England. An alien pavilion in the Lake District landscape

“The fashionable, self-destructive tendency today is to attribute to the modern movement the worst qualities and characteristics. […] Then, in order not to appear too reactionary, one leaps to the postmodern and takes delight in it. Postmodernism frees us from an oppressive father complex and from the frustration of an unaccomplished task”. Appeared on Domus 647, February 1984, these words belong to Italian historian and architect Bruno Zevi. At that time, Domus’ editor-in-chief was Alessandro Mendini and the art director was Ettore Sottsass. 24 years after the dialogue between Zevi and Mendini, it’s like nothing has changed: confidence in a rational and positive modernity is at historic lows. Symbol of a period characterised by optimism and experimentation, Italian iconic infrastructures collapse, while in the United Kingdom there is uncertainty about the consequences of a Brexit that has beem announced but has still to be defined. And what about post-modern architecture? “It has the defect of being out of fashion while not being old enough to be re-evaluated, while a new generation of architects who grew up during the period of re-evaluation of these reference points is now emerging” (Denise Scott-Brown).

Among the new wave of English authors that recovers the legacy of the postmodern figurative canon we can find Studio Mutt, a practice based in London and Liverpool that works in an ironic and eclectic way, using referencing and sampling to meet contemporary needs. Last intervention by the studio is the Ordnance Pavilion, an interactive architecture located in the Lake District, a mountainous region in the northwest of England. The project by Mutt Studio is one of the six works created for the Lakes Ignite 2018 art festival. The project is a celebration of the Ordnance Survey, the British agency that maps the British landscape. The Ordnance Pavilion interprets the influence of these mappings on our perception of the landscape. According to James Crawford, one of the studio's artists: “The piece is an interactive and semi inhabitable sculpture. We’re really interested in the almost absurd and laborious process that people went through when re-measuring the landscape over roughly 30 years. Something that seems completely alien in our GPS navigated world of today.”