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.
BIENNALE ARCHITECTTURA 2018
JUNE 2018
The 2018 Venice Biennale opened to the public on the 26th May. This year’s theme “focuses on architecture’s ability to provide free and additional spatial gifts to those who use it and on its ability to address the unspoken wishes of strangers”.
Our contribution is a collection of six large-scale models, each representing a hall for gathering that the practice has designed. These models are placed upon a rotating table which is a calendar and a cosmic machine. Each hall has a different purpose yet they all bring people together in a rhythmic and cyclical fashion daily, weekly and annually. The specific uses of each building are regulated by a calendar of events, rituals and times of congregation. Their calendars are inscribed on the outer rim of a turning table. The table can be rotated by hand. When you turn it, varying light falls upon the models representing the passage of the sun through the day from dawn to dusk. It is a manual and mechanical process.
The intention of presenting these models in this way is to emphasise the relationship between the enduring frames of the buildings and the endless procession of fugitive elements that pass through them periodically.