British artist Alex Chinneck’s latest surreal intervention, unveiled this week at Clerkenwell Design Week, reimagines a typical brick façade as a playful, freestanding arched structure.
A Georgian-style façade has been brought to life in A Week at the Knees – a new public sculpture by Alex Chinneck, specially commissioned for the 2025 edition of Clerkenwell Design Week. Installed in Charterhouse Square, the piece sees 7,000 bricks contort in a rippling arc that simultaneously evokes movement, rest and architectural subversion.
“I like the idea that it’s reclining and relaxing – so it’s on a kind of vacation,” said Chinneck of the sculpture’s title. “But it feels like a human figure in a way, and the knees are in the air. I like the play on words.”
Standing 5.5 metres tall and stretching more than 13 metres in length, the installation weighs 11.5 tonnes – yet is just 15cm thick. “I wanted to create [a] fluidity and elegance that transcends the rigidity of the materials from which it’s made,” Chinneck explained.
“With a lot of my work, we [the studio] take these ambitious and complex paths to hopefully create these accessible moments. There’s always a playful side to the work.”
Unlike previous architectural illusions – such as the artist’s famous Sliding House – A Week at the Knees is a true freestanding sculpture. “We created this for this context,” he says. “I wanted to make something that was not so much an intervention but a sculptural object in itself. It has the same kind of architectural characteristics as the surrounding architecture – so it felt contextually informed.”
“The square here has all these paths that bisect it, so I thought it would be nice to create something that arched over the path and brick arches are such an enjoyable thing,” he added.
As with all of Chinneck’s large-scale works, the apparent simplicity belies a remarkable technical feat. Constructed using more than 300 metres of repurposed steel salvaged from the former US embassy in London, the skeletal frame is clad in stainless steel and bonded with the brick façade. Bespoke bending windows, decorative stonework, pipework and a door complete the illusion of an architectural fragment sprung into life.
“There’s an enormous amount of material and an enormous amount of weight,” Chinneck notes. “We used 320kg of glue – which is an absurd notion – and then pointed it all in lime, because lime has a degree of flexibility and a traditionality.”
From concept to installation, the journey of A Week at the Knees spanned multiple collaborators and locations. Chinneck worked with Smith and Wallwork engineers in Cambridge and a steel fabrication team in Sheffield, before final assembly on his farm in Kent. “We spent the last two or three months gluing the 7,000 bricks on,” he recalls. “Each section weighs about four tonnes and travelled from Kent. Seven thousand bricks travelling along the motorway is utterly nerve-wracking – luckily not one failed.”
Though its debut is tied to Clerkenwell Design Week, the piece is far from ephemeral. “It’s not a temporary structure at all,” says Chinneck. “We think it’ll be here for about six weeks, and then it’s going to live on. I think it’d be lovely in a museum – or maybe on tour.”
A Week at the Knees is on display in Charterhouse Square until early July 2025.
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