Giles Round
Integrated Architectural Artwork
The Lantern is flooded with light once again after its restoration and transformation. But what dazzles you most as you enter is the vibrancy of Giles Round’s opulent installation that uses geometric tiles, stone and terrazzo to transform the space.
Round has created an integrated artwork embedded within the lower level of The Lantern Foyer. The work includes St Bees sandstone, polished plaster, glazed tiles, terrazzo and floor surfaces.
The artwork was created following research into our history. It takes inspiration from our city’s extraordinary historic architecture and Bristol Byzantine style, and integrates exquisitely crafted materials into the new ground floor of The Lantern Foyer designed in close conversation with the architects Levitt Bernstein.
As you dine within our Colonnade restaurant, or ascend towards our performance spaces, you’ll be surrounded by Giles Round’s spectacular creation.
The reticence of warehouses and the opulence of banks. An interior after the Byzantine-influenced Italian Gothic manner of the Bristol Byzantine
Giles Round, 2023
Location: The Lantern atrium
Medium: St Bees sandstone, polished plaster, glazed tiles, terrazzo, carpet
Commissioned by Bristol City Council for Bristol Beacon. Curated and produced by Field Art Projects.
About the artist
Giles Round
“My desire from the beginning was to embed the work into the fabric of the building.”
Giles Round, 2023
Giles Round is an artist currently living in St Leonards-on-Sea with more-than-human companion Philip Seymour Hoffman Round. Round works across disciplines – including art, design and architecture – through a wide range of techniques and approaches.
Often taking the form of long-term, open-ended projects in which exhibitions themselves become the medium, Round’s works have at times produced organisations and companies as artworks. Through these, the artist creates conceptual frameworks to interrogate the role of the artist as an agent of transformation. For example, Round’s ongoing work, ’The Art Direction of the Noguchi Museum’ (2018–) is an enquiry into the role an artist might play as an embedded part of institutional and design teams, but also of society’s infrastructures and organisations at large.
Commissions include: 24 Guildhall Road Commission, NN Contemporary Art, Northampton (opening 2024); PAMHS Department, Great Ormond Street Hospital, London (opening 2024); Time passes & still I think of you, The Arbour, Brent Cross West Station, London (2023); Building Wrap, Friary Park, London (2023); Foyer Curtain for Queen Elizabeth Hall, QEH South Bank Centre, London (2018); Designs for a Neo-Brutalist Interior, Hayward Gallery Café, London (2018); Design Work Leisure, Art on the Underground, Blackhorse Road, Vauxhall and Victoria London Underground Stations, London (2015–)
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