Architecture Room at this Year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

ARCHITECTURE ROOM AT THIS YEAR’S ROYAL ACADEMY SUMMER EXHIBITION

APRIL 2022

Níall McLaughlin and artist Rana Begum will co-curate the architecture room at this year’s Royal

Academy Summer Exhibition. Celebrated British sculptor Alison Wilding RA will co-ordinate the 254th exhibtion.

This year Wilding will explore the theme of Climate. “The theme of Summer Exhibition 2022 is

CLIMATE in all its manifestations. Whether it presents as crisis or opportunity, nightmare or

memories, or simply our everyday experience of weather, - CLIMATE is a huge all-embracing and

urgent subject.”

The Summer Exhibition is the world’s largest open submission contemporary art show which has

taken place every year without interruption since 1769. The members of the Summer Exhibition

Committee serve in rotation, ensuring that every year the exhibition has a distinctive character, with

each Royal Academician responsible for a particular gallery space. Works from all over the world are

judged democratically on merit and the final selection is made during the eight-day hang within the

galleries.

NAZRIN SHAH BUILDING – STEELWORK

JULY 2015

Just over two years since our first tentative steps towards imagining what sort of space a new auditorium for Worcester College might possibly be like, we find ourselves enclosed within a spidery sketch, looking up to the trees through a skeletal enclosure of steel. We watched in excitement as our drawings were scribed across the site, first in neon spray paint and little red sticks, later excavated into deep ravines. We pick our way across the lines that had become so familiar on paper and are now concrete obstacles in a muddy field. The reality of this transition only became real as we stood looking across at the steel columns in this picture. They map out the positions of the stone fins that radiate around the curved facade of the new auditorium, with the sloping beams above us silhouetted against the bright July sky marking the future locations of the sculpted folds to the soffit.