Paper City

I was at the Royal Academy today for the Anish Kapoor exhibition which has received quite a lot of media coverage.  The kind of mirrored sculptures that I talked about here before in reference to landscape are inside the gallery where they focus attention very much on the viewer.  The exception to this is Tall Tree and the Eye, sited outside, which provides multiple images of the RA courtyard.  Among the other works on display is Yellow (1991), one of Kapoor's monochrome optical illusions designed to evoke the Sublime: 'overwhelming in scale, this vast landscape of yellow hovers between apparition and surface.'

In addition to this exhibition, the RA currently has a nice little show called Paper City: Urban Utopias which 'showcases a selection of extraordinary drawings, collages and photomontages that have been produced for Blueprint as part of their back-page ‘Paper City’ commissions over the past three years.'  They're the kind of images familiar to readers of Pruned and BLDGBLOG.  Visitors can take copies home; the AJ describes the decision to give out printed images as a 'U-turn for the YouTube generation'... 

Shown below are some that I picked up: cityscapes by Marc Atkins, Emily Allchurch, Peter Cook with Gavin Rowbotham, Paul Williams, Duggan Morris, Javier Mariscol and James Wines.  I particularly liked James Wines' image of post-global warming structures rising from the submerged towers of an old city.  Wines is the creative director of SITE and his writing on environmental architecture argues for sustainable buildings that also harmonise with the surrounding landscape.