| Description |
In this new exhibition Yuko Shiraishi has created a visionary architectural installation which draws on numerous contemporary, topical themes: space exploration, scientific endeavour, human relationships, tradition and modernity. Shiraishi has built a ‘Space Elevator Japanese Tea Room’. Made from stainless steel tubes and plexiglass the construction is a skeletal ghost building – replicating the form of an early 17th-century traditional Japanese Tea House but also posing as a vehicle into space. Inspiration for the project came from Arthur C Clarke’s novel Fountains of Paradise in which the transportation of people and objects into space is made possible on a rigid metal ribbon. (NASA scientists are currently seriously considering space elevators as a mass-transit system for the next century.) Shiraishi has extended the idea to incorporate architecture and so to consider the relationship between humanity and space – between Japanese tradition and Western science. |