Artists

Moulin’s images of paranoid cities and impossible industrial structures demonstrate a hard surrealism entirely appropriate to Sheffield, a city that – though it seems rather ashamed of the fact – has the finest Modernist architecture of any English city outside of London.


The Brutalist architecture of Sheffield, the main inspiration for this new work, was essentially optimistic, an attempt to create an open, socialist city. Yet the only other buildings in Britain to have ever employed so much reinforced concrete were the pillboxes and bunkers of the Second World War. In Moulin’s images, the difference between the two kinds of concrete disappear, and the end result is a horrifying but thrilling unarchitecture made up of non-functional, barely even structural planes and fragments, thrown together to create aggressive agglomerations more reminiscent of the Third Reich’s Atlantic Wall and the unreadable landscape of J.G Ballard’s The Terminal Beach (1964) than the aims of Brutalist buildings such as Sheffield’s Park Hill housing estate. The latter structures tried to engender community and solidarity – Moulin’s is a city without people. The architectural site-spotter might recognise individual components of these compacted forms – the ‘free and anonymous’ planes of Victor Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion, the ‘acoustic mirrors’ of the First World War, the walkways of Park Hill, the cast concrete patterns of Sheffield’s underpasses – but they become irrelevant in these ferocious landscapes. Here, walkways go nowhere, blocks of flats transform into sheer walls, formerly functional components become hieratic monuments, girders are topped with spikes, objects are buried in the concrete while weeds crack the surface.