Echo City - Tote

In 2006 TDR art-directed and designed (and curated with Jeremy Till (then Sheffield School of Architecture), Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware, Forced Entertainment’s Tim Etchells, artists Jim Prevett and Encounters etc) Echo City for the British Pavilion at the 10th Venice Biennale for Architecture.

Jeremy Till wrote this for TDR’s Bunch of Fives book:

“It is 1940. Iron railings, saucepans and bits of domesticity are being melted down as part of the war effort, but the real stuff, the real steel’s still being made in Sheffield. This is the Achilles Heel of Britain and the Axis know it. Nightly bombing raids begin to pick off the steel mills of the Don Valley. 

Their job is made easy: when the doors of the giant furnaces open to allow the molten metal to cool, a vast glow appears in the sky. And so, with the mixture of guile and Heath Robinson ingenuity that characterised so much of the home effort, a decoy Sheffield is built further up the valley. It is made of light.

Lines of bulbs define the streets, sheets of light the buildings, theatre lights the glow of molten metal. During the day it lies blind, but at night it attracts the bombers like moths to the flame. In the wartime School of Architecture on the hill young designers draw up the plans for this phantom Sheffield (the grown ups are away in battle).

After a night of bombing ruin, they spend the next day readjusting the plans; dreamers full of the optimism of youth, they make and remake their version of Sheffield, nudging it towards an ephemeral ideal. It is a city that is — Here (in the valley), Nowhere (it disappears in the day) and Everywhere (it represents the future of their country).

The designers, builders and engineers create a double of the city. A ghost: a space that is at once Sheffield and not-Sheffield. An echo space, part decoy and part of the city’s high-voltage, deserted dream of itself.”

This is the branding for the show. And this is the bag.