Michael Collins was invited to review the Architecture Room at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2017. This years exhibition was curated by Farshid Moussavi the theme considered responses to the theme 'Production Information'.
The full review is available http://www.bdonline.co.uk/culture/review-architecture-room-at-the-ra-summer-exhibition/5088118.article
Extract:
The 249th Summer exhibition curated by Eileen Cooper features an colourfully eclectic mix of 1100 works from a range of international artists, including for the first time the media of spoken word by Alana Francis. During previous years the architecture room has occasionally jarred as an exhibition within an exhibition.
Visitors are drawn into the architecture room through a space featuring Full House by Sean Scully, and Black Path by Cornelia Parker. The former, a dense collage, the latter a floating line drawing set the tone for this years drawing based offering curated by Farshid Moussavi. Visually the Large Weston Room glides in continuum with these beautiful collages.
The thematic link this year is construction coordination drawings. Moussavi suggests this takes ‘a slice’ through a process very particular to architectural production, and considered more prosaic than earlier design stages. These ‘slices’ are in the forms of plan section cuts and exploded isometrics and aims to express frozen design team politics, spatial conflicts and layers of negotiation as artform. This is a welcome departure, following the legacy of the curators past publications The Function of Ornament and follows the lineage set over a decade ago by Herzog De Meuron’s Natural History (Tate Modern 2003) and more recently OMA’s progress (Barbican 2012) both inviting a glimpse backstage and inviting independent readings of the by products of architectural process..............
