Placeholders

When the V&A rebuilt its Exhibition Road courtyard in 2013, the Aston Webb Screen (built in 1909) was transformed from a solid facade into a porous pedestrian entrance.

More than 400 Portland Stones were removed from the original screen. To save them from being crushed into aggregate – which is the fate of most used stone, no matter how large, historic, and precious – they were hauled to a quarry in Dorset, where they have been stored for nearly a decade.

Placeholders made use of these stones – marked by a century of London pollution, and cratered by shrapnel from the Blitz – by bringing them back on site in the form of street furniture.

This intervention points to the enduring possibilities for reusing stone, which is emerging as one of the lowest-impact building materials (if quarried and reused locally), holding great potential for the circular economy within the construction industry.

Lack of reliable inventory is a recurrent bottleneck in the reuse of architectural components. The stones were not documented, so a large part of the project involved archival research and in producing a detailed survey of each stone in terms of dimension, physical condition and appearance.

Preparation work then went into renewing these durable building components: they were cleaned, and their joints dressed and rubbed to reveal their construction notation and details.

As Placeholders was a temporary commission they have not been substantially recut and will be returned to the quarry on deinstallation. The project’s inventory will help the stones to be reused again. As a public performance during the festival, PAYE’s masons carved an inscription which reads: ‘Most building stone, when dismantled, is crushed. These stones were part of the V&A facade for a century. Until they are moved again, they will hold this place, Sept2021.’