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NMLA SWIM THE SERPENTINE

SEPTEMBER 2018

NMLA swim the serpentine

On Saturday, a group of current and former NMLA staff, friends and partners swam a mile in the Serpentine as part of the weekend’s open water swimming festival in Hyde Park.

Following a summer of sun-drenched sea and river swims, it was pouring with rain as we made our way through crowds of bemused tourists and displaced geese to the start. It felt distinctly autumnal as we lined up on the edge of the Serpentine in our wetsuits and matching hats to a motivational soundtrack featuring Ricky Martin. After a civilised scrummage at the start, everyone settled into a rhythm for the mile-long lap in the murky greenish-grey water. We circumnavigated Christo’s vast London Mastaba, a stack of 7,506 brightly coloured barrels floating in the centre of the lake, and agreed that our frog’s-eye views of it lent a new appreciation of the piece. As we rounded the final marker buoy and then clambered up the precarious exit ramp, we emerged grinning, enjoying the familiar and addictive endorphin buzz from pushing through the chilly water. A bottle of fizz was opened and shared, and we splashed damply off to the pub to warm up and relive the summer’s swimming exploits.

For anyone considering a discovery of swimming outside (even vicariously!), we would thoroughly recommend Roger Deakin’s wonderful book Waterlog, which tracks a year of swimming in the wild across the UK and has by now inspired thousands of subversive sea, river and lake swims.

BIENNALE ARCHITECTTURA 2018

JUNE 2018

Biennale Architecttura 2018

The 2018 Venice Biennale opened to the public on the 26th May. This year’s theme “focuses on architecture’s ability to provide free and additional spatial gifts to those who use it and on its ability to address the unspoken wishes of strangers”.

Our contribution is a collection of six large-scale models, each representing a hall for gathering that the practice has designed. These models are placed upon a rotating table which is a calendar and a cosmic machine. Each hall has a different purpose yet they all bring people together in a rhythmic and cyclical fashion daily, weekly and annually. The specific uses of each building are regulated by a calendar of events, rituals and times of congregation. Their calendars are inscribed on the outer rim of a turning table. The table can be rotated by hand. When you turn it, varying light falls upon the models representing the passage of the sun through the day from dawn to dusk. It is a manual and mechanical process.

The intention of presenting these models in this way is to emphasise the relationship between the enduring frames of the buildings and the endless procession of fugitive elements that pass through them periodically.