The Bank of England in Ruins

The Bank of England in Ruins is an exhibition about architecture, ruins, value, and money. The gallery is in the heart of the City of London’s financial district, sited in James Stirling’s postmodernist building No1 Poultry, opposite the actual Bank of England.

Responding to this context, the exhibition’s centrepiece is a large physical model made by Studio Jacob based on a drawing by Joseph Gandy showing John Soane’s design of the Bank of England. Soane’s building had only recently been completed, but Gandy’s drawing (1830) shows the bank in ruins after some unspecified future catastrophe.

The strangeness of depicting architecture (and a key edifice of the British state) as a ruin is the starting point for a collection of different projects. These also respond to Soane and Stirling’s interest in fragmentation and reassembly, the reuse of pieces of history to construct possible futures.

Architecture here is thought of as a product of varied and conflicting value systems: Economic value, symbolic value, use value, social value and so on. Buildings are caught up in the exchange of value in many ways: Architecture can be a symbol of value (eg the temple or the skyscraper as the image of a bank, or buildings used on bank notes), its value can be an economic asset, traded in the market, backed by loans, atomised into credit default swaps and other complex financial instruments. Architecture is the physical site where competing ideas of value are exchanged. Both the product of tensions and contradictions between different value systems. and a means to imagine other possibilities.

Alongside the model of the Bank of England in Ruins the projects on show are explorations of (some) of these questions including:

• Drawings of the architectural fragments used in the design of bank notes, where buildings are used as symbols of both solidity and state.

• A tower-object reprising Soane’s Pasticcio, a surreal stack of varied, incongruent architectural pieces in the courtyard of his Lincon’s Inn Fields home reimagined with fragments of Soane, Stirling and fragments of banknote architecture.

• Responses by international architects to documentary photographs of the real ruination of Soane’s Bank of England, demolished 1925 to 1939. Dreams of reconstruction creating alternative forms value. Ruins not as ending but as a beginning.

• Souvenir architectural models cast from shredded bank notes.

The exhibition takes Gandy’s vision as a provocation to reconsider architecture’s relationship with value (or values relationship with architecture).