students, patients, paupers

* THE NEW WEBSITE HERE *

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 20:32:00 -0400

stphilips-exhibition.com

programme

Wed, 04 May 2011 21:45:00 -0400

New work from: Vasco Alves, Guy Archard, Jesse Darling, Hannah Forbes Black, Tomoko Furikado, Honor Gavin, Fiona Grady, Miranda Iossifidis, Daniel Irons, Adam Kaasa, Christian Kerrigan, Margarita Louca, Stephen Nelson, Louie Rice, Liam Smale, Sabina Stefanova, Leah Stewart, Hannah Waldron and Dominic Wilcox.

Thursday 5 May
Opening Night 6 – 9pm
Performances from 7pm: Jesse Darling, Vasco Alves and Honor Gavin

Friday 6 May
Exhibition open 12 – 2pm & 5 – 9pm

Saturday 7 May
Exhibition open 10 – 5pm

Sunday 8 May: Closed

Monday 9 May
Exhibition open 12 – 8pm

Tuesday 10 May
Exhibition open 12 - 8pm

Film screening + Reception and Q&A with director, 7pm, A Palace for Us, dir. Tom Hunter. Plus ‘Best of Britain’ hospital films from the archive, including ‘A Day in Hospital’ (1931), ‘Here’s Health’ (1948) and ‘British Way of Health’ (1973).

Wednesday 11 May
Exhibition open 12 - 8pm

Public Symposium: Modern Ruin: Destruction & Creativity in the City. 6.30-8.00pm Followed by a wine reception. Speakers include: Gus Casely-Hayford, curator and cultural historian. Richard Barnett, author of ‘Medical London: City of diseases, city of cures’. Ben Campkin, Co-Director, UCL Urban Laboratory, The Bartlett. Leslie Topp, Senior Lecturer in History of Architecture and Curator of ‘Madness and Modernity’ at the Wellcome Collection. Josephine Berry Slater, Editor, Mute Magazine, and author of ‘No Room to Move: Radical Art And The Regenerate City’. Richard McCormac, founder, MJP Architects.

Artist Jesse Darling leads us in a collaborative Sleep-in at the Ghost Sanatorium, her St Philips installation. 8:30pm. Prospective participants should get in touch as soon as possible.

Thursday 12 May
Exhibition open 12 - 8pm

Films screening + reception and Q&A with director, 7:30pm Under the Cranes, dir. Emma-Louise Williams and Michael Rosen, writer and poet.

Friday 13 May
Exhibition open 12 – 6pm

Exhibition and all events FREE.
Space limited. Please arrive early to avoid disappointment.

St Philips Building, Sheffield Street, London WC2A 2EX

Photo

Wed, 04 May 2011 06:38:30 -0400

Photo

Wed, 04 May 2011 06:37:00 -0400

Photo

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Opening Night

Opening Night

Opening Night

Opening Night

More Opening Night Photos

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

More Opening Night Photos

Introduction to the exhibition

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 11:55:00 -0400

St Philips began its service in 1903 as a Poor Law workhouse, replacing a similar institution which was levelled to make way for the passage of the Kingsway boulevard. During World War I, the building served as an observational facility for refugees. And in 1919, under the auspices of the Metropolitan Asylum board, St Philips became the Sheffield Street Hospital for woman and girls with venereal disease.

During the 1930s and 40s the hospital was converted into a facility for the study and treatment of urology and nephrology. After being amalgamated into the newly formed NHS, the hospital was renamed St Philips but continued as a specialist hospital until the 1990s when it was acquired by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Many lingering elements still speak of St Philips as an educational facility of classrooms, study spaces and closed-door offices. Before long, however, a newly built student centre will occupy this site.

In line with the sanitary ideals of the era, St Philips was designed to allow an abundance of light and the free circulation of air. It boasted an innovative ventilation system and the wards were designed with what might seem, in comparison to today’s hospitals, to be a generous amount of space per bed. In many of the wards, the number of large windows equals the amount of beds. And the building’s plan reveals the architect’s attempt to maximize the surface area of the external walls.

The history of the St Philips Building evokes images of what are perhaps the most poignant archetypes of passivity – the student, the patient and the pauper. Traditionally, these characters receive and absorb from more active agents in society, the teacher, the doctor, and the philanthropist. While the residents of St Philips were beneficiaries of air and light, they were also the subjects of a particular architectural arrogance. As one Poor Law inspector put it in 1866, ‘for the purpose of ventilation, windows should be so fixed that they cannot be shut.’

Today, students, the sick and even the poor are discussed less as passive recipients than they are as a brand new kind of consumer. The accompanying architecture, in turn, reflects a new kind of circulation. The ebb and flow of the ambiguous substances in-between – the air, the light – has given way to arenas of networking, customer choice and knowledge exchange. The space in-between the student, patient and pauper is perhaps less consequential than the idea of contact. This time around, the windows are so fixed that they cannot be opened.

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 11:33:00 -0400