Current Exhibition

Dan Brady

SELECTED WORKS BY Dan Brady

Dan Brady
The Trial

2003

100 Sheets of grey board, steel & wood

283 x 207 x 300cm

Every novel is an imaginary world to be discovered; Dan Brady’s Architectural Model 1:50 is Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Brady explores the possibilities of architecture and fictional experience – but not in the way you’d expect.

Breaking down each scene from the book (K’s house, the bank where he works, the law offices, etc.), he designs each imagined space in real miniaturised 3D, creating a conglomerate ‘blockbuster’ of a building. The grim ambience of the novel (the omnipresent terror of the clerks’ watchful eyes, the oppressive sound of the Tinsmith’s hammer) have all been translated to minute architectural detail.

Brady’s sculpture has the same hauntingly iconic qualities as Kubrick’s 2001 set design: from the simple materials of cardboard and glue, he’s made a prototype of sublime austerity, cloyingly claustrophobic, and infinitely wondrous.

In capturing the essence of a literary epic, Brady’s gone one further than telling a story of a man trying to justify his own existence: he offers a possible future space where there’s no humanity at all. Just a cold, endless, magnetically seductive perfection.

ARTICLES

Dan Brady
By Angharad Lewis

Someone once said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Architect Dan Brady is tackling that interdisciplinary gap head on by making architecture about writing, transforming literary texts into sprawling models and reshaping poems as architectural spaces. Brady is currently developing a portfolio of experimental personal work, using the sensory and emotional experiences evoked in literature to create poetic architectural spaces, treating architecture as providing an evolving experience with an integral narrative. "You can read architecture like you would read a book", Brady says, so he starts his designs in the guise of an author, writing down what he wants a space to feel like and then translates those sensory stimulants into an environmental design. Brady focuses on the light, sound, smell and atmosphere of places: "It's these kind of experiences that authors and poets draw from to compose their pieces in the first place", he says, "so I don't see any problem with doing it the other way around, taking those texts and turning them into a beautiful space that means something."

Source: By Angharad Lewis, Icon May 2004

Dan Brady
By Phil Oltermann

Non-ironic, "academic", intellectually complex, unlikely to be summed up in a three word headline in The Sun. Dan Brady's 'The Trial' is an enormous cardboard scale model based on Franz Kafka's 'The Trial'. Brady has, as he says, "either built a book or written a building". He is not the first one to do so: Orson Welles did the same in his 1963 film noir adaptation of the text, an interpretation that the architect reveres but refuses to take too literally. Where Welles matched Kafka's claustrophobia with the American horror of Soviet tower-blocks in the Sixties, Brady's cardboard model looks like a neurotic Gothic cathedral, hubristic in its exploded scale, obsessive in its attention to detail. Take your time to examine it and you find drama in the abstraction, Escher-esque stairways that end where they start. The amount of information it presents is overwhelming: "Kafka never described a whole building, he just described the details," says Brady. "It's an architecture with holes in it, which never completes the whole picture".
My favourite bit from the novel, I had to confess to him when we meet, was missing from the artwork: an absurdist piece of slapstick involving a grumpy employee and several people falling down a staircase (Wahey!). Brady owns up to his mathematical mind, "My aim is not to exhibit in galleries across the world, it's to build galleries across the world". Realising that goal with 'The Trial' might be tricky - "If I sited it in Prague, you would have to destroy half the city... and I don't think that's quite right".

Source: By Phil Oltermann, Flux, Aug 2004