by Part Egyptian tomb, part Masonic temple, the headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects in the 1930s always had an air of costume. Located on London’s Portland Place, among the embassies, consulates and pieds-à-terre of the oligarchs, it is a fittingly royal headquarters for a chartered profession that has long become an exclusive gentlemen’s club.
If you’ve ever been there, you probably haven’t paid much attention to the dull brown mural at the back of the auditorium. It is a dirty, badly lit and badly scuffed screen, and it tends to fade into the background of the surrounding art deco pomp. 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 the planet
“It’s one of the most racist things I’ve ever seen in my life,” says Thandi Loewenson, a Zimbabwean-born architectural designer and researcher. “And something is being said.”
Look, and you will see groups of half-naked people from all over the British Empire, who are depicted cartoonishly as primitive savages with exaggerated features, huddled in timid submission around the edges of the mural. In the centre, hovering above a map of Britain like some heavenly vision, is the RIBA council, depicted as a professional parliament of identical faceless figures. Floating between the professionals and the natives, in a kind of architectural halo, are the symbolic buildings of the Empire: the parliament of Pretoria, the Palace of the Viceroy in New Delhi, the government of Canberra, and other works authored by distinguished members of the institution.
“It’s a very useful document,” says Loewenson. “It hides the role of the architect within the structures of colonialism. The buildings depicted here are literal repositories of stolen land and exploited labor.” But, in her eyes, something vital is missing from the tableau. “What does not exist are the sites of material extraction themselves – the mines, farms, plantations and prisons, from which this wealth was violently taken.”
So she has come up with a solution. Along with several 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 shine a spotlight on the colonial symbolism embedded throughout the RIBA building – and suggest ways in which these histories could be interpreted and disentangled.
Loewenson’s response is a terrifying mural of its own: a shimmering drawing etched into graphite panels, intended as “another layer” to superimpose the problematic Jarvis mural in the auditorium. 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 British colonial mineral extraction sites and is now one of the most toxic places on the planet. As a result of years of mining, 95% of the local population have elevated lead levels in their blood, causing lifelong health conditions. Last year, the UN special rapporteur on human rights described Kabwe as one of the world’s “sacrifice zones”, where corporate environmental corruption has created lands of misery.
In Loewenson’s speculative proposal the double mural would be seen with layers of graphite – “this messy, slippery mineral, which is extracted from the earth” – so that fragments of the old world order, shown below, would slide through the image of the a toxic landscape he created. . “Traces of the original mural can still be seen,” she writes in a text. “The ghosts of buildings move through the image, now contextualized by piles of slag and alongside the far less glamorous extractive infrastructure that supported their own construction.” Sadly, she won’t be allowed on the mural itself, in this Grade II* listed building, but it’s a tempting proposition.
Built in 1934, according to the designs of George Gray Wornum, the RIBA was conceived as a monument of imperial splendour. It was designed as a display of colonial opulence, with African marble on its grand staircase, silver gray Indian wood on its hall floors, and Australian walnut and Canadian maple on the council chamber walls. In the upstairs building’s Florence Hall, the back wall is lined with a carved wooden screen that stands as a hymn to the raw materials of the imperial lords – a stately billboard announcing exotic things that architects might specify in their projects. One panel shows a mine in South Africa, while another shows a Canadian lumberjack felling a pine tree, from which the screen itself is made.
Architect and designer Giles Tettey Nartey, who grew up in Ghana, responded to the panels with a series of beautiful, organically shaped stools, carved from the same Quebec pine as the screen, but in a jet black color. They are arranged as small islands around a curved table, where a white tablet is set in the middle, awaiting a future interpretation panel.
“I didn’t want to implement a literal alternative to the Dominion Screen,” says Tettey Nartey, “but instead to create something that would help facilitate multiple conversations. I want people to pull up a stool, have a discussion and find a common response on the screen.” He says that the 17 stools represent the countries “left out” of the carved panels (which include Australia, South Africa, India, Canada and New Zealand), which makes us think of “other places where the ideal of British architecture was also imposed on them. “.
Hanging on the nearby wall, Indian-born architectural designer and artist Arinjoy Sen has come up with a psychedelic alternative to the Jarvis Mural. It encourages the Native subjects of the Empire to take center stage, transforming them from oppressed savages on the fringes to active players in the colorful carnival of creativity. Flanked by Burma teak and west African mahogany trees, his drawing unfolds as a riotous scene, intricately detailed that samples many details around the building to create kaleidoscopic spectacles, shining with sunny optimism. The RIBA should immediately commission a full-size version of it (preferably embroidered, like Sen’s contribution to the Venice Biennale last year) to replace his racist mural downstairs.
Finally, artist and writer Esi Eshun presents a poetic film that combines archival images with her own thoughtful commentary as she walks through the building. She examines some of the colonial structures depicted in the controversial mural and uncovers their history, in relation to the indigenous communities “to whom these buildings were immediately placed and rejected”. The retractable screen is a “cartography of desire and despair”, he says, as it rises and lowers back into the floor, representing “imperial reductions and continuities, partitions and enclosures”.
The timing of the exhibition could not have been more appropriate. It opens in the week that Lesley Lokko receives an RIBA gold medal – the first black woman to be awarded the coveted gong – and at a time when the institution has its youngest and first ever black president, Nigerian-born Muyiwa Oki . It is a special moment for the 190-year-old institution. This year also marks the 90th anniversary of the completion of the building, where the RIBA’s capital project to restore and restore it is launched, and it is hoped that this exhibition will provide some useful food for thought.
“This is 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 management plan. As a result of its research into the history of the RIBA building the institute added interpretive panels to some of these problematic features, and also inspired the foundation of the new exhibition. “These commissions are serious, nuanced responses to the complexity of the building’s colonial connections.”
He finally wants the “very, very racist” Jarvis mural taken down, agreed into the RIBA collection to be displayed in context, and replaced by a new commission. “It’s not about pretending it wasn’t there, or ‘cancelling it,’ or any of these boring, boring tropes,” he says. “You can make it more immediate, and find imaginative ways to rewrite some of those problematic narratives, completely transparently. This is not a process of destruction.”
Hardly anyone noticed these features in the building before, he claimed, and this is an opportunity to draw attention to them, as well as open up the wider conversation. “From the Confederate monuments in the USA, to the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, to the Colston moment in Bristol, we are finally seeing these aspects of our built environment, and a much more fundamental reflection of what the nature of architecture is – and the ways in which it can sometimes be co-opted for nefarious purposes.”
