Adam Nathaniel Furman (b. 1982) is an architect and fine artist who is based out of London. He states that his work brings “equal parts pleasure, color and joy as well as critical consideration, reflection and depth” to his projects.
He was in fine form for his 2014-2015 residency at the British School at Rome. His project, The Roman Singularity weaves art, architecture, the Internet, astronomical themes, science-fiction and archetypes of human thought extending down through history. It was a massive undertaking. His project combined multi-media elements including ceramics, text, animation, film and hand drawings. Furman shows us that the spirit of Rome in its heyday persists and grows even in 2015.
From the artist:
“The Roman Singularity explores and celebrates Rome as the contemporary city par-excellence, an urban version of the internet, in which subjective experience merges with an abundant profusion of historical artifacts. It is a place where the analogical-whole history of society, architecture, politics, literature and art coalesce into a space so intense and delimited that they collapse under the enormity of their own mass into a singularity of human endeavour, in which time is suspended as a dimension and everything is simultaneous, coextensive, feeding off of everything else in a city-scale feast of endlessly creative auto-cannibalism. This blog documents an exploration of emblematic case studies, and fictive investigations, as well as drawings, writings, research and digressions, and at each point of discovery architectures have been designed that evolve within the upended logic and transgressive physics of La Singolarità di Roma. The project concludes with an uncovered ‘city of singularity’ in ceramics, and an Architectural Film-Poem that encapsulates a fraction, a sectional slice through one part of the Roman Singularity, of specific narratives and contexts implied in its streets, telling their tales and revealing their forms in a cabaret of tectonic denouement.”
He refers to his ceramic architectural works as “souvenirs” from the eternal city, describing his vision as aptly in his writing as he does in the forms themselves.
“Each version of a city formed in such a fashion increases the allure of a given place to the same degree that a relic invests its church with the personality and power of the saint from whom it was drawn. There is nowhere in the world that has had so many people laying claim to its streets and buildings, nowhere else that has had so many versions of itself so prolifically promulgated as has Rome.
“And so she is as no other, a Pantheon of city-sized souvenirs of herself whose numbers have grown so vast that they began a long time ago collapsing into one another, merging with the ebb and flow of her daily existence, folding themselves into the motorway slip-roads, baroque churches, business parks, Roman baths and housing estates in an ongoing event that undermines any notional separation between what is real and what is in our mind, what is a city and what is an idea, what is Rome and what is the Roman Singularity.”
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Photographs courtesy of the artist.
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