Sam Jacob Studio has created a replica of Adolf Loos’ unrealized 1921 mausoleum in Highgate Cemetary, London, which is home to the graves of Karl Marx and Malcolm McLaren, amongst other notable figures.
Commissioned by the Architecture Foundation, the project—entitled A Very Small Part of Architecture—“resurrects” the Austrian Modernist architect’s radically simple mausoleum design for art historian Max Dvorák.
The project is recreated at a 1:1 scale using a lightweight timber frame and scaffold net, creating “a ghostly reenactment of an unrealized architectural idea.”
The title of the project is taken from Loos’ 1910 essay Architecture, in which he asserts that “only a very small part of architecture belongs to the realm of art: the tomb and the monument.”
Built within Highgate Cemetery, amongst the many monuments and memorials to the dead, A Very Small Part Of Architecture makes a different kind of memorial. Not one dedicated to a person, an event or a moment in time, not designed to remember the past but instead to imagine other possibilities, altered presents and alternative futures.
Learn more about the project here.
News via Sam Jacob Studio.
.jpg?1474605296 "Sam Jacob Studio \"Resurrects\" Unrealized Adolf Loos Mausoleum in London Cemetery")
