Ed Sheeran, the musician whose songs and collaborations have made him one of the most well-known singer-songwriters in the UK, built a pub in Ipswich, Massachusetts—but it’s only to use as a one-night-only concert venue slash music video shoot.
The pub, called The Old Phone, a reference to a song off Sheeran’s forthcoming album, looks very real. In fact, it is real, it’s just not permanent. Built by Pink Sparrow whose pop-ups and brand activations have included a “pit stop” for a festival that looks like a miniature truck stop, and a Fenty candy booth that looks just like an airport shop, The Old Phone falls in line with an ever-escalating installation-art-level tradition of building full-scale and functioning structures that is best represented by, what else, Hollywood.
Since time immemorial (aka, since Hollywood was Hollywood), fake buildings have been built for use as movie sets. And a surprising number still stand. In the brilliant 2003 documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself, director Thom Andersen lists out a number of buildings that look exactly like the real thing… except they’re not. For example, a “fake” McDonald’s used only for commercials and movies that was built in the 1970s. And a fake gas station, built in the ‘30s, called the Gilmore Gasoline Filling Station that became a Starbucks in 2015.
On the other end of the spectrum is the famous Prada store in Marfa, Texas. It’s an installation by the artists Elmgreen & Dragset that looks like a real Prada store extracted from any monied city in the world and dropped in the desert: “Mirroring the design of a Prada shop, the work is filled with the fall/winter collection of 2005. Here in this new media artwork, the installation is depicted throughout a day’s cycle, as the sunlight beats down on the building and then fades into nightfall. The artists describe the project as pop architectural land art…”
In the last decades, brands have copped to the fun of pop-up buildings. Mostly newsstands and foodstands. Just last month, Lacoste built a pop-up “club” at the US Open, in Miami. But a fully functioning pub? That might take the cake.
