Bompas & Parr invited designers and architects to create speculative designs for monuments and mausolea, and the fascinating results are now on show at the Sir John Soane Museum.
A design competition and a resulting exhibition focusing on mausoleums sounds like a morbid affair but Bompas & Parr’s Monumental Masonry display at the Sir John Soane Museum manages to be more serene than sombre. The top ten entries to the competition, which make up the display vary wildly in style from the pseudo-classical to the futuristic, but they are all given a consistency in display through the use of 3D printing to create each of the small-scale physical models.
The display is a little tucked away in this labyrinthine building but well worth a visit, especially if you plan time to take in the museum as a whole – one of the most eccentric and fascinating in London. Whether or not the exhibition succeeds in Bompas & Parr’s hope that it will “reignite interest in funerary architecture, tombs and mausolea,” it will all have been for a good cause: the ten winning models were auctioned off and raised £5,000 to be split between Maggie’s cancer charity and the museum itself.
Monumental Masonry
Until 24 January 2015
Sir John Soane's Museum
13 Lincoln's Inn Fields
London WC2A 3BP
bompasandparr.com
soane.org
Photographs by Ann Charlott Ommedal