A large round table densely in a dimly lit gallery space, filled with geometric models and sculptural forms, with several illuminated spherical structures hanging above.

Model for your circular city 2024

With his studio team, Eliasson has the capacity not only to bring people together to raise awareness of challenges, but also evoke emotion and inspire action to solve problems creatively.

Model for your circular city 2024 presents a selection of maquettes, prototypes and geometric experiments built at Studio Olafur Eliasson, Berlin, often as preparatory studies for artworks or architectural projects.

The models are a kind of topographic record of Eliasson’s wide-ranging studio practice. Displayed here on a large circular table and arranged into conceptually related ‘districts’, the models suggest an ideal city we can explore in our imagination or create in our own work and lives. Nearby, The cubic structural evolution project 2004 offers an opportunity to collaboratively build an evolving ‘city of the future’ in white Lego.

In strategic city planning, a ‘circular city’ embeds the principles of a circular economy. Circular cities are designed and built to be durable, adaptable, easily maintained, powered by renewable energy and to operate in harmony with the natural world.

– Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow

Low/no vision audio description

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Model for your circular city 2024 is a large installation that fills the centre of the gallery floor. The work takes the form of a circular wooden table, raised on simple legs, measuring 3.6 metres in diameter. Visitors can move all the way around the table’s perimeter, looking across its wide surface, which holds an expansive arrangement of models, maquettes, and prototypes created in Eliasson’s studio.

The tabletop is densely populated with geometric models and experimental forms. There are latticed spheres, angular crystalline shapes, mirrored polyhedra, coloured glass panels and clusters resembling miniature buildings. Some models rest flat, while others rise in layers, overlapping and leaning against each other so that the ensemble grows upward as well as outward, forming a compact cityscape in miniature. Surfaces of wood, glass and metal catch and scatter light, producing glints and reflections that shift as the viewer moves.

Suspended from above are five larger polyhedral forms. Warm light from within, emitted from exposed light fittings, shines across these woven and geometric forms overhead. The illuminated structures cast patterned shadows across the table and onto the surrounding walls. These overhead elements extend the installation beyond the tabletop, linking the ground with the surrounding space.

Forms on the table are loosely organised into conceptual districts, with variations grouped together. Taken as a whole, the work resembles an imagined circular city — multifaceted, experimental and constantly in flux — inviting viewers to make connections between shapes, surfaces and structures.

– QAGOMA

A close-up view of a dense cluster of geometric models, including faceted spheres, folded panels, latticed forms and star-shaped pieces.

A round table densely packed with geometric sculptures in various materials, with illuminated spherical structures hanging above and circular artworks on the wall behind, featuring dense, ring-shaped clusters of black, ink-like marks.

Room: ‘Urgency and creativity’

Twenty years after Olafur Eliasson created The glacier series in 1999, it had become clear the landscape in Iceland was changing irrevocably. The glaciers he had photographed were in retreat.

The glacier melt series 1999/2019 reveals the impact of rising global temperatures on Iceland’s glaciers and our world more broadly. Eliasson has also created public art projects, such as Ice watch – 12 chunks of glacial sea ice arranged in a circle, suggesting the face of a clock – which emphasise this point. By transporting ice to the city centre, including at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, Eliasson brings climate change into the realm of daily experience. Given this opportunity, people came to see, touch and listen to the ice, pressing their cheeks against its coolness as it melted.

With his studio team, Eliasson has the capacity to not only to bring people together to raise awareness of these challenges, but also to evoke emotion and inspire action to solve problems creatively. Model for your circular city 2024 presents a selection of maquettes, prototypes and geometric experiments built at Studio Olafur Eliasson, Berlin, often as preparatory studies for artworks or architectural projects. The models are a kind of topographic record of Eliasson’s wide-ranging studio practice. Displayed here on a large circular table and arranged into conceptually related ‘districts’, the models suggest an ideal city we can explore in our imagination. Nearby, The cubic structural evolution project 2004 offers an opportunity to collaboratively build an evolving ‘city of the future’ in white Lego.

– Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow

Model for your circular city 2024

Room: ‘Urgency and creativity’

Other work from ‘Urgency and creativity’:

Room: ‘Urgency and creativity’

Other work from ‘Urgency and creativity’: