PsychoBuildings @ the Hayward

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
'The extraordinary international artistic response to Psycho Buildings shows just how challenging, exciting and playful The Hayward can be' Ralph Rugoff, Director of The Hayward and curator of the exhibition.
This exhibition marks The Hayward's 40th anniversary as one of the world's most architecturally unique exhibition venues.

The exhibition brings together the work of artists who create habitat-like structures and architectural environments. Become an adventurous participant as you explore The Hayward's spaces inside and out, including a room frozen in a moment of explosive disaster, an eerie village of over 200 dollhouses, a floating plastic cloud and a skyline boating pond.


Has anyone been to this? Worth the time / money?
 

woops

is not like other people
STILL haven't made it to this shockingly...

I heard it was kind of OK though, or at least it had one good things in it

Maybe this is new thread material - dunno - but i'm keener to see Richard Prince at the Serpentine Gallery. He's one of the uniquer artists at work today, a day so hugely dissimilar to almost any other, in my humble, somewhat unique opinion...
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
i went to this. but i didnt totally see what was so psychotic about all the buildings. i really liked the red staircase and the goth?-ish lycra dome that you see when you go in there but was slightly unsure how they fit the theme. did want to see the boats on the roof but the girl i was with couldnt stay so we left (queue was too long).
 

Pestario

tell your friends
I haven't been yet but the theme is not so much about 'psychotic buildings' but how artists could use spaces to interact with the mind through the language of architecture. So you could have happy spaces, scary spaces, whatever.

I'm probably heading to this over the weekend so I won't say much more until then...
 

run_time

Well-known member
would strongly suggest going on a weekday or early on a weekend morning as queues can be pretty horrendous for some of the exhibits. Had a fun time with some of the more immersive pieces
 

Pestario

tell your friends
I went to this on Sunday morning and thought it was great. According to the exhibition pamphlet the works were supposed to "involve us in a reconsideration of space and place, and prompt us to re-examine our ideas about the relationship between ourselves - our bodies and minds - and our surroundings", and I believe they were quite successful in doing so.

The exhibition consists of various large scale installations which deal directly with the idea of the built environment. Some are quite immersive (Beutler), others are simply spectacular (Los Carpinteros) and others a bit gimmicky (Gelitin, but on purpose). The running theme I garnered was a reminder that the built environment is and always has been a phyiscal manifestation or projection of human ideas, behaviours, norms, cultures, societies etc; that architecture grew organically from our basic responses to the environment and became a way to apply our ideas about how we would like to inhabit space. With this in mind there is an implicit critique of modernist, top-down, 'big idea' architecture where the users of buildings become subservient to some (often misguided) ideal dropped from above (like Corbusier). The fact that the exhbition is in the brutalist Hayward Gallery adds an ironic dimension where the works end up critiquing the space they inhabit.

Besides all this, some of the installations are simply a lot of fun. Get there early though as the queues can be long.
 
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