Cyber Space

Artists Langlands & Bell explore the architecture of tech titans

For 40 years, British artists Langlands & Bell have decoded the structures of buildings to illuminate human relationships – their subjects have included Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse, the British Museum, Millbank Penitentiary and, most famously, the house of Osama bin Laden (a work which earned them a nomination for 2004’s Turner Prize). For their new exhibition, opening this month at London’s Alan Cristea Gallery, they are turning their attention to the futuristic architecture of internet giants.

The show consists of 24 editioned prints, depicting in-progress or recently completed ‘campuses’ belonging to Apple, Facebook, IBM, the Gates Foundation and Nvidia. Stripped of texture and context, they are shown in distilled form against sharply coloured backgrounds that accentuate their shape. Most of them are laid at an oblique angle, so viewers ‘feel like God looking down at a Lilliputian landscape’, and experience a rare sense of power over companies that have influenced almost every aspect of our lives.