Artist:
Arni Haraldsson (born in Iceland; lives and works in Vancouver, Canada).

Description:
“The Goldfinger Project explored social utopian ideology through the photography of Brutalist architecture.

“The project documents both fictional and factual narratives across a wide range of media from one of Brutalism’s key exponents and a leading figure of the Modern Movement; Ernö Goldfinger.

“Contemporary scholar and artist, Arni Haraldsson has compiled key moments from Goldfinger’s lifetime and documented his legacy to architecture within the urban landscape. Haraldsson examines the accomplishments of Goldfinger through the presentation of photography, film footage, historical documentation, popular cultural memorabilia, sound and resourced information. The display includes material from such diverse sources as BBC newsreels of the Ronan Point tower collapse, the Barbican, Trellick Tower t-shirts, popular music songs, advertising campaigns, interviews with residents and James Bond movies.”
—”Arni Haraldsson: The Goldfinger Project,” SPACE.

“Beautiful photography by Vancouver-based artist Arni Haraldsson, who curated the show, portrays Goldfinger’s most famous building, London’s Grade-II-listed Trellick Tower. Already pretty photogenic when it opened in 1972, it looks wonderful now: an ambitious, arrogant structure in gritty grey concrete. Next to this image stands a rickety glass cabinet containing artefacts exploring the building’s social and cultural ramifications: JG Ballard’s novel High Rise, with its explicit indictment on the class warfare waiting to happen to British modernism, Anthony Burgess’s The Clockwork Orange, Blur’s album The Great Escape and, of course, Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger.

“Yet the show sheds little critical light on the building’s passage from dystopian nightmare to icon of the west London cultural elite. This same conflict underlies Goldfinger’s work: his many enemies attacked him for being a champagne socialist. While he and his wife did spend two months living in one of his first housing projects, the Balfron Tower in Poplar, they returned to their warm, wood-lined home in West Hampstead.”
—Beatrice Galilee, review of “The Goldfinger Project,” by Arni Haraldsson, SPACE, London, icon 53 (November 2007).