Elemental Encounters
Open Monuments by designer Melek Zeynep Bulut
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At the entrance courtyard of the Design Museum, a new kind of gathering place emerges - one that blurs the lines between sculpture, architecture and the everyday rituals of city life.
Open Monuments, the latest work by London-based Turkish multidisciplinary artist and designer Melek Zeynep Bulut, marks a shift in scale and intention in her work: from large, immersive interventions to a family of sculptural urban objects conceived for direct public use.
For years, Bulut’s practice has explored the space between disciplines, creating installations that invite physical and emotional engagement rather than passive observation. Her work synthesises space, experimental architecture, behavioural sciences and visual art, exploring how existence and subjectivity are shaped by the environments we inhabit.
Open Monuments extends this ethos into the public realm for the first time, offering pieces that are as much places to sit, pause and meet as they are quietly monumental forms.
Its debut at the Design Museum carries particular significance. Set against a building designed by one of Bulut’s favourite architects, John Pawson – who famously reclaimed the listed building as cultural space whilst retaining its unique spatial quality – the installation becomes a dialogue between two mediums that have long shaped her work: design and architecture. Positioned at the museum’s entrance, the collection unfolds not behind closed doors, but out in the open city, setting the tone for visitors from their very first step.
“It is truly meaningful that this collection is making its debut here,” she reflects. “I am hugely thankful to the Design Museum for giving Open Monuments its first home and to London Design Festival for supporting this Landmark Project.”
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The series takes its cues from geometry’s most essential elements – point, line, circle, square. These forms, Bulut explains, “never truly begin or end”. Instead they can be arranged in innumerable configurations, becoming a stage where chance encounters, quiet gestures and everyday movement take on a performative quality.
Materiality sits at the heart of the project. Each piece is crafted entirely from soil using the ancient construction method of rammed earth, a process of compacting successive layers to form dense, monolithic structures. The result is both grounding and expressive - natural textures, tonal striations and visible layers that act as a sedimented archive of time.
“The layering is a metaphor,” Bulut says. “It honours collective memory while inviting the visitor to create a new language of the present.”
The material encourages slowness too – a pause, a breath, a moment of connection with the surrounding environment and with oneself.
While sculptural in presence, these objects are also deeply functional. They serve as urban furniture, offering places to rest, gather or simply observe. But their role is not fixed. This installation was designed as an ongoing experimental experience, one that reimagines the public realm.
“Their purpose evolves through participation,” Bulut explains. “Like performers, the pieces respond to the needs of the moment and to the character of their location – a meeting point one hour, a contemplative refuge the next”.
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In its shifting uses and open-ended form, Open Monuments imagines a vision of the city as generous, porous and alive to change. Bulut hopes the work becomes a site of unexpected interaction – a place where encounters accumulate, where meaning grows not from a predetermined programme but from the stories that unfold over time.
“This is my ideal of the open city,” she reflects. “A public realm that is living and mutable, a setting shaped by the exchanges and memories it holds.”
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