners of the British empire, caricatured as primitive savages with exaggerated features, huddled in shy resignation at the edges of the mural. In the middle is the RIBA council, portrayed as a professional parliament of identical faceless figures, shining like a celestial vision on the map of Britain. Among professionals and locals, emblematic buildings of the empire float in a kind of architectural halo: the Pretoria parliament, the viceroy’s palace in New Delhi, the Canberra government and other works by distinguished members of the institute.
“This is a very useful document,” says Loewenson. “It celebrates the role of the architect in colonial structures. The buildings depicted here are literal repositories of stolen land and exploited labor.” However, in his eyes, something very important is missing from the picture. “Missing arenas of material extraction, such as the mines, farms, fields, and prisons from which all this wealth was brutally extracted.”
So he found a solution. Loewenson, along with many other designers from the colonial diaspora, was commissioned as part of a new exhibition called Raising the Roof, curated by Margaret Cubbage, which aims to shed light on the colonial symbolism embedded throughout the RIBA building and suggest ways to do so. these dates can be interpreted and deciphered.
Loewenson’s answer is a surprising mural of his own: a shimmering drawing etched into graphite panels, intended as “another layer” to be placed over the problematic Jarvis mural in the auditorium. Created in collaboration with Chinese designer Zhongshan Zou, his image is a reinterpretation of a 1921 drawing of a lead and zinc mine called Broken Hill in Kabwe, Zambia. This was one of the first sites of British colonial mineral extraction and is now one of the most toxic places on the planet. As a result of decades of mining, 95% of the local population has high levels of lead in their blood, leading to lifelong health problems. Last year, the UN special rapporteur on human rights described Kabwe as one of the world’s “sacrifice zones” where corporate environmental pollution has created shadow lands of misery.
Loewenson’s speculative proposal called for the mural to be covered in layers of graphite with layers of “this messy, slippery mineral dug up from the ground,” so that fragments of the old world order depicted underneath would shine through in the image of the toxic landscape it created. . “Traces of the original mural are still visible,” the accompanying text reads. “The ghosts of the buildings gleam in the image, now contextualized by the slag heaps and accompanied by the much less ostentatious mining infrastructure that supported their construction.” Unfortunately, II. It won’t be released on the mural in this Grade*-listed building, but it’s a provocative proposition.
Built in 1934 to the designs of George Gray Wornum, the RIBA was intended as a monument of imperial grandeur. It was designed as a showcase of colonial opulence, featuring African marble on the ceremonial staircases, Indian silver-grey wood on the floors of its halls, and Australian walnut and Canadian maple on the walls of the council chamber. The back wall of Florence Hall, on the upper floor of the building, is covered with a carved wooden screen that serves as a hymn to the raw materials of imperial dominions, a majestic billboard advertising the exotica that architects might specify in their projects. One panel depicts a mine in South Africa, while the other shows a Canadian lumberjack chopping down a pine tree from which the screen is made.
Architect and designer Giles Tettey Nartey, who grew up in Ghana, responded to the panels with a series of beautiful, organically shaped stools carved from the same Quebec pine as the curtain, but painted a deep, inky black. These are arranged like small islands around a curved table where a blank tablet fixed in the middle awaits the future commentary panel.
“I didn’t want to impose a real alternative to the Domination Screen, but instead wanted to create something that would help facilitate multiple conversations,” says Tettey Nartey. “I want people to pull up a stool, discuss it, and have a collective reaction to the screen.” He says the 17 stools, carved panels, represent countries that have been “left out” (including Australia, South Africa, India, Canada and New Zealand) and prompts us to think about “other places where the British architectural ideal has been imposed”. ”.
Hanging on a nearby wall, Indian-born architectural designer and artist Arinjoy Sen has come up with a dazzling, psychedelic alternative to the Jarvis Mural. It pushes the empire’s indigenous peoples to the center of the stage, transforming them from repressed savages on the margins to active players in a colorful carnival of creativity. Surrounded by Burmese teak and West African mahogany trees, his drawing emerges as a complex, intricately detailed scene that samples numerous details from the building’s surroundings to create an ever-changing landscape that glows with sunny optimism. The RIBA should immediately commission a full-size version of this (preferably embroidered, like Sen’s lovely contribution to last year’s Venice Biennale) to replace the boring, racist mural downstairs.
Finally, artist and writer Esi Eshun contributes a poetic film that combines archival footage with her own thoughtful interpretations as she wanders through the building. It examines a series of colonial buildings depicted in the controversial mural and uncovers their history with indigenous peoples, “where they were both imposed and rejected.” The retractable display is “a cartography of desire and despair,” he says, evoking “imperial discontinuities and continuities, partitions and enclosures” as it rises from the ground and descends.
The timing of the exhibition could not be more appropriate. It opens in the week that Lesley Lokko received the RIBA gold medal, the first black woman to be awarded the sacred gong, and at a time when the institute’s youngest and first black president is at the helm, Nigerian-born Muyiwa Oki. It is a moment of reckoning for the 190-year-old institution. This year also marks the 90th anniversary of the building’s completion; This year also sees the start of the RIBA’s capital project to refurbish and restore it; We hope that this exhibition will provide useful food for thought.
“This is not just an exercise in institutional self-flagellation,” says Neal Shasore, an architectural historian and president of the London School of Architecture who advised on the conservation management plan. His research into the history of the RIBA building led to the institute adding interpretive panels to some of these problematic features, and also inspired the origins of the new exhibition. “These commissions are serious and nuanced responses to the complexity of the building’s colonial entanglement.”
Ultimately, he wants to see the “deeply racist” Jarvis Mural removed, included in the RIBA collection for contextual display, and replaced with a new commission. “This isn’t about pretending it’s not there, ‘cancelling’ or any of those boring discursive tropes,” he says. “You can bring it more topical and find creative ways to rewrite some of these problematic narratives in a completely transparent way. “This is not a deletion.”
He argues that almost no one had noticed these elements in the building before and that this is an opportunity to highlight them as well as sparking a wider discussion. “From Confederate monuments in the US to the Rhodes Must Fall campaign to the Colston moment in Bristol, we are finally seeing these aspects of our built environment and thinking in a much more fundamental way about what the nature of architecture is and the nature of architecture. There are ways in which it can sometimes be chosen for nefarious purposes.