From the Editors
THE MARBLE ARCH JOKE Words Alessandro Rognoni
Recently built in London, the MVRDV designed Marble Arch Hill is just the latest case of ‘pavilion for the pavilion’s sake’. But while the premise of an artificial hill might be worth a laugh, the project also raises questions on whether it still makes sense to build temporary structures as vehicles for social (and commercial) aggregation.
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Despite the lifting of travel restrictions in the UK, these days not many of us in Delft have had the chance to stroll around Hyde Park in London. However, like anyone keeping up with the architectural press, I have recently been meticulously told, by writers of literally every single British paper, about the experience of encountering one of the most controversial architectural installations in years: the Marble Arch Hill. Now, because of our editorial inexperience and our lack of self-confidence, we at Bnieuws are usually very timid when it comes to criticising architecture, a profession in which we’ve all have very little professional involvement. Because of this, I personally felt very liberated when I found out about the Marble Arch Hill, a building so clearly dreadful that it was offered to me on a silver plate for a comfortable intellectual massacre. Readers that were also recently in touch with the British press will know how the pavilion managed to attract criticism from every possible disciplinary angle [1]. With that said, a few things are there to discuss... I will avoid a meticulous explanation of the failure of the pavilion’s construction, something that can be easily found through a quick Google search. The pavilion, an artificial hill situated between Marble Arch and Hyde Park’s speaker’s corner (once the temple of democratic debate and, funnily enough, public criticism towards authority), was advertised by MVRDV as a lush, dense and ‘realistic’ ridge.
Instead, on opening day the building looked more similar to low-res, triangulated blob, so clearly appalling to be eventually closed after just two days, to allow for further refinement What instead deserves even more criticism is the premise of the project itself. Proposed by Westminster Council as a sort of ‘public magnet’. Aiming at attracting people back to shopping in the adjacent Oxford Street (the most important shopping street in the capital), this is just another example of public money (6 million pounds, to be precise) spent on an eye-catching but ephemeral object, directly serving the right to consume-andshare, rather than the right to genuine commercial public space. “Build a hill and they will come” stated The Guardian last month. To be precise, it looks more like ‘build an image of a hill, and people will come’, with renders of the lush urban mountain travelling around the internet long before construction, in an attempt to build excitement around the installation. The public’s harsh judgment on the project has, in fact, resulted from a misalignment of its look with their expectations. The fact that the top of the hill is not publicly accessible, but requiring a ticket up to 8£, made things even worse. “What a joke!”, I imagine many of the Londoners saying when approaching this unrefined object, after having booked in advance. A joke, for sure. But is it at least an intentional one?
