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The Size+Matter project on London’s South Bank is one of the focal points of the London Design Festival. In a bid to drag the focus south of the river and onto the ever-developing South Bank area, the London Design Festival commissioned two globally renowned British architects, Amanda Levete and Zaha Hadid, to create a public installation from one material, to be unveiled at the festival and later sold in a walk-through auction by Phillips de Pury. The finished installations are extraordinary, reflecting the different and very signature styles of each architect.

Amanda Levete of Future Systems fame was charged with the material Corian and set about designing an installation in two sections, made up of repeated motifs of a single shape. The effect is mesmerising. Sometimes seeming futuristic with the translucent quality that Corian has when light shines through it, at other times, it feels computer-generated. the joy is being able to walk through it, touch it and see how the ever-changing London light and weather affect one’s perceptions of it against the brutalist architecture of the surrounding National Theatre.

We caught up with Amanda Levete to hear more about her work, and spent last week following the construction process.

What interested you about taking part in the Size+Matter project?
I was approached around February, and was fascinated by the commission, in that the piece I created doesn’t have a function. It was about experimenting and exploring, taking a material and coming up with an idea that allowed me to explore the limits of the material structurally, aesthetically and also allowed me to explore ideas that I might use in other projects or ideas that have been bubbling away for larger architectural commissions. I was able to explore them at a different scale and to create something that has a public presence but that isn’t a piece of sculpture.

So you didn’t approach the commission wanting to create a sculpture?
For me there is a very different sensibility between being an architect and being an artist and I would not ever want to stray into the territory that of claiming that we were making a piece of sculpture, which would have been entirely different. However the scale of it is somewhere between a building and a sculpture so it clearly has that kind of connotation. But it’s very interesting to explore this idea where there is no function attributed to it.

Is it completely functionless?
Yes. Having said this - when you think of anything, you think of where it’s going to be placed. So clearly it’s place in front of the Southbank Centre is a temporary installation, so you then think, well where might it end up? And the idea came from looking at the repetition of a motif and looking at foliage and light and the way that light comes through the foliage of a tree. I wanted to explore the effect this has- this relationship between solid and void and the patterns that this makes, the shadows and the way that they animate the space, adding a visual complexity with a comforting and open feel.

Would you describe your piece as a barrier?
Well I was interested in the idea of creating a wall that wasn’t a boundary, it has a physicality but it’s not about producing a boundary. And the idea of layering like when you look up at a canopy of branches and leaves of trees and how that effect could perhaps be replicated in something very physical and solid. That was my starting point. And then thinking perhaps its eventual home might be in a park or garden setting, where it would be set against the natural foliage, with an interplay between natural and artificial.

How did you find working with Corian on this scale?
Corian was given to us as the material. It’s a completely manmade material and yet people look at it like marble, which is natural, so that was interesting in itself. We’d never used it structurally, I’d only used it before as a surface, finishing material. It’s never been used structurally before. I’ve not seen it used in a way that isn’t slab like. So we wanted to take this motif and by using it repetitively, create a whole structure beyond its composite means. The idea of the shape came very much from tree foliage. Corian can have a very translucent quality, much like light coming through leaves of a tree. In parallel to this we’ve been looking into various elevational studies for large arch projects where we’ve been playing with repetition of motifs so the projects have merged into one. And this opportunity to explore the same idea on a smaller scale was the fundamental interest in taking part in the project. via wallpaper
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