Ground Form_Description — Trower Falvo Architects

Ground Form

Exhibition
Ongoing

Model Photography
Garry Smith

“Each piece depicts the same project site, earthworks and building structures in various stages of completion, as though captured in time lapse. As a linear series of twenty pieces, Ground Form has both a clear beginning and end. The site is worked over, the building set out and erected in stops and starts, but its elements accumulate nonetheless, before being finally finished. The series starts with an empty vacant lot, seemingly an abstraction with only subtle formal articulations. By the end, a complete dwelling, its internal detail suddenly hidden, and compensated for, by its long ribbed roof.

This is Trower Falvo’s third series, and in keeping with his earlier work, topography is as much a focus as architecture. Trower Falvo’s sculptures depict deep, three-dimensional ground planes, a constant in which volumes and details are traced, subtracted and added. While each ‘ground form’ is a foundation on which a stage of the project is depicted, each is itself constructed. It is not crafted only as a background, but it is also a fore-ground object, a sculpture and centre piece. Despite the project’s narrative across multiple works, each ‘foundation’ is capable of standing alone, a whole that includes the iteration of excavations, installations, roofs, slabs and walls ‘imposed’ on its surface.

In one early piece, a space is excavated. The same space in its neighbour is filled and expanded upward. Footings expand across the ground form, and then are seemingly retracted. Are the pieces really sequential steps from first to last as their arrangement suggests? Or are there links between the works that jump or recur across their allotted order? Are steps really reversed or undone in the very next piece? Or do the later iterations more subtly integrate the earlier ones? It is easy to be lost in a part of the series, or in the detail of just one work, and be distracted from following overall developments closely. Trower Falvo’s works have exactly the aesthetic that seduced me years ago to enrol in architectural design, to get a handle on a language of forms and textures that sits apart from words. Trower Falvo are in command of the formal, architectural language in his sculptures. Although without direct translations into writing or speech, the language is precise, refined, and sophisticated. Their sculptures contain both certainty and ambiguity, concrete detail and evocative abstraction.

Of their work, Trower Falvo say that it is meditative, a practice they welcome at the end of a day. After so many pieces, I am tempted to imagine that a slow and calming practice has grown into a swift technique. Whether or not the Ground Form series is executed wholly in the service of an outside project or brief, the works demonstrate a fertile ground either to further or augment architectural design with a sculptural practice that can provide precise depictions of a project to be built, or speculations with a life and direction of their own.”

James Stephens