Lecture date: 1990-10-17
In the decades since Woodstock, the construction of temporary and portable architecture to accommodate outdoor concerts has developed from a bunch of hippies in a field to a global construction industry. The ensuing architectures instant and ephemeral nature has led some commentators to describe it as one of the few realisations of the ideas of Archigram. Others have seen its development from flimsy towers of scaffolding to baroque mountains of custom-built scenery as a manifestation of a decadent culture of greed.
More tellingly, for Mark Fisher, these primitive structures demonstrate that the only constraint on form is funding. In this lecture he discusses his stage sets for the Rolling Stones tour ‘Wheels of Steel’ and for ‘The Wall’, a one-off event in Berlin. Mark Fisher studied at the AA from 1965 to 1971, during which time he experimented with self-articulating inflatables and portable structures. He taught at the AA in the mid-1970s, before moving to full-time set design for discos in the 1980s and rock shows in the 1990s.
