PLACEHOLDERS, V&A, LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL - DOCUMENTARY

A project by Aude-Line Duliere and Juliet Haysom - With a documentary by Ele Mun. 

When the V&A rebuilt its Exhibition Road courtyard in 2013, the Aston Webb Screen (built in 1909) was transformed from a solid facade into the porous entrance we see now. More than four hundred large Portland Stones were removed from the original screen. To save them from being crushed into aggregate – which is the fate of most used stone, no matter how large, historic, and precious – they were hauled to a quarry in Dorset, where they have languished for nearly a decade.

Here, some of these stones – marked by a century of London pollution, cratered by shrapnel from the Blitz, and now cleaned and restored – make a comeback on Exhibition Road in the form of street furniture. This intervention points to the enduring possibilities for reusing stone, which is emerging as one of the lowest-impact building materials (if quarried and reused locally), holding great potential for the circular economy within the construction industry.

The Borough’s plan is to ship monolithic freshly-quarried granite blocks from India to this site, to form “permanent” street furniture. For the time being, these stones, originating in Dorset and bearing the traces of London’s recent history, will hold this space.