Delight

British readers who grew up in the '70s might have fond folk memories of Bird's Angel Delight, a blancmange-like dessert that came in lurid shades of citrus and pink. With its swirling contours of gloopy, E-number orange, Magma Architecture's temporary installation to house an exhibition of the practice's work looks as though Angel Delight has been pumped into a room in the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin's museum of contemporary art, photography and architecture. In reality it consists of an immensely flexible tensile fabric (a mix of polyamide and elastan) stretched between the walls, floor and ceiling to form a thrillingly amorphous spatial environment.

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The use of stretched fabric recalls the work of Anish Kapoor (AR September 1999), and it forms an atmospheric counterpoint with the orthogonal formality of the gallery. Openings cut at intervals into the fabric enable visitors to pop up into the curvaceous orange space (kick stools are provided for smaller patrons). Inside, Magma's collection of models, drawings and photographs are delicately suspended from tensile wires. Through the manipulation of geometries and coruscating colour, the temporary gallery is transformed into a surreal, dynamic environment. The jury were tickled both by the technically inventive concept and its delightful execution. The future is orange. C. S.

COPYRIGHT 2007 EMAP Architecture
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning