Sensing Spaces
Royal Academy, London, to January 25th to April 6th
“Go and explore, you’re not going to get lost.” That’s the message from Kate Goodwin, the Drue Heinz curator of architecture at the Royal Academy in London, who has just allowed seven architectural practices from different countries to transform the RA’s pristine galleries into a hotch-potch of cutting-edge design.
Architecture exhibitions can be tricky. Carting paintings and sculptures around the world is straightforward, paperwork aside: uprooting an 18th-century neo-classical building is not. “We end up having to communicate through representation,” Goodwin says. “It can be alienating—and it requires a real leap of imagination.” So the fiddly plans and 3D models have gone, and the architects have each created a site-specific installation.
The result should be a rich interactive experience: “not about telling people what to think,” Goodwin argues, “but about generating a reaction.” Diébédo Francis Kéré (from Burkina Faso, based in Berlin) has made a sweeping tunnel of honeycomb plastic that punches through two galleries. Li Xiaodong, from Tsinghua University, Beijing, conjures contemplative spaces (above). Kengo Kuma, from Japan, has something more delicate with wispy strands of bamboo that wiggle and wobble. It incorporates two traditional scents (hinoki wood and tutami) to shift our perceptions by engaging all the senses. Then there are Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen, whose slick designs straddle three continents—”Poli House” in Chile is the best-known. With 27,185 screws and 72,800 nails, their installation is the biggest of all.
“Sensing Spaces: Architecture Reimagined” is unusual. It is less about the beauty and skill of each individual work and more about the collective experience, the sensation and the atmosphere. “In many ways,” Goodwin says, “it is a subtle exhibition about sitting in a space and reflecting.”
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