Architecture Viewing Room

Architecture Introduction

Fergus Purdie RSA, Architecture Convenor

BEGINNING(S) and UNBUILT

As a cultural institution, not a professional body, the RSA provides a forum within which the practice of architecture in all its diversity can be shared and supported. Acting and endeavouring to function as a community of purpose.

The architectural element of the 200^th Annual Exhibition was conceived as two distinctive themes entitled Beginning(s) and Unbuilt.

The Open Architecture aspect of the exhibition presents Unbuilt: a showcase for current practice research and experimental architecture investigating lines of enquiry that remain or have become ‘paper architecture’.

Beginning(s) sees architect Academicians taking a more reflective approach to the bicentenary exhibition. Academicians (rather than their practices) were invited to respond to the proposition of a new RSA building, interpreting this in their own ‘handwriting’.

Aligned to the working title, Beginning(s) was developed at a conceptual level of study and enquiry through the medium of drawing. With the emerging outcomes presented in the form of notations, sketches and small-scale models.

To place drawing, a critical instrument of design, at the heart of the 200^th Annual Exhibition will acknowledge a fundamental aspect of how architects approach the thinking and making of architecture.

It will hopefully reintroduce past conversations, whilst opening-up new ones.

In addition to the Academicians’ work, a selection of interconnected themes have also been included:

Recipients of the Metzstein Architecture Discourse were invited to participate in the exhibition with selected concept design sketches from notebooks
An acknowledgment of Honorary Academician, Alvar Aalto, the distinguished Finnish architect, and Elissa Aalto who continued the practice after his death
Academic fieldwork by Michael Spens, a supporter of the RSA who championed the restoration of an almost lost and forgotten Aalto building, the Viipuri Library

And finally, a reference to George Wyllie RSA as a heart-warming reminder that we should not take ourselves too seriously!