Communicating Vessels: An Exhibition of Architectural drawings by Neil Spiller at the Lightroom Gallery until Feb. 26 

Neil Spiller’s Statement

Art multiplies the number of possible worlds; it designs microcosms that are often situated offshore, at the outer edge of possibility…Prospero’s magical domain or the laboratory where Moreau conducts his sacrilegious experiments, Crusoe’s factory of virtuous work or Peter Pan’s carefree kindergarten. There must, after all, be an island. If there were no other worlds, how could we bear to live in this one?

~ Islands: A Trip through Time and Space by Peter Conrad

The Island of Vessels (Communicating Vessels) is a huge chunking engine, a communicating field, full of witchery and sexuality. Its neurotic things are pataphysically enabled and surrealistically primed. The island’s geography is cyborgian and always teetering on the edge of chaos. Its groves and glades are haunted by ghosts, some impish like Alfred Jarry, some nude on staircases, some with Dalinian moustaches, and some muttering about defecating toads.

On the island lives a Professor: a mad man, an idiot savant, or a genius. Perhaps all three. The Professor is attempting to work out the shock of the new, its architectures, and its desiring poetics. The Professor likes his things; they tell him where he’s been and where he is. He dwells in this world and builds in it every day without fail. He works at the intersection of art, architecture, and science. He uses desire as a welding torch and the pen as a scalpel. Like Duchamp’s Handler of Gravity, he likes to surf on precarious and fleeting equilibriums. He is a spiral architect, swerving from idea to idea on a silver machine. He does nothing if not break the house rules.

About Neil Spiller

Neil Spiller is a London, UK architect and the Visiting Azrieli Critic 2020. He is spending the winter semester at the Azrieli School of

Architecture + Urbanism. Since 1998, he has produced the epic Communicating Vessels project.

Spiller is the former Hawksmoor Chair of Architecture and Landscape and Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greenwich, London. Prior to this, he was Dean of the School of Architecture, Design and Construction, and Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory at Greenwich University. Before that, he was Vice-Dean and Graduate Director of Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

He is on the editorial board of AD (Architectural Design). His architectural design work has been published and exhibited on many occasions worldwide. Spill

er is also known as the founding director of the AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) Group (2004), now based at the University of Greenwich. Spiller and the AVATAR Group are recognized internationally for their paradigm-shifting contribution to architectural discourse, research/experiment, and teaching.