When a Fence Stops Being a Fence: The Story Behind No.1616
What happens when you take one of the most ordinary, overlooked objects in the built environment and ask a visionary artist and a team of structural engineers to reimagine it from the ground up? The answer, unveiled at the London Festival of Architecture 2026, is No.1616 — a sculptural tower installation created by British-Bangladeshi artist Rana Begum in collaboration with structural engineers Webb Yates. The project does exactly what its creators promised: it quite literally turns the idea of a fence on its head.
Fences define boundaries. They divide, separate, and close off. They are so commonplace in urban and suburban life that most people stop seeing them altogether. No.1616 demands you look again — and look up.
What Is No.1616? The Concept Explained
The installation takes the standard vertical picket or panel fence and rotates its logic entirely. Rather than running horizontally across a landscape to mark territory, the structure rises vertically into the sky, transforming an instrument of division into something that reaches, aspires, and invites the eye upward. The name No.1616 is itself a nod to the serialised, almost industrial nature of fencing — those anonymous numerical designations that classify standard fence panels in building catalogues — reclaimed here as the title of a work of architectural art.
Rana Begum is known for her rigorous exploration of geometry, colour, and light. Her practice often takes industrial or everyday forms and amplifies their latent visual and emotional potential. In No.1616, she applies that sensibility to fencing, stripping it of its mundane function and reassembling it as something that challenges how we perceive boundaries and public space.
Webb Yates, the engineering practice behind the structural ambition of the project, brought the technical expertise to make the vision stand — literally. The challenge of inverting a fence into a tower is not merely conceptual. It demands serious structural thinking: how do you take a form designed to be long and low and make it tall, stable, and safe in an urban context?
The London Festival of Architecture: A Platform for Bold Ideas
The London Festival of Architecture has long served as one of the most important annual events for showcasing experimental and innovative thinking in architecture and design. Running each June across the city, the festival uses London itself as its canvas, placing installations, exhibitions, and events in streets, parks, courtyards, and public buildings.
The 2026 edition continues that tradition of using architecture to provoke conversation about the city, its structures, and the way people inhabit space. No.1616 fits squarely within that mission. It is not a building in the traditional sense, nor is it purely decorative. It occupies a productive middle ground between sculpture, architecture, and social commentary — asking viewers to reconsider one of the most basic elements of the built environment.
Installations like No.1616 are precisely what festivals like LFA do best: giving architects, artists, and engineers the freedom to experiment without the constraints of a conventional commission, and presenting the results to a broad public audience that might never otherwise encounter this kind of thinking.
Rana Begum's Artistic Vision: Geometry, Light, and Everyday Objects
To understand No.1616 fully, it helps to understand Rana Begum's broader practice. Based in London, Begum has spent her career exploring how geometric forms, repetition, and industrial materials can be transformed through careful arrangement and the play of light. Her works often draw on the visual languages of minimalism and constructivism while remaining grounded in tactile, real-world materials.
In previous projects, she has worked with chain-link fencing, scaffolding poles, and mesh screens — materials that most people associate with construction sites or boundary markers — and elevated them into refined, contemplative sculptures. No.1616 continues that trajectory. The fence is not just a metaphor here; it is the literal raw material of the work, recontextualised through rotation, scale, and placement.
The decision to work with Webb Yates on the project reflects a growing interest in the architecture world in genuinely collaborative relationships between artists and engineers. Rather than treating engineering as a service that simply enables a creative vision, the collaboration here appears to be one in which structural thinking actively shapes the aesthetic outcome. The way the tower stands, the way it distributes load, the way its components are joined — these are not hidden behind the work but intrinsic to it.
Why Architectural Art Installations Matter in Urban Life
It would be easy to dismiss an installation like No.1616 as a novelty — a clever visual pun on a familiar object. But the questions it raises are genuinely important ones for anyone thinking about cities and the public realm. Consider what fences actually do in urban life:
- They establish ownership and control over land and space, often in ways that exclude or marginalise certain communities.
- They shape pedestrian movement, determining where people can and cannot walk.
- They contribute to the visual character of streets and neighbourhoods, for better or for worse.
- They are one of the most common forms of infrastructure that residents encounter daily, yet almost entirely absent from architectural discourse.
By turning a fence into a tower — by making it monumental and unmissable — No.1616 forces all of those questions into the open. It asks: why do we accept fences as neutral, invisible infrastructure? Who decides where they go, and what purposes do they really serve?
The Power of Reframing the Ordinary
Some of the most powerful architecture and design work of recent decades has operated exactly this way: by taking something ordinary to the point of invisibility and making it strange again. The Surrealists called this defamiliarisation. Architects and designers have their own vocabulary for it — adaptive reuse, creative misappropriation, material honesty — but the impulse is the same.
When Rana Begum and Webb Yates rotate a fence ninety degrees and send it skyward, they are not simply making a visual joke. They are engaging in a serious act of creative reframing. They are saying: look at this thing you have stopped seeing. Look at what it is made of, how it is put together, what it implies about space and belonging. Now look at it differently.
No.1616 and the Future of Public Art in London
London has a long and distinguished history of commissioning and hosting public art that challenges assumptions and enriches urban life. From the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square to the Turbine Hall commissions at Tate Modern, the city has shown an appetite for ambitious, sometimes controversial, always thought-provoking work in shared public spaces.
No.1616 belongs in that tradition. It is not a permanent addition to the cityscape, but its impact on those who encounter it — the double-take, the recalibration of a familiar object — is the kind of effect that good temporary public art can achieve better than almost any other medium. It changes how you see, even after the work itself is gone.
As the London Festival of Architecture 2026 continues to unfold across the city, No.1616 stands as one of its most conceptually compelling contributions: a reminder that the most radical act in architecture is sometimes simply to look at what is already there and ask whether it has to be that way.