About Room For Art

Room for Art was a commission by the Whitechapel Gallery in collaboration with Year 6 at the Lansbury Lawrence Primary School in Poplar.

Situated on the fringes of Canary Wharf and the Olympic Park, the Lansbury Estate finds itself on the margins of rapid redevelopment. Built as the Live Architecture exhibition of the 1951 Festival of Britain, the design of the estate proposed a new model for community focused neighbourhood planning. Capturing this utopian optimism, the modernist school is the site for a new commission: building the school’s new Art Room.

Over 12 weeks the children explored the possibilities for their new art classroom. They set the brief for the space and what they would like to do there. We then supported them through a process of imagining, drawing and model making to create a proposal for the Room for Art. Chapter 1 concluded with a week-long build at the Whitechapel Gallery where children fabricated a full scale prototype for part of the Room in two of the gallery spaces. Public exhibition: 5th December 2017 to 4th March 2018.