Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Spencer de Grey, Patrik Schumacher and recently Alex Chinneck with melting houses and floating building have made the sculptor a new master of illusion.
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| Alex Chinneck’s new structure was commissioned as part of the Assembly London office and retail complex in Hammersmith, on the site of a former publishing house. This finished piece – constructed from 4,000 bricks and more than 1,000 stainless steel components – reaches 20 metres above ground level, weighs 10 tonnes and took 14 months to complete. |
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| One of Chinneck’s earliest works, Telling the Truth Through False Teeth, was assembled in 2012 using 1,248 pieces of glass to create 312 identically smashed windows across the facade of an abandoned factory in Hackney. |
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| This house in Margate had been derelict for 11 years when Chinneck found the right property for his ‘very large project’. Ten companies donated all the processes and materials required for the project, and after its months-long run, it was reused as housing. |
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| For his next trick, Take My Lightning but Don’t Steal My Thunder in 2014, Chinneck made a building in London’s Covent Garden market look as though it was floating mid-air. The illusion of weightlessness took a lot of polystyrene and 16 tonnes of steel. |
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| A Bullet from a Shooting Star, a 35m upside-down electricity pylon, appeared on Greenwich Peninsula as part of the 2015 London Design Festival. |
Chinneck is also working on two new works in Mumbai, India, slated for 2018 – his first pieces outside of the UK. ‘Over the next couple of years, some very large, very ambitious, very challenging artworks are going to be entering the public realm’.
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