Part Egyptian tomb, part Masonic temple, the 1930s headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects has always exuded a cult-like atmosphere. Located on London's illustrious Portland Place, among embassies, consulates and oligarchs' pieds-à-terre, it is a fitting royal headquarters for a chartered profession that has long styled itself as an exclusive gentlemen's club.
If you've ever attended an event there, you probably didn't pay much attention to the dull brown mural at the back of the venue. It's a dirty, poorly lit and worn screen, which tends to fade into the background of the surrounding Art Deco splendor. And there's a good reason the RIBA didn't want you to look too closely at it.
Thandi Loewenson's answer is a drawing of a mine in Zambia, one of the first sites of British colonial mineral extraction and now one of the most toxic places on earth
"It's one of the most racist things I've ever seen in my life," said Thandi Loewenson, a Zimbabwean-born architectural designer and researcher. "And that means something."
Take a look and you'll see groups of half-naked figures from all corners of the British Empire, cartoonishly depicted as primitive savages with exaggerated facial features, huddled in timid submission around the edges of the mural. At its center, radiating like a heavenly vision above a map of Britain, is the RIBA Council, depicted as a professional parliament of identical faceless figures. Between the professionals and the native population, in a kind of architectural halo, float the symbolic buildings of the empire: the Parliament of Pretoria, the Viceroy's Palace in New Delhi, the Government of Canberra and other works written by leading members of the institute .
"It's a very useful document," says Loewenson. "It celebrates the role of the architect within the structures of colonialism. The buildings depicted here are literally repositories of stolen land and exploited labor." But in her eyes, something crucial is missing from the tableau. "What is missing are the locations where the material itself is extracted - the mines, farms, plantations and prisons, where all this wealth was forcibly taken."
That's why she came up with a solution. Along with a number of other designers from the colonial diaspora, Loewenson has been commissioned as part of a new exhibition, Raising the Roof, curated by Margaret Cubbage, which aims to spotlight the colonial symbolism embedded in the RIBA building - and to propose ways in which these histories can be interpreted and untangled.
Loewenson's answer is a startling mural of her own: a glittering drawing etched into panels of graphite, conceived as "a new layer" to be superimposed over the gallery's problematic Jarvis mural. Her image, created in collaboration with Chinese designer Zhongshan Zou, is a reinterpretation of a 1921 drawing of a lead and zinc mine in Kabwe, Zambia, called Broken Hill. It was one of the first sites of British colonial mining and is now one of the most toxic places on earth. As a result of decades of mining, 95% of the local population has elevated blood lead levels, leading to lifelong health problems. Last year, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights described Kabwe as one of the world's 'sacrifice zones', where corporate environmental pollution has created shadow countries of misery.
Loewenson's speculative proposal would daub the mural with layers of graphite - "this messy, slippery mineral, mined from the earth" - so that fragments of the old world order, pictured below, would gleam through the image of the toxic landscape it created. "Traces of the original mural can still be seen," she writes in an accompanying text. "The ghosts of buildings shine through the image, now contextualized by slag heaps and accompanied by the much less glamorous infrastructure of extraction that supported their own construction." Unfortunately, she will not be unleashed on the mural itself, in this monumental building, but it is a provocative proposal.
Built in 1934 to the designs of George Gray Wornum, the RIBA was conceived as a monument of imperial splendor. It was designed as a showcase of colonial riches, with African marble on the processional stairs, Indian silver-gray wood on the floors of the halls and Australian walnut and Canadian maple on the walls of the council chamber. In the Florence Hall on the building's top floor, the back wall is clad in a carved wooden screen that forms a hymn to the raw materials of the imperial dominions: a stately billboard advertising the exotic things that architects could specify in their projects. One panel depicts a South African mine, the other a Canadian lumberjack cutting down a pine tree, from which the screen itself is made.
Architect and designer Giles Tettey Nartey, who grew up in Ghana, has responded to the panels with a series of beautiful, organically shaped stools, carved from the same Quebec pine wood as the screen, but colored in a dark, inky black. They are arranged like islands around a meandering table, with a blank tablet in the center, waiting for a future interpretation panel.
"I didn't want to impose a literal alternative to the Dominion Screen," says Tettey Nartey, "but instead create something that would facilitate multiple conversations. I want people to get started, discuss and come up with a joint answer on the screen." He says the 17 stools represent the countries 'left out' in the sculpted panels (including Australia, South Africa, India, Canada and New Zealand), which makes us think about 'other places where the British ideal also exists of architecture was imposed. ".
Hanging on the wall nearby, Indian-born architectural designer and artist Arinjoy Sen has created a dazzling, psychedelic alternative to the Jarvis Mural. He puts the empire's indigenous subjects center stage, transforming them from oppressed savages on the margins to active players in a colorful carnival of creativity. Flanked by trees of Burmese teak and West African mahogany, his drawing unfolds as a riotous, intricately detailed scene that samples numerous details from throughout the building to form a kaleidoscopic spectacle, radiant with sunny optimism. The RIBA should immediately commission a full-size version of it (preferably embroidered, like Sen's beautiful contribution to last year's Venice Biennale) to replace the boring, racist mural downstairs.
Finally, artist and writer Esi Eshun contributes a poetic film that combines archive footage with her own thoughtful commentary as she wanders through the building. She examines some of the colonial structures depicted in the controversial mural and unravels their histories, in relation to the indigenous peoples upon whom these buildings were 'imposed and denied at once'. The retractable screen is a "cartography of desire and desperation," she says, which, as it rises from the floor and sinks back into the floor, evokes "imperial cuts and continuities, partitions and enclosures."
The timing of the exhibition couldn't be better. It begins in the week that Lesley Lokko receives the RIBA Gold Medal - the first black woman to receive the sacred gong - and at a time when the institution has its youngest and first-ever black president at the helm, Nigerian-born Muyiwa Oki. It is a moment of reckoning for the 190-year-old institution. This year also marks the 90th anniversary of the building's completion, with the launch of RIBA's investment project to renovate and restore the building, for which this exhibition will hopefully provide food for thought.
"This is not just an exercise in institutional self-flagellation," says architectural historian and head of the London School of Architecture, Neal Shasore, who is advising on the conservation plan. His research into the history of the RIBA building led the institute to add interpretation panels to some of these problematic features, and it also inspired the origins of the new exhibition. "These commissions are serious, nuanced responses to the complexity of the building's colonial entanglements."
He would ultimately like to see the "extremely racist" Jarvis mural removed, included in the RIBA's collection for contextual display, and replaced with a new commission. "It's not about pretending it wasn't there, or about 'cancelling,' or about any of those boring discursive tropes," he says. "You can make it more present and find imaginative ways to rewrite some of those problematic stories in a completely transparent way. This is not an erasure process."
Hardly anyone had noticed these elements in the building before, he argues, and this is an opportunity to highlight them and open a wider conversation. "From the Confederate monuments in the US, to the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, to the Colston moment in Bristol, we are finally seeing these aspects of our built environment and reflecting much more fundamentally on what the nature of architecture is - and the ways in which it can sometimes be co-opted for nefarious purposes."
