I asked a group of students at Central Saint Martins to formulate new sentences with the words written by William Richard Lethaby in his essays about design. [The founding head of the Central School of Art and Design – later Central Saint Martins – and an architect and architectural historian, Lethaby gives his name to our Lethaby Gallery, which played host to the 2018 Foundation Show.] My aim was to start from his words, representing his vision of the College, and through a process of erasure, select sentences that would represent the current design-thinking of Central Saint Martins students. The resulting piece of text therefore both embodies Lethaby’s heritage and our continuation of his principles, to be shaped and adjusted into contemporary thinking. From the new text I chose the sentence: “The necessity is to always be puzzled, to find myself in a world where work and art really make up what should be one body of a human service.” By scaling up the text and putting it on the gallery columns, the architecture embraces it and they become conceptually linked. It acknowledges Lethaby’s writings as the foundations of the physical and conceptual structure of the College. I think the book title – Lethaby: A Continuing Presence, A 1922 Collection Of Lethaby’s Papers – from which the students developed the new text, gives the project a poetic aspect. Physically embodying his words, the text reaffirms Lethaby’s continuing presence.
“The necessity is to always be puzzled, to find myself in a world where work and art really make up what should be one body of a human service.”
Back to Top