Covent Garden has long been home to a diverse collection of living statues and fairground freaks, a levitating shaman competing with unicycling jugglers and motionless men in their silver-painted suits. But now, in a moment of jaw-dropping trickery, the architecture is joining in the fun: the Victorian market portico appears to have been ripped away from its colonnade, and left hanging in thin air.
This surreal stunt is the work of 30-year-old artist Alex Chinneck, master of architectural illusion, who has previously turned buildings upside down, pulled off their facades, and let them slither down in a heap on the pavement. A Uri Geller of bricks and mortar, this is one of his most ambitious works yet, fabricating an imaginary eastern entrance to the market hall that he’s then torn in half and jacked aloft, its Portland stone columns and granite walls left brutally severed.
“I wanted to play on the theatricality of this area, and make something physically extraordinary,” he says. In place for the next three weeks, it is already attracting crowds of gawping passers-by, as a visually arresting one-liner, seemingly made for the Instagram era.
The illusion of weightlessness is made possible by a lot of polystyrene and 16 tonnes of steel. A 12-metre armature hidden inside the structure is connected to the ground through an innocuous market cart, in which a 6-tonne counterweight stops it all from toppling over. The effect of weathered stonework has been immaculately recreated by Richard Nutbourne and his team of scenic artists – who usually work on stage sets for the opera and ballet next door. Covering the CNC-milled polystyrene blocks with plaster and granite sand, they have mimicked the neighbouring gnarled stone even down to the detail of moss, electrostatically flocked onto the surface.