+

-

v

BBC Coverage : Star of Caledonia: Winning Gretna landmark design revealed.
Click here

BBC Interview : Ian Rankin on the winning Star of Caledonia landmark.
Click here

Cecil Balmond selected to work with Charles Jencks on an innovative contemporary landmark for Scotland

The Gretna Landmark Trust is pleased to announce Cecil Balmond as the winning artist for the Gretna Landmark’s competition to design “the Great Unknown”. Cecil has been chosen to work with internationally renowned architectural critic, land artist and designer Charles Jencks to realise an ambitious large scale project of integrated sculptural form and landscape that celebrates and explores the border crossing into Scotland at Gretna.

Andrew Dixon, selection panelist and chief executive of Creative Scotland says, “Cecil Balmond's outline proposal will combine artistic vision and engineering to produce a landmark that is rooted in Scotland's scientific contribution to the world. The project will provide millions of future visitors with an iconic welcome and an ever changing contemporary symbol of a confident, creative Scotland.”

PROJECT BACKGROUND

The project is being developed and produced by Wide Open (South Scotland) Ltd for The Gretna Landmark Trust. Over the last six years the creative direction has evolved out of a series of seminars and workshops led by Charles Jencks and involving the input of key Scottish academics and cultural thinkers who helped to inform the brief and develop themes for the project. ‘Energy’, ‘innovation’ and ‘the river of identity running deep’ emerged very strongly as themes within the brief, especially the role that energy and its conservation might play in the future, the inventive energy of the Scottish people and also the natural energy of Scotland’s dynamic landscape.

The Gretna Landmark’s “The Great Unknown”, was dubbed early on as a working-title for the competition. As the competition for design evolved, this working-title was left intentionally vague to encourage innovation and limitless thinking amongst the design contenders for the Gretna Landmark project.

THE PROPOSAL

The Star of Caledonia (working title) is Cecil Balmond’s response to the “the Great Unknown”. It is a project of form and landscape, and is the result of a fully integrated collaborative effort between Cecil Balmond and Charles Jencks. Creative director Charles Jencks describes the work:

“Crossing the border to Scotland, across the River Sark, is now a passage obscured under a bridge by cars travelling at speed. Instead of marking this with motorway signs we are using a landform and sculpture that pulls together the adjacent site, the distant hills and the Solway.

Nestled into the curving mound and springing from it is Cecil Balmond’s whirling creation. In one sense, it is a scintillating piece of calligraphy seen against the sky which will signify various meanings as you approach – starburst, energy, St. Andrew’s Cross, thistle, Highland Dancing, etc – or, if you look at the right place, the ‘map of Scotland’. It all depends from where you see it in the landscape. These meanings emerge dramatically as you walk the site, but they are also taken up by the landform and embedded in its curves.

Over the next several months Cecil and I will work to make these aspects more resolved, we respect each other, and are both inspired by the challenge of coming up with a set of dynamic elements fitting for Scotland – we hope!”

The Star was born out of an idea by Balmond to capture the powerful energy, scientific heritage and magnetic pull of Scotland. Balmond’s design pays particular homage to Scottish innovation and particularly James Clerk Maxwell, the pre-eminent Scottish physicist, and mathematician noted for his groundbreaking work in electromagnetic theory. It was Maxwell who first said that light was energy and paved the way for Einstein and the other great thinkers of our modern world. Cecil Balmond explains:

“The Star of Caledonia is a Welcome; its kinetic form and light paths a constant trace of Scotland's power of invention. And I am delighted to be collaborating with Charles Jencks to create an integrated idea of this concept in both landscape and form.”

Power, energy and the river of identity running deep (the river Sark is the border at Gretna) are clear and constant themes in Jencks/Balmond design. By looking at the border as a series of journey crossings, back and forth, in waves that exit and enter into Scotland, Balmond has conceptualised The Star of Caledonia by using movement and shape to create a sense of energy.

The symbolism in Balmond’s design extends further through its subtle use of S-curves to mark the cross of St Andrew. And as the eye passes in movement across the structure, its abstract form appears to shift in a series of opening and closing undulations.

REGIONAL IMPACT

The Star of Caledonia supports an image of a dynamic, innovative, outward-looking region that is capable of attracting and offering both investment and talent. More than five million vehicles travel north and south each year, yielding a potential audience of ten million people who will be able to experience the England-Scotland Border Crossing.

The Gretna Landmark is an important flagship project for the Gretna area and has the potential to be a powerful catalyst for the development of Gretna-Lockerbie-Annan as a national gateway to Scotland. The designs have been likened to the stars and highlights the Dumfries and Galloway Region’s Dark Skies Park status.

“The star is magical and looks like the galaxy” feedback from pupil from Gretna School during community consultation.

The presence of a world-class iconic Scottish Landmark will signal a meaningful exploration of identity and borders, and will help promote Scotland as a vibrant and creative country rich in natural resources, ideas and cultural heritage.

The initiative is supported by wide-open, the Gretna Landmark Trust, the community of Gretna, Gretna Green and Springfield, Alasdair Houston of the Gretna Green Group, Dumfries & Galloway Council, Scottish Enterprise and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

The next steps for Wide Open and The Gretna Landmark are to secure funding for the further design and implementation of the Star of Caledonia, hopefully in time for the Commonwealth Games in 2014.

About Creative Director, Charles Jencks

Charles Jencks is one of the foremost international artists working in his medium.  His Garden of Cosmic Speculation in Scotland, is one of the most original and highly praised contemporary gardens as is his recently completed life Mounds at Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh.  He engages with a wide range of contemporary themes from science and cosmology to war, regeneration and man’s relationship to nature.

Charles Jencks divides his time between lecturing, writing, and designing in the USA, the UK, and Europe. He is the author of the best-selling The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (re-issued as The New Paradigm in Architecture, 2002). He has also written numerous other books on contemporary arts and building, including What is Post-Modernism? (fourth edition, 1995) and The Architecture of the Jumping Universe (second edition, 1997). His celebrated garden in Scotland is the subject of his book The Garden of Cosmic Speculation (Frances Lincoln, 2003) and in 2004 the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, won the Gulbenkian Prize for Museums for his design, Landform Ueda. Landform projects have also been completed in Europe, and his current concern is working with Cern on an iconographic and green project. He is the author of The Iconic Building, the Power of Enigma, (Frances Lincoln, 2005), Critical Modernism, (Wiley 2007), and The Architecture of Hope with Edwin Heathcote, on Maggie Centres (Published by Frances Lincoln 2010). The Story of Post-Modernism, Five Decades of Ironic, Iconic and Critical Architecture (Wiley, 2011) brings this resurgent tradition up to date while his recent landscape work is summarised in The Universe in the Landscape (Frances Lincoln, 2011).

For further information please seewww.charlesjencks.com

About Cecil Balmond

Balmond creates new horizons in art and design. His dynamic approach is informed by the art of geometry and the science of non-linear organization and emergent form.

Balmond’s art has been presented in a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions including ‘Frontiers of Architecture 1’ at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark (2007); ‘H_edge’ at Artists Space in New York (2006); ‘Solid Void’ at Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Chicago (2008-2009); ‘Forum 64’ at Carnegie Museum of Art (2009-2010) and ‘Element’ at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in Tokyo (2010.)

He has published several books, of which ‘informal’ won the prestigious RIBA Banister Fletcher Prize in 2005.  Balmond is Professor of Architecture at Penn Design, and founder of the NSO (Non-Linear Systems Organization), a groundbreaking material and structural research unit at Penn.

He has published several books, of which ‘informal’ won the prestigious RIBA Banister Fletcher Prize in 2005.  Balmond is Professor of Architecture at Penn Design, and founder of the NSO (Non-Linear Systems Organization), a groundbreaking material and structural research unit at Penn.

Balmond runs his studio in London, a research-based practice involved with design and art.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the Royal Academy of Engineers.

For further information, please see www.balmondstudio.com

For press enquiries, please contact press@balmondstudio.com

website design & build:weesleekit.co.uk