Very excited to be working on this intense, ambitious, timely and necessary project.

Created by Spike Laurie, ‘Civil Unrest’ will be forcibly occupying the tunnels of Debut (London Bridge) on 2nd, 3rd and 4th of March. Creatives in Residence has commissioned our work on this – props to Lolo and The Hospital Club for supporting this challenging piece. More soon. In the meantime: this will be hardcore amazing. Get your info and tickets here:

http://www.civilunrest.net/

The brick series was House of Jonn reaction to the ‘RAW’ theme imposed by the Royal Academy of Arts for this years summer exhibition.

We were rejected….

Without sounding like whinny losers this was the reaction we were expecting and in a way played up to. The architecture room was co-ordinated by David ‘vitality, risk taking and a necessary sense of adventure’ Chipperfield.

We could not help but prod a little fun at ourselves and the theme by creating 4 very impractical and improbable brick types to live upto the RAW theme.

These included the  acrylic Banana brick, Cock Arch brick, Wizard of Oz brick and the Recession proof brick. All were produced as editions of 25.

The above images show the Wizard of Oz brick depicting a scene from the story of Dorothy and Toto on the yellow Brick road.

Above is the Banana Brick and below is the Icon Brick.

Curated by Eszter Steierhoffer & Levente Polyak. House of Jonn was invited to contribute to the project. A map and audio guide was produced and made available during the London festival of Architecture to navigate through the exhibition that unfolds along Church Street in the shop windows and market stall, and includes photography, film, urban interventions as well as performances by artists, activists and architects: Albert Ádám, Gabó Bartha, Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad, Emőke Kerekes & Anna Mózes, Péter Rákosi, Allan Siegel, Miklós Surányi, Szövetség39 (Anna Baróthy & Csenge Kolozsvári) and screenings by no.w.here in collaboration with The Edgware Road Project – Free Cinema School of the Serpentine Gallery.

So its all over…

A-ha……….. finally a chance to lift our heads just long enough to blog. Sorry for the silence – we could blame it on the sunshine, blame it on the boogie, but really it’s because the ‘Welcome to your City’ project has kicked off in a big way.

Long story short, we’re teaming up with aberrant architecture to stage a dual pop-up residency event-cum-installation in Selfridges Wonder Windows on Oxford Street. Simon Burrill and Alex Shepheard, fellow CiRs past and present, are contributing to the project and will be exhibiting new work during the event. Super to have them involved. There’s blurb over at CiR HQ – go and contribute! Or come and visit us live on site from the 15th of June.

In the meantime, here’s some work we did with our Selfridges co-conspirators aberrant architecture and Melissa Appleton last year.  A ‘fiction based on fact’, aberrant presented a pavilion at the SZHK Biennale 2009 to showcase the ideas of ‘Gordon Wu’*, Hong Kong’s foremost captain of industry and infrastructural visionary… More about that here. And more from us soon about Project Selfridges. x

* any resemblance to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

A quick update of what we’ve been up to recently – from Russia to the French Riviera via a Shoreditch basement, lots of good things underway.

Fidelio at Perm 36:

Jordan has been working with SCDLP Architects on the set design of a new production of Beethoven’s one and only opera, Fidelio, being performed in July this year by Perm State Opera and Ballet Theatre of Russia. To be staged in the grounds of Perm 36, an operational gulag until 1988, the project is part set design, part site-specific installation – a series of stages and architectural events spread through the gulag’s grounds. A couple of pics:

La Belle Époque:

A certain Riviera palace is ear-marked for the Starchitect treatment. To set the scene, design consultant Jane Withers commissioned House of Jonn and Thomas Greenall to produce a context study of its aesthetic, cultural and historical significance. Fingers crossed for a proper site visit..

Club That Shall Remain Nameless:

Can’t reveal any details yet sadly but excited to also be doing a little work on a new club opening in Shoreditch this summer. Nothing but a derelict ex-industrial shell at the moment but come July or August home to 900 creatures of the night…

So — all a bit hectic just now but great to be busy. Please just give us a shout if anything takes your interest.

xoxo

Launch night was a real pleasure. We showed work old and new and took a lot from conversations with the very inquisitive Hospital members and guests – much of it complimentary, some of it critical, but all of it appreciated. Particularly good to meet Samir Ceric and Zoe Knight, directors of design store Wolf and Badger, who were interested in the ‘future gothic arch’ piece on show, the result of some intense digital 3D modelling and an advanced rapid prototyping machine.

At the other end of the tech-spectrum was ‘Questions of Development’, our exhibit resembling a pile of giant architectural cardboard lollipops.

This was a sample of an ongoing work of ‘performance architecture’. As it said on the wall:

‘These objects are props in a series of direct action performances by House of Jonn. Each is a fragment of London’s built environment, buildings abandoned or under discussion, others not yet constructed or approved for development. Taken to their real locations in the city, these rough replicas are intended to draw attention to issues surrounding the building’s development – a modest and absurd protest at the obscure systems that control our built environment. Each is an open question about what we want from our city and how we can involve ourselves in its making.’

With thanks to Anna Robertson for her photography on the night.