For the third chapter of The Dalmore’s Luminary Series, architect Ben Dobbin distills landscape, whisky and tensegrity into a twisting, dynamic sculpture unveiled at the Venice Architecture Biennale
Architecture, according to the famous Italian architect Ernesto Rogers, encompasses everything from the broad scale of a city to the fine detail of a spoon. Ben Dobbin, a partner at one of Britain’s best-known architectural firms, Foster + Partners has thought a lot about both. He has worked on the design of such remarkable landmarks as Apple’s circular HQ in Cupertino in the suburbs of San Francisco, which is big enough to house 12,000 people and is popularly described as the spaceship. And his latest project is small enough to sit comfortably on one of the elegantly minimal desks inside the Apple building.
It is a piece of sculpture that was unveiled at the Venice Architecture Biennale in an exhibition inside the gothic brick tower that marks the entrance to the city’s ancient shipyard, the Arsenale. Crafted with extreme precision from twisted bronze rods, the sculpture is the result of a close creative partnership between The Dalmore and V&A Dundee, Scotland’s design museum – brought to life through a shared vision with architect Dobbin as part the third edition of the Luminary Series. Designed to accompany the distillery’s 52-year-old single malt whisky – known as The Rare – the piece distils a spirit of collaboration into sculptural form. Though it is modest in size, the oscillating curves of Dobbin’s sculpture have a dynamic energy that can make themselves felt in any space.
Only two complete sets of The Rare exist: one was auctioned by Sotheby’s in Hong Kong in 2025 in support of programmes at V&A Dundee, while the other will be held at The Dalmore Distillery. “I was thinking about who might acquire it, and where they might put it,” says Dobbin. “It would be exciting to see it rotating, it is very symmetrical as a composition, but as you move around it becomes more asymmetrical.”
Though Dobbin grew up in Newcastle, he knows Scotland well. He was a student in Edinburgh, and was taught to become a discerning whisky drinker by his father. He suggests that the sculpture’s form is inspired by the landscape on the north shore of the Cromarty Firth, where the Dalmore distillery was first established in 1839 at Alness. He says that its intricate structure is a tribute to Scotland’s engineers who built the country’s great bridges.
The launch in Venice also saw the unveiling of the Luminary No.3 Collectible, an edition limited to 20,000 bottles of a 17-year-old single malt, that Dobbin played a part in creating with Gregg Glass, the Dalmore’s master whisky maker and Richard Paterson, the master distiller. “As an architect, if you are designing a laboratory, you have to understand the scientist’s method, you have to know how they think.”
“It was like that at the distillery, where I was less confident about asserting an opinion. I was fortunate. I had two brilliant geniuses to work with who knew how to take on my loose ideas. I sketched out what the Collectible might taste like, using colours to suggest flavours, along with some written notes for Gregg. It was about what do you want to taste first, and then what would come next?” Dobbin describes the Collectible as The Rare’s younger cousin – brighter and more playful – while its older relative is deeper, more complex and refined.
The balance between tension and compression in Dobbin’s sculpture could also be seen as evoking the qualities that he, Paterson and Glass were looking for in maturing a single malt in a sequence of casks that range from calvados to port and sherry. Architects call that balance ‘tensegrity’, the word that Buckminster Fuller, the guru of the geodesic dome, came up with as a combination of tensional integrity. Fuller was an inspiration for Norman Foster, the founder of Foster + Partners, who recalls being reduced to silence when Fuller asked him, “Norman, how much does your building weigh?”
Dobbin’s work is the third commission from leading architects in the Luminary Series, a project that The Dalmore began in 2020 in support of V&A Dundee. The distillery asked Kengo Kuma, the Japanese architect of the museum’s striking building on the banks of the Tay and his protégée Maurizio Mucciola to design the first sculpture. It took two years to realise and was then auctioned to raise funds for the museum. They were followed by Melodie Leung, a director at Zaha Hadid Architects, whose glass sculpture was unveiled in 2023. Now, with the designer’s proof of The Rare sculpture joining the previous two commissions on permanent display at V&A Dundee, the full arc of the Luminary Series comes together – a lasting tribute to creative collaboration, and the evolving conversation between whisky and architecture.
Find out more about The Dalmore’s Luminary Series here.
Photography courtesy of The Dalmore.
