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This might seem like just a graffiti / painting on a set of plinths, but there is more behind it. The idea I am fascinated about the most is – the provocation of students. This installation was done at university, on all plinths of our MArch Architecture studio a week before our interim crits.

Taking all the plinths might seem rude at first, but architecture is about behaviour change and interaction between a space and its users, which is what this installation did. The painting on the plinths gave them a sense of untouchability (or at least I hoped it will). I was curious what will happen with a crit day approaching. Will students start to take the plinths one by one? They belong to them as much as they belong to me.

I wanted to see a progressive defragmentation of this painting, but what I’ve discovered instead, not even 24hours after the installation was made – plinths composed randomly, looking somewhat similar to Picasso’s paintings. Brilliant – a number of coursemates decided to re-organize them.

I loved the idea of chance in this installation – stacking the plinths randomly and then painting a symbol on them left me wondering how will each plinth look like. The random sizes of plinths stacked together was also a way of escaping a typical grid. It also has an effective three-dimensional quality, due to lengths of plinths they can be spaced in a random way, again creating something completely different and completely by chance.

The crits went great too, as my tutor Sean Griffiths, Co-Founter of FAT said: “Ricardas, you have had the best presense during the crits today”, meaning that all students were presenting their models on plinths with a piece of my painted symbol.

I was hoping that after the crits I will collect them and stack them in a random way, but there was no need for that, as like I mentioned previously, it happened sooner than I expected thanks to my coursemates.

The painted symbol is from my own created alphabet, which you can check out here and download as a font here.

I have also made a small model of this installation, which will appear on the blog soon.

Above you will find a time-lapse video of the installation making process, and at the bottom a photo gallery of the installation, as well as a photo gallery of plinths being used in the studio by other students to display their work.

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