Abercrombie Awards

Another competition.  In this case, I got shortlisted, produced a prototype and then lost out to Adam Johns again, with Adam using a similar hot glass "egg" design to the one for the Building Forum award competition, covered in my previous post.

This was a competition staged by town planners in Plymouth City Council.

Patrick Abercrombie and James Paton Watson created the 1943 "Plan for Plymouth" after the city was effectively flattened in World War II.

The Abercrombie Awards are handed out every three years "celebrating the development and improvement of Plymouth's built environment".  This year, 10 awards are planned with the theme of "A Changing City".

 The brief came in a 20th August email and submissions had to be in sharpish, by 1st September.   Up to four artists were to be shortlisted and given £100 each to produce a prototype by 22nd September.  A winner would then get £1,300 to make 10 awards by 24th October.

In view of the short timeframe I decided to keep it simple and propose a design engraved on a piece of flat glass, mounted on another block of glass.

I started out trying to be clever and use parts of Abercrombie's Plan for Plymouth in the design but I couldn't make it work - it was too obscure.

I went back to basics.  I thought the award ought to be easily recognisable as Plymouth and ought to have some sort of reference in it to the Council's strategic plan to promote Plymouth as the "waterfront" city.  That led me on to Smeaton's Tower, a strong symbol of Plymouth, a seagull, a waterfront bird, and a view looking down from on high, which is the way town planners like Abercrombie often look at their work.

I proposed getting the awards made by Proto Studios, the outfit I worked with on the Derriford Hospital sculpture and I signalled a problem - I couldn't make the prototype myself until the college workshops opened on 29th September, a week after the deadline.

I got shortlisted and I sidestepped the issue by getting Proto to make the prototype:

In the end,  I lost out to Adam Johns with a proposal that was similar to his Building Forum "egg" ...

....but had "a skyline of buildings at the top" according to the organiser.

Once again, I would have picked Adam's proposal over mine.  

I don't envy Adam the task of producing 10 awards of this quality in a period of 3 weeks.  I would find it very stressful (even if I had Adam's hot glass skills).

The feedback I got was:

Peter Heywood’s was liked because looking at it, it immediately said “award” at the same time as incorporating Plymouth in the image. But this was the reason others also didn’t like it. Because the Abercrombie Awards are architectural awards and they wanted something “striking”.

Lessons

• Hot glass beats engraving for awards, as I said in the Building Forum post.  I didn't think there was enough time for anybody to propose this.
• I think I picked the best solution for me -  where I did the design and then handed over the production to Proto - bearing in mind the time constraints and my lack of engraving experience.
• I think the design would have looked better with less deep-carved lines.  I didn't fully understand what was meant when discussing it beforehand with Proto
• In different circumstances I might have tried to create the feathers on the seagull using a lathe.