Slimy curtains made of seaweed and pig intestines dangle from the ceiling in the Royal Academy’s central rotunda, looking like slippery skins shed by a reptilian creature. They hang above a busy scene, where workbenches are filled with half-finished models and material samples, next to a rickety prototype of a stone tower and a plaster mold used to manufacture toilets. A brightly painted model of a Ghanaian coffin, shaped like a phoenix, sits on a rubble plinth, while pastel-colored tiles formed from crushed shells hang on the nearby wall.
This is the architecture room of the RA Summer Exhibition – but not as we know it. The usual selection of small model buildings and impenetrable drawings, often leafed through by bemused members of the visiting public, has this year been transformed into an enchanting museum of making. It is the radical vision of Assemble, the young Turner prize-winning architecture collective, which was admitted into the hallowed ranks of Royal Academicians in 2022 and has breathed new life into the way their rarefied discipline is displayed here.
“It can sometimes be quite difficult to participate in architectural exhibitions,” says Maria Lisogorskaya, one of the founders of Assemble. “We wanted to celebrate the messy parts of architecture and highlight the people involved in making buildings who are not traditionally seen as architects.”
The result is a wonderfully diverse collection of material experiments and new techniques that revel in the tactile, artisanal qualities of architecture and offer a behind-the-scenes look at how things are made. There are beautiful mosaic panels produced by volunteers at the Hackney Mosaic Project in London, dazzling neon nylon chairs woven by Samuel Obusi Adjei at the Nubuke Foundation in Accra, and countless knick-knacks that you’ll want to pick up and caress. In a world where buildings have increasingly become assemblages of proprietary components specified from catalogs, Assemble offers an alternate universe of things molded, cast, carved, thatched, rammed and fermented into existence.
The stakes are high: architecture covers two rooms this year, including the central rotunda for the first time, giving the subject much more attention than usual. Gallery six, behind the rotunda, is conceived as a kind of industrial space at the back of the house, equipped with ready-made metal shelving systems and pegboards, on which models, machines and curiosities are displayed, as if in a warehouse.
With a nod to sustainability, elements from the previous exhibition Entangled Pasts have also been reused, including several large mirrors and a low table from JA Projects, while the walls retain the deep burgundy color in which they were already painted. It’s a royal backdrop to some major parts of the industry, including a large agricultural mechanism for compacting earthstones, submitted by Feilden Clegg Bradley, and a fearsome army of hydraulic ‘pincers’ created by artist James Capper, who uses them to to gnaw and gnaw. with his sculptures. One hopes that their mighty steel jaws will turn to crush the model of 1 Undershaft, Eric Parry’s latest blown-up office tower for the City of London – a greedy hulk that feels distinctly out of place here.
The rotunda has now been designed more as a work studio space, with paint samples on the walls and objects on workbenches, without any museum plinths visible. Furniture pieces and other building elements from artists and makers have been cleverly deployed as exhibition structures themselves, such as a shelf made of woven piping from Felicity Irons, and a recycled terrazzo fireplace from Granby Workshop, on which other exhibits are perched like homely furniture. bric-a-brac, which adds to the ad hoc feel of it all. A luminous Murano glass gourd by Yinka Ilori glows on a ceramic side table by Matthew Raw, while a roll of hand-printed wallpaper by Victoria Browne hangs next to the carved wood block that created it.
There is real skill and sophistication on display here, in honor of the specialist hands that realize architects’ visions. An immaculate scale model of a wooden staircase, made by students from Stratford’s Building Crafts College, sits on the workbench where it was created by apprentice carpenters. Next to it are a pair of bowls, made by decorative plaster experts Steven and Ffion Blench, using unlikely ingredients. One is made from waste from a plaster quarry, while the other uses 18th-century soot and lime collected during repairs to the domed ceiling of General Register House in Edinburgh. Both have the appearance of precious mineral, waste turned into treasure in a process of geological alchemy.
The magical possibilities of stone are also evident everywhere. Webb Yates Engineers and the Stonemasonry Company (who exhibited a daring cantilevered stone beam here in 2022) are back with their latest unlikely venture into the structural possibilities of rock. This time they demonstrate how stone can be used to replace steel in space frame structures, with slender bars of pink Portuguese marble bolted together to form a delicate tower. The result looks like it could be a Flintstones cell tower.
“This kind of structure can replace any kind of truss,” says engineer Steve Webb, who suggests that one day we could see long-span roofs, bridges and tower cranes made from stone – meaning 75% less carbon in the manufacturing process. “Imagine the biomes of the Eden Center, or Stansted Airport, or even Stadium Australia, formed with stone bars – inherently fireproof, sustainable and low-carbon.”
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Next to it is a very different kind of stone tower by the Palestinian architects AAU Anastas. It is part of a larger stone column, made from chunks of limestone salvaged from a demolished 1950s Ministry of Education building in Bethlehem, stacked between smooth stone nodes, carefully carved to nestle among the salvaged rocks. It’s a poignant shot from the young duo, who also operate a cultural center in Bethlehem, in the shadow of Israel’s concrete security barrier. As Gaza is mercilessly crushed, their poetic work offers a glimmer of hope for how a powerful architecture of memory could one day emerge from the rubble.