76 Esquire — June 2018
at the beginning of April this year, a company called London
Mastaba Limited took up residence on the northern bank of the
Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park. here, in a low white marquee and a series
of shipping containers, a group of around 35 engineers and construction
workers, overseen by one of the company’s directors, an ebullient bearded
Bulgarian called Vladimir Yavachev, began building a large floating plat-
form, 40m long and 30m wide, made of white, high-densiy polyethylene
cubes. Over the following few weeks, a second layer of cubes was placed
on top, then a horizontal steel frame, followed by a vertical scafolding
structure. At the beginning of May, deliveries of 55-gallon oil barrels, spe-
cially constructed at a factory in the Netherlands, started to arrive. he
barrels, 7,506 in total, were placed on their side and bolted to the scafold-
ing frame in neat rows.
If all continues to go to plan, by mid-June the completed structure,
which will by now be 20m high and resemble a pyramid with the top cut
of – an ancient form called a “mastaba”, first appearing in Mesopotamia as
mud benches, from which the Arabic name is derived; later seen on
a much biger scale as tombs for pharaohs and nobiliy in Early Dynastic
Egypt — will be floated out into the middle of the Serpentine. A team of
Bulgarian divers will be on hand to make sure the concrete anchors are in
the correct position, having first checked the botom of the lake for unex-
ploded World War II ordnance. On 17 June, “The Mastaba (Project for
London, Hyde Park, Serpentine Lake)”, the newest work by the Bulgarian-
American artist Christo, will be complete.
More correctly, it will be the newest work by Christo and Jeanne-
Claude, the artist duo who had one of the great creative partnerships —
not to mention love stories — of the last century.
hough they both dispensed with their surnames in their professional
work, he was born Christo Vladimirov Javacheff on 13 June, 1935, in
Gabrovo, Bulgaria, where his father owned a fabric factory and his politi-
cal activist mother worked as a secretary at the Academy of Fine Arts in‘For small erections may be finished
by their first architects; grand ones,
true ones, ever leave the copestone
to posteriy. God keep me from ever
completing anything. his whole book
is but a draught — nay, but the draught
of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength,
Cash, and Patience!’
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Christo and Jeanne-Claude showcase a piece of their new
‘wrapped-up’ artwork style, Rome, 1963
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s ‘Valley Curtain’
project in Rifle, Colorado, 1972