Assemble- Turner Prize
The street that might win the Turner prize: how
Assemble are transforming Toxteth
It’s not quite a pickled calf – but the
rebirth of a troubled Toxteth community might be art. The story of the street
and the young architects succeeding where every official plan has failed has
caught the art world’s attention
Cairns Street in Toxteth, which Assemble have
helped to transform after decades of ‘managed decline’. Photograph: Andrew
Teebay/Liverpool Echo
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2015/may/12/assemble-turner-prize-2015-wildcard-how-the-young-architecture-crew-assemble-rocked-the-art-world?utm_content=buffer533e2&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
At the end of Granby Street in
Liverpool’s Toxteth, past relentless rows of tinned-up houses punctuated by
half-demolished corner shops, the mood is unusually festive. Television crews
have been here for the past few days, camping out amid the jungle of pavement
plant pots and poking their cameras into tumble-down terraces. But for once
they haven’t come to report on the sorry story of urban dereliction that has
plagued these streets for the past 30 years. It’s not the usual social affairs
correspondents, but packs of bewildered cultural critics – because this is the street
that’s been shortlisted for the Turner prize.
Turner prize 2015 shortlist: three women – and a
housing estate
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“Our first reaction was a sort of
surreal amazement,” says Ronnie Hughes, a member of the Granby Four Streets
community land trust, which is now at the centre of the art world’s attention
for the way residents have been taking the future of their streets into their
own hands. “But then again, the community has had practice at this. It’s the
same way that Liverpool reacted to becoming
Capital of Culture in 2008: there was dancing in the streets because
we’d won something, rather than particularly knowing or caring what it was we’d
won.”
Most locals might still be in a state
of baffled amusement that the DIY handiwork of a young London-basedarchitecture collective, Assemble, in doing up some of the
area’s empty homes has been shortlisted for the country’s most
prestigious art award. But the members of Assemble are at an equal loss for
words – mainly because they’re far too busy for the news to have sunken in.
There is work to be done.
In the back yard of one of the
houses, a couple of the group are pouring pigmented concrete to make a series
of fireplace surrounds, beautifully cast in moulds made of debris collected
from one of the derelict properties. Indoors, others are convening a meeting
with future residents to present options for their new floors and front doors,
around a group of intricately crafted doll’s house-sized models.
“Assemble are the only ones who have
ever sat and listened to the residents, and then translated their vision into
drawings and models, and now into reality,” says Erika Rushton, chair of the
community land trust that has been working with the designers during the last
couple of years to bring these neglected houses back to life.
It is a moment that has been sorely
awaited. Since the 1981 riots, which saw buildings torched and 500 people
arrested, Toxteth has suffered from decades of “managed decline”, with life
inexorably drained from its streets. Eleanor Lee has lived here since 1976 and
seen most of her neighbours leave.
Plans for Assemble’s renovation of the Granby Four
Streets area of Toxteth in Liverpool
“After the riots, an invisible red
line was drawn around the area,” she told me when I first visited the area in
November last year. “It was an unspoken policy of no maintenance and no
investment. Once houses are boarded up, it sends a signal.” Bins weren’t
collected, streets weren’t swept, and Granby became a no-go area.
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There are now just 70 residents
clinging on in an area of 200 homes, a post-apocalyptic statistic that is the
result not of some great environmental disaster or mass industrial collapse,
but of a series of failed regeneration plans. New Labour’s Housing Market
Renewal Pathfinders is one of the most recent of such schemes that have
systematically eviscerated the communities here to make way for promised
visions that never arrive.
“Everyone just offered a total
solution,” says Rushton. “Every house would be done, with no recognition of
what people have crafted into their individual homes, or the value that people
had invested in the street with planting and building furniture.
“Regeneration is always this blunt,
abstract, over-professionalised thing,” she adds. “But Assemble have shown how
it can be done differently, by making things that people can see, touch,
understand and put together for themselves.”
After attracting funding from a
Jersey-based social investor, Steinbeck Studio, which also brought Assemble on
board, the community land trust formalised its plans and took control of 10
empty properties from the council last year. They aremidway through being refurbished to Assemble’s designs,
with the help of local apprentices, in a strategy that makes the most of what
is already there, celebrating the generous ceiling heights and big windows of
the existing structures, in comparison to the mean-minded hutches that have
been built in the tabula
rasa approach nearby.
“We want to celebrate the
idiosyncrasies of the existing derelict buildings,” says Assemble’s Lewis
Jones. “If a floor is missing, why not leave it out and have a double-height
space? There isn’t the usual pressure to extract the maximum possible value
from the site and put profit before people.”
As part of a second phase of work,
Assemble has imagined a spectacular winter garden within the empty brick shell
of a gutted house – an idea that might form part of their installation for the
Turner show at the Tramway in Glasgow later this year.
“I just love their attitude,” says
Lee. “They are so bold and fearless in their designs, and their vision for
housing isn’t limited to the usual cream-coloured boxes. They are architects
working truly as artists.”
The Cineroleum … Assemble’s first project converted
an abandoned petrol station into a temporary cinema.
For Assemble themselves – all still
in their mid-20s, and not one of them even yet qualified as an architect – the
nomination has come as a bit of a shock. When they first got together as a
group of recent graduates to build a temporary cinema in an abandoned petrol
station in Clerkenwell in 2010, they can have had little idea that, just five
years later, they would be shortlisted for the Turner prize. But
not much about the dazzling trajectory of this loosely assembled collective of
designers and makers was ever really planned.
The 18-strong group has since gone on
to build a portfolio spanning everything from temporary theatre structures and
artists’ studio spaces to community housing strategies and new town squares –
as well as staging a mysterious ritual happening at the Serpentine Pavilion
last summer. They might not be qualified architects, but that wasn’t much of an
obstacle to them landing a £2m
competition to build a new art gallery for Goldsmiths College last
year, or tobuilding an adventure
playground in Glasgow, or to proposing a revolutionary new housing
strategy for Liverpool.
The diversity of Assemble’s work is
matched only by their ability to make things happen in unlikely circumstances,
where the usual necessities of a client, site or budget might not be in ready
supply. The Cineroleum in Clerkenwell came
about, they said, from a collective desire to build something; the
result exuded their pleasure in the process of making, a feeling that has
infused their work ever since. Sheets of Tyvek, the foil-like waterproof
building material, were turned into walls of sumptuous, silvery swagged
curtains, hoisted in a dramatic reveal at the end of each screening to leave
the audience exposed on the edge of a busy main road. Formica was used to make
intricate marquetry tops for tables and stools, while plastic tiles were
vacuum-formed on site (using a jury-rigged hot air gun and a vacuum cleaner) to
transform the ceiling of the former garage shop into something special. The
building process was as much a performance as the final event itself.
Assemble have never claimed to be
artists – and their shortlisting has no doubt raised some eyebrows in the
rarified realms of the gallery world – but in both their approach to materials
and the collaborative process by which their projects are made, their work
transcends the norms of conventional architectural practice.
Folly
for a Flyover … their second temporary events space was conceived as a little
house trapped beneath a motorway.
A year after the Cineroleum, they
built a second temporary events space under amotorway flyover in east
London, commissioned by arts organisation Create, its pitched roof
poking up between the roaring lanes of traffic like a fairytale cottage that
had lost its way. Made of wooden bricks sawn from railway sleepers and hung
like drapery over a scaffolding frame, it was built by an army of 200
volunteers and provided a surreal theatrical setting for films, talks and children’s
play sessions. Its bricks went on to be reused to make planters for a local
primary school.
The more interest they received in
their talents, the more the group began to coalesce as a formalised practice.
These initial projects caught the eye of the London Legacy Development
Corporation, the agency charged with co-ordinating the spoils of the Olympics,
who offered them a warehouse space in Stratford on a peppercorn rent, while it
awaits development by Ikea’s property arm. With a fully equipped wood shop,
welding facilities, ping-pong table – and a kitchen where they take turns to
cook lunch each day – it is a lively laboratory for testing their ideas at full
scale, and developing new hybrid materials with an almost alchemical
sensibility. There are chunks of “papercrete”, which they used to make tables for a
British Council exhibition, samples of “rubble-dash” render for a
little performance temple for OTO Projects, along
with sliced tree-trunk furniture and sheets of pummelled metal that look like
battered steel drums – a cladding test for another forthcoming project.
Yardhouse under construction … erected with the
collective spirit of an Amish barn-raising.
Across the yard, the LLDC has since
commissioned Assemble to build an affordable workspace building, the Yardhouse,
which exhibits a similar level of care and fun as their temporary venues,
elevating cheap materials into something refined. It is a basic timber-framed
shed – once again erected with the collective spirit of an Amish barn-raising –
full of spaces for like-minded makers, arranged around a processional
staircase, with elegantly welded chandelier light-fittings. It is wrapped with
a candy-coloured facade of hand-made concrete shingles, which has become an accidental Instagram
sensation, turning this East End industrial estate into an unlikely
place of pilgrimage for the selfie brigade.
Such things might make their projects
sound like fleeting designer stage-sets or marketing-friendly “pop-ups” produced
by agents of gentrification. But that would miss the point that Assemble’s work
is founded in an interest in issues, and sites that go way beyond constructing
pretty scenography in gritty industrial locations. It is about engaging with
people on their own terms, driven, as they put it, by “a belief in the
importance of addressing the typical disconnection between the public and the
process by which spaces are made”.
Theirs is a down-to-earth,
no-nonsense attitude that comes in part from the mix of disciplines involved.
While many of them studied architecture at Cambridge, others came from
backgrounds in English, history and philosophy, or had worked as builders or
technicians. As one member said of his
non-architect colleagues in a recent interview: “They can be so much
more astute and direct than the rest of us, who are loaded with the language of
obfuscation and meaning with which architectural education indoctrinates you.”
Their plain-speaking approach seems
to go down well with their clients, too. Countless are the architects who talk
of engaging with communities, wielding Post-it notes and collaborative board
games, but Assemble do it for real, often embedding themselves in places for
months at a time.
New
Addington town square … the result of weeks of testing uses with temporary
structures and events.
I saw them in action in New
Addington, the Croydon council estate long damned as a “benighted ghetto”,
where they took up residence in an old kiosk on the town square and staged
community events during a number of weeks, as full-scale tests for how the
public realm might be improved. After orchestrating such things as a stage for
pensioners’ tea dances and ramps for young skateboarders, and reorganising the
market, they proposed permanent
improvements along similar lines. The result is a low-key collage of
pieces that have since taken on a life of their own.
I’ve seen them at work in Dalmarnock
in the east end of Glasgow too, where the regenerative juggernaut of the Commonwealth Games razed the
local high streetand bulldozed the local park to make way for a
“transport hub” for the games. Assemble have since been helping to pick up the
pieces, building an adventure playground that
prioritises mud and understands the fun to be had with logs, sewer
pipes and tree-houses, instead of the officially sanctioned play equipment
beloved of risk-averse local councils. In June, they’ll be unleashing further
ideas about play with a Brutalist
Playground installation at the Royal Institute of British Architects,
injecting a much-needed dose of whimsy into the prim surrounds of Portland
Place.
Goldsmiths
Art Gallery … being carved out from a series of extraordinary spaces within a
former Victorian bathhouse.
All this and more is what piqued the
interest of Alistair Hudson, director of the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and
one of this year’s Turner prize judges. He invited himself to visit the
Assemble studio earlier this year. They didn’t know why he had come and, as
usual, they were mostly too busy to talk.
Receiving the phonecall from Penelope
Curtis last week – an occurrence met with equal bafflement – Assemble’s first
reaction was to call the Granby residents. If the community didn’t want the
attention, they wouldn’t accept the nomination.
“They were very conscious that the
residents had been battling to save their the street for 25 years,” says
Rushton. “It had been a gradual process, beginning with the community doing
guerilla gardening and setting up a monthly street market, which gradually
changed the reputation of the place and started to bring people back during the
last five years. It’s not something that’s happened overnight.”
Back in Granby, the residents
couldn’t be prouder of the Turner prize news.
“It’s just a fantastic boost for the
whole area,” says Delucia Emina, 31, who set up the Baby Dolls beauty salon on
Granby Street last year, the first new sign of life the high street had seen in
a decade, where most of the units remain boarded up. Born on Granby Street,
Emina moved away at age eight, but recently returned, buoyed by the fresh
shoots of optimism poking up through the pavement cracks. Since she set up in
July last year, a kebab shop has sprung up next door, and she’s planning to
expand across the street.
Whether any of this is of interest to
the Turner prize judges is neither here nor there. Assemble’s work with the
residents is thankfully bereft of any of the pretensions that the bestowal of
such a gong implies. But if the prize wants to look outwards and engage with
the real world, then its arbiters need look no further.
• This article was updated on 15 May to add further
detail about Assemble’s Granby Four Streets project
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