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Digital Menhir

Public art · Milton Keynes

A full-size replica of an Avebury standing stone, placed on a porte cochère at the top of Midsummer Boulevard. A 3D scan supplied the form for a hard-coated foam replica. Its iridescent, custom-car finish brings an ancient monument into the visual world of Milton Keynes.

Digital Menhir above the tree-lined boulevard

Digital Menhir

The sculpture combines a prehistoric form with the language of contemporary car finishes. Commissioned by Milton Keynes and MK Gallery, it makes a new landmark within the boulevard.

Photograph © Jim Stephenson

Digital Menhir seen from the side of its porte cochère

A monument to the new town

Milton Keynes drew on myths of the English landscape and an idealised view of Los Angeles. The stone brings these apparently distant influences together on the boulevard’s midsummer-solstice axis.

Photograph © Jim Stephenson

Design visualisation of the iridescent stone on a porte cochère

Ancient form, new surface

The design study tests the stone above the existing structure. Its changing colour separates the replica from the mass and material of the Avebury original.

Photogrammetric survey of the Avebury stone

Scanning Avebury

The stone’s geometry was captured digitally and used to fabricate the replica. This passage from ancient material to data to new object underlies the sculpture.

For exhibitions, acquisitions and commissions: [email protected].

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Selected works

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About Sam Jacob

Sam Jacob makes work that explores the strange lives of familiar things. His work draws on the images, objects and fragments of history through which we construct ideas of nature, culture and ourselves.

Across drawings, objects, installations and curatorial projects, he examines how architecture and material things embody social and cultural ideas, how ‘fictions’ become ‘real’, how ideas become things, and how things become ideas.

Collage, copying and processes of reconstruction are central to this practice, which also moves between digital processes and physical materiality. These transformations and translations bring both humour and unease to questions of memory, value and meaning.

Solo exhibitions include Against Nature (2023) and Empire of Ice Cream (2019) at Betts Project, London, and Disappear Here at the RIBA Architecture Gallery (2018). His work has also been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the V&A, MAK Vienna, the National Museum in Oslo, the Graham Foundation in Chicago and Secession, Vienna, and at Manifesta and the Venice and Chicago architecture biennials.

Curatorial projects include A Clockwork Jerusalem, co-curated with Wouter Vanstiphout for the British Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale; The Lie of the Land at MK Gallery; and Pattern as Politics, with Priya Khanchandani, at the 2019 Lisbon Architecture Triennale.

Jacob is a columnist for ArtReview, writes Strangeharvest, and is the author of Make It Real: Architecture as Enactment. He is Professor and Dean of the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Die Angewandte), and directs Sam Jacob Studio, a collaborative architecture and design practice.

For exhibitions, gallery enquiries, acquisitions and commissions, contact [email protected].