Carl Zimmerman’s Industrial Landmarks of Britain
s mall, very detailed models provide the material for these photograhs. Empty of mid-Victo- rian occupation that such indus- trial buildings would have had, we are faced with the powerful deter- minism of such industrial spaces and their absolute utility. Lost Hamilton Landmarks , 1997, exploited both the authority of the gallery and the presumed authenticity of photography to present a fabricated and personal compilation of Hamilton’s public buildings. The current series, Industrial Landmarks of Britain ,
draws on a monumental classical heritage and dwells to an even greater extent on the ramifica - tions of physical mass and scale. Industrial Landmarks imagines a Victorian worker’s state at the apogee of British wealth and impe- rial ambition. The photographs themselves are very large — 40” x 72”: heroic proportions for imagined heroic buildings of an imagined state- sponsored programme of monu- mental public architecture. We are presented with pure metaphor for an alternative history.
Buildings of modern construction were poorly suited to form that bridge of tradition to future generations... My theory was intended to deal with this dilemma. By using special materials (eg. stone and brick) and by applying certain principles of statics, we should be able to build structures which even in a state of decay, after hundreds or thousands of years would more or less resemble Roman models.
Carl Zimmerman is a photographer/ installation artist living in Orangedale, Cape Breton. He was recently artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Although it wears a correct Beaux Arts dress... something about it seems to go straight back to pre-history; glimpsed at twilight or in the early morning it looks as if an unknown race of giants might have quarried it up in great chunks out of the living rock. Brendon Gil, essay for exhibition catalogue, The U.S. Customs House on Bowling Green , 1976.
Albert Speer’s Theory of Ruin Value, from Inside the Third Reich , 1970
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O n S ite review
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I ssue 10 2003
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