It’s gratifying that the Royal Academy’s current exhibition of architecture Sensing Spaces: Architecture Reimagined, should be something of a runaway success- for one thing, it’s a great contrast to what a typical exhibition of architecture includes, such as the RA’s own on Richard Rogers last year, with diverse representations of a series of buildings as perfected objects.
Pezo von Ellrichshausen
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Li Xiaodong
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Instead it presents installations by seven architectural practices, who for the most part have relished the opportunity to pursue and build a project without the usual kind of constraints of functionality and purpose. The main rooms of the Academy are transformed into sometimes dark or confusing, sometimes apparently empty spaces: each, usefully, very different from each other. They are aware of the architecture of the Royal Academy’s own grand spaces and their detail: Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s great structure enables the viewer’s intimate relationship to the plaster moulding of the ceiling coving. Kengo Kuma occupies two rooms with delicate enclosures of bamboo, evoking sensation through darkness, and smells of cypress and tatami. Li Xiadong’s maze of green timber leads to a slightly disappointing climax. The passage-work of Diebedo Francis Kere invites the enthusiastic participation of visitors in modifying his structure: while the installations by Alvaro Siza and Souto de Moura seem to be fragments of a different, more cerebral exhibition. For me the prize, if there was one, goes to Grafton Architects whose spaces are articulated in a way familiar to Western architecture- installing forms whose weight and mass frame and articulate light in mysterious and affecting way.
Grafton Architects
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Much of what the exhibition includes is not too surprising for those involved in architectural education in the recent past. That architecture can be playful and experimental, that it may be experienced in a state of distraction, that it is created always in a context that is physical, but also experiential and emotional. Architecture is not only appreciated through the eyes, but the body, and through touch and smell. And also that architecture is about the making of space along with the making of its enclosure is a point which the RA’s visitors seem to fully appreciate. As Yvonne Farrell of Grafton Architects says of how architecture can work: ‘For a short time in your life you think ...mmm, there's something lovely here’.
Kengo Kuma
Interviews with the architects and clips of built work they’ve done provide a fascinating context to the show and can be seen at http://roy.ac/youtube
The exhibition is open until 6 April.
The exhibition is open until 6 April.