Remaking the Crust of the Earth – Gavin Murphy, et al.

Remaking the Crust of the Earth – Gavin Murphy, et al. is a 56 page artists’ publication, produced as part of the exhibition Remaking the Crust of the Earth, March – April 2023 at the Irish Architectural Archive.

The publication is divided into two halves/parts:

I. Elements comprises 24 pages printed full-colour on silk coated paper. It reproduces stills and excerpts from a film that is also part of the exhibition.

II. Materials comprises 32 pages printed monochrome on uncoated paper. It includes essays, archive images and experimental photographic studies.

The two halves are gathered (in 8 page sections), thread-sewn and bound with a simple 4 page cover – featuring an even simpler typographic design, set in Matthew Carter’s Galliard typeface and printed in Cobalt Blue ink.

The finished 207 × 249mm publication is housed in a folded dust-jacket, printed in Black and Silver inks on uncoated paper. The dust-jacket – which features large scale reproductions of two of the experimental photographic studies included inside the publication – is engineered to produce alternative designs by amending the folding sequence.

“Idealism and imagination, dreams and reality, all come into play when we consider glass: from an elemental, ritual and decorative material of mysterious origins, to functional, technological, mass-produced commodity. 

Remaking the Crust of the Earth presents a layered, intertextual, cultural history which examines the ways in which glass has transformed society – how humans situate themselves within the environment, and how we view the world. Through the unlikely accident of its discovery to its present day ubiquity, it considers glass in its myriad guises: from the modular prefabrication of Joseph Paxton’s ‘Crystal Palace’ to the optimism of Paul Scheerbart’s Glasarchitektur, both of which in their own way lay a path for modernism, the curtain wall, and the 20th century ‘glass house’. Traversing time and space, this book draws on archival material (and in particular the encyclopaedic 1937 publication ‘Glass in Architecture and Decoration’ by Raymond McGrath & A.C. Frost) to explore previous and unfulfilled stages of material history, revealing alternatives which belie an ‘inevitable’ contemporary (and its futures).

The publication features excerpts from the film Remaking the Crust of the Earth, a series of restaged photographic glass tests conducted by Gavin Murphy and Louis Haugh, and new essays by Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll and Chris Fite-Wassilak, alongside reproductions from the Raymond McGrath collection in the Irish Architectural Archive.”