This year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition opens to the public on the 21st June which Níall has co-curated with artist Rana Begum two rooms of art and architecture. Our practice has been been extremely delighted to have had this opportunity and assisting with assembling and the intall of some of the pieces, from Boomserm Premthada’s elephant dung brick to a full size Khudu Bari flood shelter in Bangladesh by Marina Tabassum.
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.