Tramway Private View: Matthew Darbyshire (with Owen Hatherly)

Tramway is proud to present visual artist Matthew Darbyshire’s largest public exhibition to date 'T rooms' which includes a splinter project by Darbyshires long term collaborator architecture critic Owen Hatherly.

Darbyshire presents us with a hypothetical future scenario where Tramway appears to have been bought up and developed into a residential care-village, although owing to the eerie silence of it all, like elsewhere across the country, Tramway’s visitors may suspect that they’ll have to make do with the virtual rendition ‘until the market picks up’.

A huge printed banner resembling a so-called ‘building wrap’ stretched from pillar to pillar throughout Tramway’s vast gallery space demarcates a faux-residential gated environment, implying a building site where a new all-under-one-roof ‘village in the city’ is under construction. Depicted is a trompe l’oeil style architectural render of what is allegedly to come. With its computer generated geometry, pixelated curves and uniform proportions, T Rooms suggests an abject, homogenised developers vernacular in which the Mackintosh-style has reduced to a series of bland and generic motifs.

Each depicted detail pertains to an existing Mackintosh design, scrambling a so called ‘Mockintosh’ architectural vocabulary into various indecipherable uses – is it a bar, spa, bank or boutique? Is it for eating, sleeping, praying or a meeting?

By adopting simplified compositions from some of Glasgow’s most celebrated Mackintosh buildings, Darbyshire’s installation reflects on the way in which developers demonstrate an apparent sensitivity to their environment and the feared potential revival of right-wing nostalgic mock architectural approaches that negate all proper human concerns in favour of the cheapest and most ubiquitous palettes and materials.