Sensing Spaces

Introduction

Visitors to Sensing Spaces: Architecture Reimagined will experience a new type of architecture exhibition. Described as an approach that highlights not the functional but the experiential aspects of architecture, it features the work of seven of the world’s leading contemporary architectural practices. Conceived as an experiment to challenge the conventions of traditional art and architecture exhibitions, it sets out to awaken and recalibrate our sensibilities to the spaces that surround us. As such, it is part demonstration and part experiment, which in the spirit of enquiry requires interaction and participation from its audience. With such unique and ambitious aims, Sensing Spaces has already prompted critics to call it a must-experience, once-in-a-generation show.

For a period of ten weeks, visitors to the Royal Academy’s Main Galleries are invited to observe, move through and around, touch, adapt and occupy a series of specially commissioned architectural installations. During this time, the familiar character of its grand Beaux-Arts galleries will host a series of contemporary architectural interventions that will radically transform the apparently dominant character of the classically planned and detailed interiors; transformations that will simultaneously amplify and diminish, mask and frame, illuminate and shade, and reinforce and unbalance the familiar gallery experience.

Presenting the work of the internationally preeminent architects, Grafton Architects (Ireland), Diébédo Francis Kéré (Burkina Faso and Berlin), Kengo Kuma (Japan), Li Xiaodong (China), Pezo von Ellrichshausen (Chile), Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura (Portugal), the exhibition not only focuses on the essential elements of architecture (space, proportion, light and materials) overlaid with the subtle presence of cultural nuance, but also, with visitor engagement, on how we perceive these elements through our senses and associative memory – making the experience both personal and collective.

As the art form that most directly affects our day-to-day life, the ever-present background to our days, architecture is nothing without the people who occupy and use it. In response to this, Sensing Spaces takes delight in and heightens our awareness of the essential architectural interactions that exist all around us. Through this exhibition, the RA hopes that people will become familiar with a new way of engaging with architecture.

Conceived by Kate Goodwin, Drue Heinz Curator of Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts, the exhibition creates, above all else, an essential interaction between three factors: the nature and quality of physical spaces, how we perceive them, and their resulting evocative power.

Architecture Unknown

Do people really understand architecture?

Writing in his 1948 book Architecture as Space, Italian architect, historian and theorist Bruno Zevi (1918–2000) posed an important question, ‘What do most of us truly know about the riches of meaning in architecture?’ While recognising that architecture has a constant and profound effect on everyone’s life – at home, school, workplace, and in public buildings – his book revealed an acute frustration that in his view very few people understood how powerful architecture is or how it can so profoundly affect us. Drawing an analogy with people’s understanding and engagement with other art forms, he went on to ask, ‘Why do cultivated people, [who are] intensely interested in literature, painting, sculpture and music, know comparatively little about the art that has a closer influence on them than any other?’ He theorised that unless people had a valid and clear interpretation of what architecture is, it would remain shrouded by ‘public ignorance and lack of interest’. Sensing Spaces tackles this issue head on, setting out to show how architecture as an art form can only be truly experienced in person, through the senses – vision, touch, hearing, and even smell. Supporting and building on the established contribution made by traditional shows – such as the Royal Academy’s own Summer Exhibition, which presents architectural drawings, models and sketches – these site-specific installations, that may or may not be works of art in their own right, have been built to encourage the audience to become more attuned to their own experience of architecture. Which, it is hoped, will help people to understand the attributes of an art form that exists beyond the gallery, in the buildings and places that surround them every day.

Architecture Experienced

Architecture has to be experienced to be understood In reframing the established form of an architectural exhibition, Sensing Spaces extends the focus of Bruno Zevi’s writing even further. Following Zevi’s principles, what lies at the heart of this exhibition is the desire to help visitors ‘reimagine’ architecture; a desire founded on the premise that the ‘true riches of meaning’ in architecture are largely misunderstood, being based on a superficial reading of the art form. This is not to say that exhibitions that present the measurable and theoretical efforts of architects and how these relate to the buildings they produce, do not have their place. It would be nonsensical to argue against the fact that background knowledge augments appreciation. However, as the adage goes, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, which Zevi argues has for generations resulted in a broad and common misunderstanding of what is specific to this form of art. While the function of the arts overlap at many points – with architecture having much in common with sculpture and music – architecture also has its own peculiar province and pleasure which is typically its own. This means that the use (or misuse) of words like rhythm, scale, balance and mass will continue to be vague until we give them meaning specific to the reality which defines architecture. As Zevi wrote, ‘The fact is that buildings are judged as if they were sculpture and painting, that is to say, externally and superficially, as purely plastic phenomena. In this way, they fail to consider what is peculiar to architecture and therefore different from sculpture and painting. They miss the qualities that are essential to architecture.’

In sympathy with these views, this exhibition sets out not to teach people what to understand – through illustrations and information – but to understand above all else that ‘architecture is a personal, enjoyable necessary experience. [Architecture] has a monopoly of space ... [and] alone of the arts can give space its full value. To grasp space, to know how to see it, is the key to the understanding of building’ (Bruno Zevi).

Architecture Reimagined

If people are attuned to the spaces that surround them, they will be moved Knowing how to ‘see space’, or how to be spatially attuned, is an ability with which we are all born. As described by Royal Academician Colin St John Wilson (1922–2007), writing in the Architectural Review in 1989, ‘All of our awareness is grounded in forms of spatial experience, and that spatial awareness is not pure, but charged with emotional stress from our first born affinities. It is in fact the first language we ever learned, long before words.’ He describes this language as being drawn from a wide range of sensual and spatial experiences – rough and smooth, warm and cold, of being above or below, inside, outside or in between, exposed and enveloped. For this reason children often make more articulate responses to architecture than adults do, as what seems to happen as we get older, gaining knowledge and rational thought, is that we somehow disconnect ourselves from the ability to respond instinctively.

Wilson described this condition as if it were a medical ailment. Spatial blindness he says is ‘a baffling and perhaps dangerous transparency ... a condition that we do not see but see through’, one that not only accounts for mysterious moments of elation, but also acts ‘as the catalyst for those responses of alienation and exasperation provoked by buildings that, as we vaguely say “do not work”!’ What we need therefore is to tune back into the stream of awareness that operates just below the level of day-to-day self-consciousness, in order to monitor the field of spatial relationships around us, which impacts more deeply than many of us realise on the quality of our day-to-day lives, both collectively and as individuals.