A Week at the Knees

What fun! A Georgian façade appears to have slithered into Charterhouse Square and sat down for a rest, but it is actually A Week at the Knees, a sculpture by British artist Alex Chinneck.

Unveiled during Clerkenwell Design Week 2025, the freestanding façade looked perfectly at home among the historic buildings surrounding the square. Only its tired posture gave the game away, with the brickwork bending down towards the grass before rising again over the path.

The sculpture was much more substantial than its effortless appearance suggested. It measured around 13.5 metres long and 5.5 metres high, weighed 11.5 tonnes and contained approximately 7,000 hand-laid bricks. Remarkably, the whole façade was only 15 centimetres deep.

Beneath the brickwork sat 320 metres of repurposed steel, shaped to create those apparently impossible curves. Specially made windows, a bending door and even a curved drainpipe carried the illusion through to the smallest details.

The raised centre formed an underpass across the square’s gravel path, allowing visitors to walk straight through the artwork. I love how naturally the weary façade fitted its surroundings while thoroughly disrupting them at the same time.

Some of the steel was salvaged from the former American Embassy in London, helping to reduce the sculpture’s carbon footprint. There is something rather pleasing about one London building being reused to help another appear to put its feet up.

Chinneck is no stranger to making familiar structures behave strangely. His previous projects have included a melting house made from wax bricks, a hovering section of Covent Garden’s Market Building and a canal boat tied into a loop. Wonderful stuff.

Originally found at Designboom.