Graham Stevens – Desert Cloud and Other Works
Thursday 10th October, 6.30pm Room M421
Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment
University of Westminster
35 Marylebone Road
London NW1 5LS
“The purpose of creating events such as Walking on Air or Walking on Water is to explore the relationship between people and their environment.” Graham Stevens, Pneumatics and Atmospheres, Architectural Design (AD), 1972.
In 1966, Stevens presented his Walking on Water series, which comprised a variety of playfully inventive works presented throughout Battersea Park in London. Among these were inflated spheres that participants could climb inside; floating atop bodies of water, walking along the inside surface, a little like a rat in a spinning wheel. Other works included Atmospheric Raft 1968, an art work, which proposed changing the world’s energy supply from fossil fuels to ‘atmospheric’ sources of the sun, wind, rain and ‘Energy Farms’. Inflatable pontoon or Pontube, and Overland, Overwater, Airborne, Submarine Transport System 1971, was an inflated tube lying across a variety of terrains for participants to traverse. These works were not just extensions of the body but experimentations and opportunities for participants to extend themselves, and, for a moment, feel as if they were superhuman within a widened perceptual field.
For Lecture details
Pete Silver / Will McLean