Built to Not Last

Es Devlin spent thirty years designing things meant to disappear by morning. On October 2, the Design Museum gives one of them a six-month lease instead.

In 1995 Es Devlin finished a fine art foundation course at Central Saint Martins — the standard on-ramp toward becoming a painter or sculptor with work in a gallery somewhere. She went a different way instead: the Motley Theatre Design Course, then a first commission nobody outside the trade would have heard of, at the Octagon in Bolton. Thirty years later she's the one who designed the sphere Beyoncé climbs out of on the Renaissance tour, Adele's Las Vegas stage, U2's residency inside the Sphere, the Closing Ceremony of the London Olympics. Every single one of those was built for one specific night and torn down by morning. That's not a side effect of the job — for a stadium or an arena show, it's the whole job.

In 2022 she added one more temporary structure to that list. "Come Home Again" was an illuminated dome shaped like a cutaway of St Paul's Cathedral, its whole inner surface wrapped in her own hand-inked pencil drawings of the 243 species — birds, moths, fungi, wildflowers — on the City of London's own endangered-species watchlist, drawn one at a time. Cartier commissioned it, a choir sang evensong inside it every evening at sunset, and after one month near Tate Modern it came down and the steel went back into circulation. That was the plan. Ephemeral art about things that don't get a second chance.

On October 2, London's Design Museum opens "Es Devlin: Other Worlds" — the first retrospective a European museum has given a still-working stage designer, thirty years of maquettes and annotated sketchbooks and a life-size rebuild of her actual studio, running through April. "Come Home Again" is back in it, redisplayed for the run. Of everything she's ever built to vanish on schedule, the one piece specifically about vanishing is the one that just didn't.