Soft architecture at the Summer Exhibition 
This year’s Architecture Room at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition is curated by Peter Barber, an architect known for creative density & use of brick. Amongst the works he has curated, however, are numerous soft moments, suggesting that behind the rigidity of architectural design & form there is a more fluid, malleable way of thinking. 

The Architecture Room at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition is always a little different to the rest of the crammed exhibition. In every other gallery, salon-hang artworks of mixed subject, media – and quality – present the impression of the largest village fete art show, a large number of the works created by amateur artists. Architecture, however, is rarely now practiced by amateurs, and the room dedicated to the making of buildings has always sat a little separately from the main show.



A different architect is selected as curator each year, with the room’s display usually dominated by the work of practicing architects, and often mainly comprising normal architectural media and representations: models, sketches, and drawings – in the main work which is a by-product or process of getting a building designed and maybe built, rather than art for arts sake or visual exploration. This year, however, in a display overlooked by a boulder column by the late Phyllida Barlow – a tower looking as hard as granite but formed of maleable hessian, paper, plywood and foam – there is a playful curation which amongst the big-name models and drawings celebrates a softness of material and design process.



2023’s Architecture Room is pulled together by Peter Barber, an architect celebrated over recent years for design (model above) dedicated to vernacular, density, and community-focused buildings – usually using brick. So central is brick to Barber’s work that a visitor to his room may have gone in expecting it to be dedicated to the building block, but what is presented has a much softer and more nuanced exploration of materials and their interconnectedness.



For an architect so associated with the regularity and hardness of brick, a visitor may have been expecting equal solidity and ruggedness in his exhibition. However, while the end result of designing buildings is often a lump of solidity, built into form and place, it is essentially a soft process of shifting ideas and malleable concepts. To be soft is less predetermined, authoritative, harsh, and iconic – approaches that need to be infused into architectural making and language.

Here are some of the soft highlights of Peter Barber’s 2023 Architecture Room:



Quilt City
Anna Russell

Fabric quilt






Canning Dock Tapestry
shedkm

Cotton


Third Space Udaipur: Woven cane sunshades, continuous maintenance by a weaver more economical, socially beneficial, and lower carbon than more durable aluminium panels
Webb Yates Engineers

Card


Multispecies Neighbourhood
Matthew Dalziel & Raphaelle Jones

Straw, clay, lime, and hemp



City Study
Peter Barber

Pencil and watercolour



Cultivating Resilience | Oman | Zambia | Zimbabwe | Palestine (triptych)
Lori Micu

Mixed media: pencil, pen, gouache, and spray paint on cardboard collage


Taking the Barn for a Walk
Kristina Kotov & Gabor Stark

Reclaimed timber purlin and iron nails from Lithuanian barn



Villa Caroisla
Nick Baker Architects

Wool

Map of Korail Bosti, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Angus Taylor

Ink and pencil


One-to-One Tracings of Façade Fragments for the Construction of a Temporary Pavilion in Calarasi (Romania)
Lucia Medina & William Chew

Chalk and white satin paint on fabric



Heathrow Embroidered
Ben Stringer

Embroidered silk






Peter Barber worked with Richard Rogers, Will Alsop and Jestico+Whiles prior to establishing his own practice in 1989. He is currently a lecturer and reader in architecture at the University of Westminster.
He has lectured about the work of the Practice at many institutions, including the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Architectural League in New York, and numerous international and domestic university schools of architecture including Helsinki, Pretoria, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Burma, Munich, Genoa Istanbul and Colombo as well as Oxford University and The Bartlett - University College London.
He has been invited by the Government to lead a discussion on "Designing for Better Public Spaces" with a team of top built environment professionals.
He has been described by The Independent as one of the UK leading urbanists.
www.peterbarberarchitects.com

The Royal Academy of Arts was founded by King George III in 1768. It has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to be a clear, strong voice for art and artists. Its public programme promotes the creation, enjoyment and appreciation of the visual arts through exhibitions, education and debate. The Royal Academy is an independent charity. It does not receive revenue funding from the government so is reliant upon the support of its visitors, donors, sponsors, patrons and loyal Friends. .
www.royalacademy.org.uk

visit

The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition runs until 20 August 2023, more details available at:
www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/summer-exhibition-2023

images

All images © Will Jennings

publication date
12 June 2023

tags
Peter Barber, Phyllida Barlow, William Chew, Matthew Dalziel, Drawing, Raphaelle Jones, Kristina KotovLucia Medina, Lori Micu, Model, Nick Baker Architects, Anna Russell, Royal Academy, Shedkm, Soft, Gabor Stark, Ben Stringer, Summer Exhibition, Tapestry, Quilt, Weaving, Webb Yates Engineers