Sweetening the Deal

At the tail end of this year’s London Festival of Architecture (LFA), which begins June 19, sculpture and architecture will come together in a rather unusual way. NEO Bankside, a £400 million scheme of luxury apartments adjacent to London’s Tate Modern and designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, is due for its first-phase completion […]

At the tail end of this year’s London Festival of Architecture (LFA), which begins June 19, sculpture and architecture will come together in a rather unusual way.

NEO Bankside, a £400 million scheme of luxury apartments adjacent to London’s Tate Modern and designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, is due for its first-phase completion in 2011. To give LFA-goers a foretaste of the “premium residences,” the developers commissioned the sculptor Brendan Jamison to create architectural replicas of their project and its illustrious neighbor—in sugar cubes. 81,028 cubes, to be exact. Jamison painstakingly stuck each one in place, using more than fourteen liters of glue in the process.  The replica of the Tate Modern was built at a scale of 1:100, which means that its chimney still stands over a meter high, and it weighs close to 500 pounds.

Jamison is known for his rather unusual choice of materials: he regularly works with wax and wool. But his sugar-cube sculptures (he has previously created models of Belfast’s Helen’s Tower and a proposed construction at Great Patrick Street, Belfast) are something else. The two new ones will be on display at the NEO Bankside sales pavilion on the 3rd and 4th of July; we will post some additional, larger photos when the final installation is complete.

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