Archive

Monthly Archives: July 2024

Shopping Emporiums of West Africa: The Kingsway Stores

By
July 25, 2024
Africa, AHUWA, British Colonial Architecture, Ghana, Ibadan, Nigeria, United Africa Company
Leave a comment

This week we installed our new exhibition: Shopping Emporiums of West Africa: The Kingsway Stores, at Lever House, Port Sunlight.

Following on from our research project into the architecture of the United Africa Company we’ve curated an exhibition that focuses on the department stores and their contribution to design, urban development and retail throughout the 20thC.

The exhibition has been co-curated with archivist Claire Tunstall, and developed from the research undertaken during the last 4 years with Ewan Harrison, Rixt Woudstra, Paul Robinson, and Michele Tenzon.

The exhibition includes images from the Unilever Archive arranged across two freestanding pavilions along with archival films, and a set of newly commissioned 3D printed models beautifully crafted by Liverpool School of Architecture students. The pavilions were fabricated using CNC routers with the expert help of LSA’s technicians.

The catalogue is available here. This is just the start – the next step is to tour the exhibition from their current home in Port Sunlight to Birkenhead, Liverpool, Accra, and Lagos.

A summer of gods and goddesses: Nek Chand Exhibition at The Gallery of Everything

By
July 12, 2024
Chandigarh, India
Leave a comment

Nek Chand’s Rock Garden: Phase2

A summer of gods and goddesses

14.07.24 > 15.09.24

The gallery of everything presents an installation of original sculptures and figures by Nek Chand Saini (1924 – 2015).

Born in 1924, Saini was a village-born child whose family fled to india as refugees. his lifetime project, started in secret in the 1950s, was a maze of narrow walkways and sloping gardens, filled with hand-crafted figurines.

Nek Chand, 2005

Originally titled the kingdom of gods and goddesses, his creative practice was situated somewhere in between land art, landscape architecture and the vast realm of the folkloric vernacular.

Yet even in his lifetime, Saini saw himself neither as an artist, nor as author of his environment. instead, he saw his project as a welcome contrast to Chandigarh’s sharp modernist lines, and a place where everyday people could simply go, discover and be.

In this centenary year of Nek Chand Saini’s birth, The Gallery of Everything honours his profound achievement with an installation of works from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, including original ceramic and bangle figures created by Saini and his team of workers.

To celebrate Transnational Architecture Group has uploaded our book from 2007 here as a free PDF download.