2024 Update

Antepavilion is back with a new competition for 2024 on a new site, with the brief Earthwork. 

The Antepavilion competition did not run in 2022 or 2023. But the team was far from idle, being intensively engaged in the defence of the competition's ethos, its survival and its home at Hoxton Docks. So here's a bit about what's been going on behind the scenes of the competition itself.

The Battle of the Sharks broke out with Hackney council in 2020. The Council has since spent tens of thousands of pounds of public funds on failed chest-pounding enforcement exercises - and paying our costs incurred in reversing their unlawful decisions.

The 2020 Antepavilion Sharks! Installed in City Rd Basin (L.B. Islington)

Freedom of Information Act requests on Hackney Council and the Guardian, and its journalist Oliver Wainright, produced an insight into how the latter assisted the former with obtaining its emergency injunction against Sharks! We accused the newspaper of misquoting us and thereby assisting the Council in making a false claims in Court to stop the installation. When they refused, we had to rely on the Information Commissioner to direct the Guardian to disclose the recording of Wainright's interview. So they resorted to claiming they didn't have it. This has made our challenge to the injunction in the courts much more difficult. But it saved the Guardian from showing its true colours when it comes to weighing sensationalism against the truth in its reporting. 

Two police raids on the Hoxton Docks home of Antepavilion were ordered in August 2020 (Distdancing: Lockdown ballet performances on the canalside) and June 2021 (All Along the Watchtower: rooftop bamboo tensegrity towers).

By an action we brought for Judicial Review the Metropolitan Police were forced to admit the June raid on Hoxton Docks was illegal and they paid out £60,000 of public money in compensation and for our legal costs. We handed this admission on a plate to our Hackney Labour MP Meg Hillier to pursue the Home office for an explanation of the instigation of the raid. She declined to challenge such a blatant disregard of human rights by the Tory Government of Boris Johnson, when Priti Patel was directing the Police.

The Home Office and the Police refused our own Freedom of Information Act requests to disclose the officials and the reasoning behind their actions, relying on the usual secrecy exemptions.

Priti Patel inspecting the Police's own Watchtower replica so that the threat to society posed by such tensegrity structures could be contained

Morgan Trowland, the civil engineer and leader of Project Bunny Rabbit that built the 2021 All Along the Watchtower was sentenced to three years in prison in April 2023 for climbing the QE2 Bridge in a climate change protest.

In response to a letter from a UN 'special rapporteur' complaining to the British government about such a sentence for a peaceful demonstration and its human rights implications, Rishi Sunak tweeted that the sentences were ‘entirely right’. 

The tensegrity structure All Along the Watchtower by Project Bunny Rabbit

In August 2021 Antepavilion published 'Architecture and Anarchism' by Paul Dobrascyzk, Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture.  It is part manifesto for Antepavilion, part an idealised what-if? of future cities where small scale self-build architecture and construction is all-pervasive – as-if.  And it is a photo study of the many diverse and widespread alternative community models worldwide that stem from the primal instinct to create a personal model of communal living outside of standardised, industrialised, commercialised urban norms.

Conical Intersect by Gordon Matte-Clark in Architecture and Anarchism

Meanwhile, the future of Sharks! is still being pondered by the Planning Inspectorate, as it has been for the last six months along with other planning issues that may affect the future of the Antepavilion commission at its Hackney home.

When Antepavilion started to evolve, around ten years ago, it was conceived as an opportunity for architects and artists to show in a prominent public space a large scale work that arose from the personal aspirations that Architecture and Anarchism is dedicated to. We didn't realise then how threatened those aspirations and ideals were, but we quickly learned: Freedom of protest and expression in Britain are under threat more than ever before from arrogant and dictatorial central and local governments and other authorities with insatiable appetites for regulation, control and conformity. 

The Hackney sharks are back, or are they? Are they art or a building?

Hackney Council’s Enforcement Notice against the ‘display of art installations' at Hoxton Docks has been quashed by the recent planning appeal decision. However, although Antepavilion has now been graciously liberated by the Inspector to display art at the Wharves - which it has been doing for 25 years anyway - the decision is non-committal on when art requires planning permission. This is now for the council to decide in the first instance, or a planning inspector thereafter. It is a question at the heart of Antepavilion’s agenda: when does art become architecture or architecture become art?

To help them decide whether a shark on a float in our canal mooring is ‘development’ a lone shark now floats in our dockside. We are waiting to hear from them with the result of their deliberations before a 2022 reincarnation of the sharks is floated for the spring/summer season