Artist:
Langlands & Bell [Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell] (duo formed 1977 in London, England; work in London).

Materials:
Silkscreen ink on poster paper, plywood, softwood, steel, paint; 420 x 610 x 35 cm overall.

Description:
Commissioned as part of The Green Room, a multi-part public art project that took place in Bath as part of the Bath International Music Festival.

“Located on a waste area within the park area that had formerly been the site of a ruined castle amusement, the image is of a model of the Bauhaus building at Dessau. The building has become, to an extent, an icon for a utopian idealism now long disappeared.”
—Piers Masterson, review of Bath Festival, Bath, Creative Camera, 1995.

“Once [the image of the building] was removed from the specifically urban context of the street and placed in the [eighteenth-century] pleasure garden, it had an air of unreality about it. Also, the site we chose was the Parks Department’s rubbish tip which had once been a folly of a ruined castle. These gardens are so full of architectural follies such as Roman temples so we introduced an image of the Bauhaus in Dessau, an architectural icon from the twentieth century, a temple of modernism.”
—Artist statement, in Langlands & Bell (London: Serpentine Gallery, 1996), 133.