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Fragile: Touring Exhibition for Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners

Added June 7th, 2011

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“From the House to the City” is a detailed survey of the work of the architect Richard Rogers and practice, spanning over three decades of work and a host of familiar, iconic buildings, including Lloyds of London, Madrid Barajas Airport and the Pompidou in Paris. Since 2007 the exhibition has toured the Centre Pompidou Paris, the Design Museum London, La Caixa Forum Barcelona, La Caixa Forum Madrid and most recently the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan and URA Centre in Singapore.

The main content and focus of the exhibition are incredibly detailed, intricate models of the Practice’s buildings and projects. The models themselves represent a 45 year history of work and are made from a diverse range of materials. As with all architectural models they are incredibly fragile – and the challenge for EFM has been the safe transportation between venues and storage in the interim periods.

EFM developed a very close working relationship with the Project Manager and model makers. Each move was carefully discussed and planned to ensure that all adequate measures were taken to prevent unnecessary damage to the models during transit. An EFM Project Manager has been travelling with the models to supervise the models through to their arrival at the venues where the practice model makers have received the crated models to prepare and install the models for exhibition.

The European moves of the exhibition tour were completed by dedicated, air-ride trucks and more recently, EFM were responsible for shipping the entire exhibition on its first international leg of the tour, to Taiwan and Singapore. The shipment consisted of 5 x 40′ ocean containers for the display structure and 7 x dedicated airline pallets for all exhibits from the UK & Centre Paris to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan and on to Singapore. There was some trepidation at the potential damage which could occur to the models during a long haul flight, take-off and landing. Given the complexity of the models and the number of small, delicate components, a certain amount of damage is always expected but this was the first time the whole show had travelled together by plane.

Prior to each shipment, EFM recorded the condition of all models with digital images and written reports. New models were added to the show in London which were collected and cased in museum specification, Fine Art cases. Loans from the Centre Pompidou in Paris were also collected by EFM with an EFM project manager accompanying the truck as courier. It was agreed that an EFM project manager would travel to Taipei at the same time as the shipment to receive the intact pallets and to safely un-stow the cases at EFM’s local warehouse in Taipei. On arrival, all cases were opened to assess what damage had occurred during take off, flight and landing. Again, using digital images and written reports this information was relayed to the model makers and Project Manager in the UK, to assess in advance the scale of work required on their arrival in Taipei.

As expected, the take off and landing had taken its toll on the models in spite of their museum cases and the final hurdle remained of transporting the models from the warehouse to the museum without further damage. This involved getting the model cases to the first floor of the museum. After a site visit by the EFM project manager, it was determined that the cobbled loading bay of the museum was unsuitable for access. Instead we used a crane and a flat lifting platform to transfer the models from the trucks on the ground floor to the first floor exhibition space.

The moves have involved detailed consultation throughout with the client, venue, movers, suppliers and agents to ensure that all measures and cautions were in place to minimise the risk to the exhibits. The process was reversed for the de-installation in Taipei and the move of the exhibition through to secure storage in Singapore with EFM, from where it most recently installed at the URA Centre in Singapore.