Architecture Viewing Room | 23 April - 12 June 2022 | RSA Annual Online

Architecture Viewing Room
23 April - 12 June 2022
McGinlay Bell, Off Grid Bothies, 2022

Introduction - Charlie Sutherland RSA, Deputy Convenor

This year’s Annual Exhibition is during, or more hopefully at the tail end of, an extraordinary period of the global pandemic which has both preoccupied and impacted on our daily lives and routines in the most dramatic manner.

For some it has been a devastating period of loss or illness, and many endured a drastic change to their livelihood and security and most if not all have seen a changed landscape of our working lives and our domestic situation.

This change to our society and the way we all live, work and play will undoubtedly unfold over several years to come and will leave us all in a different world, all played out against the rapidly accelerating need for global action in response to climate heating.
Ben Addy RSA (Elect) - Moxon Architects, Royal Victoria Dock Footbridge, London

This should be reflected and hopefully be enabled by contemporary architectural practice both in how we think about our individual environments and our communities but equally our civic life.

One might look around the display of architectural work in this year’s show and not see many of these urgent issues either addressed or reflected. Of the built projects on view, this is undoubtedly due to the glacial gestation period of architectural projects with the majority of these projects being conceived in the sunny uplands of the pre-pandemic world.

Equally what is reflected and quite noticeable is that there are two parallel worlds or scales of architectural practice in Scotland. It has long been prophesised that this fractional process would occur with only the larger and the very small practices surviving, with nothing much in between.
Ben Allen - Studio Ben Allen, A Room in the Garden, film still

The gathering of bothies on the yellow wall is a ‘tongue in cheek’ reflection of this phenomenon and the care, consideration and time these practitioners have devoted to these modest structures speaks both to their unrequited creative energy and the stimulating magic of Scotland’s wilderness as a context.

More importantly, these and some of the housing designs displayed may also be a reflection of different modes of living and working and how architects might react to these changes initiated through remote working or working from home.

Working from home is shown in action through a film submitted by this year’s invited architect, Ben Allen Studio, which documents a small home studio being designed, prefabricated, constructed and enjoyed at the bottom of his garden.
Ben Allen - Studio Ben Allen, Centre for Silence X

Ben was one of my students at the Mackintosh School and went on to work with artist/architect Olafur Eliasson in Berlin and has subsequently created his own studio in London: I was very happy to be able to offer him the opportunity to display his very beautifully conceived work in this year’s exhibition.

The last great pandemic and the Great War heralded a dramatic and wholesale attitudinal change to our physical world through radical new forms of living, and to our urban environment with the obsessive quest for space, light and clean air. This was equally manifest through how art would be displayed, heralding the modernist curatorial dogma of the sparse white space with works distanced and hygienically separate.

This year’s show is conversely very much in the ‘Salon’ tradition with works stacked high and cheek-by-jowl, which is not about intentionally promoting a super-spreader environment but more, as with our Modernist legacy in the built environment, that we may perhaps need to find other ways in which to maintain and support our natural state of being a highly social animal without the wholesale dismantling of our habitat and our traditions.
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