Birdstane
Birdstane, a collaboration with Timorous Beasties, is a carved granite cruciform column that sits at the entrance to Kings Gate, an apartment building that we designed at Victoria in central London. Timorous Beasties' interest in 'Chinoiserie' and our interest in Baroque ornament led to an attempt to recreate what the great German architectural historian Hans Sedlmayrcalled "the zone of ambiguity" at the head of a Baroque column, between architecture, sculpture and representation. In this case, Birdstane is part of an extended spatial field that includes Silver Forest, a large cast concrete mural, and a small grove of trees sat within a new public space next to Westminster City Hall called Kings Gate Walk. In each case, the individual elements hover on the ambiguous boundary between art work, product design, landscape, and architecture; this ambiguity typifies Baroque spatial thresholds and gardens. In concert with the lighting design and the bike racks, the space oscillates between the absolutely quotidian condition of a public passageway, and something more elusive and allusive. In particular, Birdstane fuses art and structure, ornament and use, practicality and decorum. At dusk, as you leave Kings Gate, the X column, the fresco and the garden combine together to create a moment of intense spatial excitement and coherence; re-establishing, briefly, the fabled, supposedly lost, Baroque Unity of the Arts.
