by There are thin curtains made of seaweed and pig in them hanging from the ceiling in the central rotunda of the Royal Academy, with the appearance of slippery skins lost by some reptilian creature. They hang above a busy scene, where there are work benches tasting with half-finished maquettes and material samples, next to a teetering prototype of a structural stone tower and a plaster mold used to make toilets. A brightly painted model of Ghana’s coffers, shaped like a phoenix, stands on a rubble plinth, while pastel-hued tiles made from crushed seashells hang on the nearby wall.
This is the architecture room of the UK Summer Show – but not as we know it. The usual selection of small buildings and impenetrable drawings, often visited by baffled members of the public, has been transformed this year into a well-made museum. It is the radical vision of Assemble, the young Turner prize-winning architectural society, which was inducted into the ranks of the Royal Academies in 2022, and has breathed new life into how their rare discipline is represented here.
“Architectural exhibitions can sometimes be very difficult to tackle,” says Maria Lisogorskaya, one of Assemble’s founders. “We wanted to celebrate the messy parts of architecture, and show the people involved in making buildings that aren’t traditionally seen as architects.”
The result is a wonderfully diverse collection of material experiments and novel techniques that revel in the tactile, craft qualities of architecture and shed light on how things are made. There are beautiful mosaic panels produced by volunteers at the Hackney Mosaic Project in London, dazzling neon nylon chairs woven by Samuel Obusi Adjei at the Nubuke Foundation in Accra, and lots of odds and ends that you want to pick up and fondle. In a world where buildings are increasingly assemblies of proprietary components specified from catalogues, Assemble offers an alternative universe where things are moulded, cast, carved, thatched, rammed and fermented.
The stakes are high: this year the architecture has two rooms, including the central rotunda for the first time, giving the subject more prominence than usual. Gallery six, behind the rotunda, was designed as a kind of industrial back-of-house space, equipped with off-the-shelf metal racking systems and a pegboard, on which models, machines and curios are displayed, as if in a warehouse.
For sustainability, elements from the previous exhibition, Entangled Pasts, were also reused, including large mirrors and a low table from JA Projects, while the walls were left the deep burgundy they were already painted. It’s a royal backdrop for some heavy pieces of industry, including a large agricultural mechanism for compacting clay bricks, installed by Feilden Clegg Bradley, and a formidable army of hydraulic “snappers” by artist James Capper, who use them to gnaw and gnash. at their statues. One hopes that their mighty jaws will turn to steel to push through model 1 Undershaft, Eric Parry’s latest office tower boom for the City of London – a greedy hulk that feels distinctly out of place here.
Meanwhile, the rotunda is more like a working studio space, with colored paint swatches on the walls and objects displayed on the workbenches, with no museum plinth in sight. Pieces of furniture and other building elements contributed by artists and makers are cleverly used as display structures themselves, such as a shelf made of woven rushes by Felicity Irons, and a recycled terrazzo fireplace at the Granby Workshop, on which other displays are housed like a home . bric-a-brac, adding to the ad hoc feel of it all. A luminous Murano glass gourd by Yinka Ilori glows on a ceramic side table by Matthew Raw, and a roll of hand-printed wallpaper by Victoria Browne hangs next to the carved wooden block that made it.
Real skill and refinement are evident here, celebrating the specialist hands that make the architects’ visions come true. An immaculate scale model of a wooden staircase, made by students at Stratford College of Building Trades, stands on the workbench where apprentice carpenters made it. Next to him is a pair of bowls, made by decorative plaster experts Steven and Ffion Blench, using unlikely ingredients. One is made from waste from a gypsum quarry, while the other uses 18th century soot and lime, collected during repairs to the domed ceiling in Edinburgh’s General Register House. Both look like precious minerals, the trash turned into treasure in a process of geological alchemy.
The magical possibilities of the stone are very evident throughout. Webb Yates Engineers and the Stonemasonry Company (who showed off a bold cantilevered stone beam here in 2022) are back with their latest incredible venture into the structural potential of rock. This time, they are demonstrating how stone could be used to replace steel in space-frame structures, with slender slats of Portuguese pink marble joined together to form a delicate tower. The result looks like it could be a radio tree from the Flintstones.
“This kind of structure can replace any type of truss,” says engineer Steve Webb, who suggests that we could one day see long-span roofs, bridges and tower cranes made of stone – meaning 75 % less carbon in the manufacturing process. “Imagine the biome of the Eden Centre, or Stansted airport, or even the Australian Stadium, made of stone rods – essentially fire resistant, permanent and low carbon.”
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Next to it is a very different stone tower by the Palestinian architects AAU Anastas. It is part of a larger stone column, made from chunks of limestone salvaged from a demolished 1950s ministry of education building in Bethlehem, stacked between fine stone nodes, precisely carved to nestle between the salvaged rocks. It is a poignant inclusion from the two young people, who also operate a cultural center in Bethlehem, under the shadow of Israel’s concrete security barrier. With Gaza relentlessly ready, her poetic work offers a hopeful glimpse of how a powerful architecture of memory could one day be created from the rubble.
