This photobook explores vents and their awkward disguises, in a celebration of architecture’s double life
Architecture is a schizophrenic discipline. On one hand it aspires to grandeur, civicness and significance. Its history books chronicle palaces, monuments and sacred structures, or grand social projects manifesting utopian ideas for transforming society. On the other hand it’s a mess: a world of pipes and problems, conduits and compromise. It’s as if haute couture was not only fixated on dressing the body as spectacle but also charged with removing verrucas on a Thursday afternoon at a local GP practice. This double life – its intrinsically bathetic nature – is of course what makes architecture so fascinating. Usually understood as serious and ineffable, architecture is, at heart, comedy.
Adventurous Vents revels in architecture’s founding contradiction. A coffee-table book (for small coffee tables) that presents 100 British vents. More specifically: bits of substantial ventilation infrastructure that acknowledge the res publica. By placing vents – typically peripheral – centre stage, the book reveals things about cities, land- scape and architecture that most buildings are too ashamed to admit. The range shows extraordinary variation: chimneys that dream of being castles, exhausts dragged up as campaniles, hollow Potemkin buildings, delicate cast-iron structures that convert sewage methane into street light; modernist shafts with austere silhouettes straight from Aldo Rossi’s Città Analoga.
The book lets vents tell their own story about the historical and technological development of the city. From the eighteenth century onward there are demands to ventilate, say, mines, the foul atmospheres of industry, transport systems, sanitation and the complexities of modern infrastructure. Each new and necessary rupture between one world and another becomes an architectural struggle to give form to the intake or discharge of air.
There are the decorative Victorian follies in London, like Decimus Burton’s chimney-as-campanile for the Palm House boilers at Kew Gardens. There are brutalist examples: The concrete Fibonacci spiral at the Barbican and the spectacular, expressionist Camberwell Submarine providing venting and cooling for nearby housing estates.
There are examples where the practicalities of building services become entwined with human stories – a 71-metre chimney styled as an Italianate brick minaret topped with a domed cupola exhausting Manchester’s Strangeways Prison heating system and a small austere but elegant tapered octagonal structure that ventilates HM Prison Portland’s sewer system. Both have a tragic quality, portals between two separate worlds, the enclosed incarcerated bodies contrasting with the drifting atmospheres of the world beyond.
There are the ridiculous, like the 23-metre Corinthian-style monument at Paternoster Square. This area, just north of St Paul’s Cathedral, was redeveloped in the 1990s at the height of the then-Prince Charles’s anti modernist public interventions. The Paternoster Column’s outward appearance is all Portland stone, fluted column and rusticated base, topped with a gilded flaming urn. Its real function though is to vent the traffic gyratory and car park beneath, piping benzine-heavy air through grilles discreetly inserted into its English Baroque form. In the
hands of a serious postmodernist, this chronologically impossible, absurd mismatch of form and function, with its awkward disjunctions between modernity and history, could have been made an explicit exploration of the problem of the contemporary city. But the monarch-pleasing, no-fun pomo historicist reality is an object driven by shame, repressing the city’s real conditions in favour of architectural fantasy. A Freudian urbanist would read this as displacement, where the baser bodily function (venting, excreting, purging the foul air of the city’s guts) is sublimated into the most elevated of architectural forms.
Adventurous Vents revels in an obscure design typology, revealing the marginal as central. This celebration of vents and their awkward disguises and blunt exposures is also a celebration of architecture’s double life, its ever-unresolved tension between the profane and the transcendent. Vents here are not just infrastructure but a catalogue of architectural possibilities. Function slips away, form persists as archetype, building becomes rhetoric. Nothing but hot air, and sometimes all the better for it.
Adventurous Vents by Lucy Lavers, Judy Owens & Suzanna Prizeman. Particular Books, £20 (hardcover)
From the October 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
