The Bat Spiral by Friend & Company

Adrian Friend of Friend and Company set off with duster and a bottle of Windolene to attend a quaint event known as Varnishing Day, exclusively for exhibitors to the Royal Academy’s Summer Show. Here he describes the experience and suggests some highlights of the Architecture Room.

The opportunity to attend Varnishing Day at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, which takes place a day ahead of the private view, came with a gracious invitation to attend a service at St James’s Piccadilly to thank the Lord for the greatness in our art. Naturally we were delighted, as well as keen to see our Bat Spiral model in place and check it was in good company.

My first impression of the Architecture Room, Gallery VI which is this year curated by Royal Academician Will Alsop, was that it’s a simple and bold statement. The walls and shelves, stacked to the ceiling, are coated in matt black paint. With a tall plinth like a giant table in the centre, the room resembles a cabinet of curiosities that might have been selected by a Victorian antiquarian. The emphasis is on models, which are stacked and viewed individually on the first two rows of shelves, and then seen more as a collective composition higher up. A treat for those train-spotters among us who can spot a Patrick Lynch model even at 1:500 scale and three metres above the floor.

Numbered an auspicious 888, our Bat Spiral was on the second shelf up. Slightly above eye-level it gave viewers the opportunity to get up close and look under the spiral to view the bat boxes from below, as if walking under the real thing surrounded by bat silhouettes that we had stencilled on the acrylic cover above.

The Model room at Somerset House

Chatting briefly with Will Alsop about the concept of the room, I said it reminded me of the Somerset House Model Rooms which opened to the public in the 1820s to display Plank on Frame ship models, also known as Built Models. These models were constructed in the same manner as the full sized ships for presentation to the Navy Board for approval. Alsop was sorry to disappoint: apparently the Somerset House precedent had nothing to do with his concept for the room. He would not sacrifice ‘his shelves’ and wanted to display only 3d work, preferably artist ready-mades. Indeed the rougher the better: Lucy Tauber’s Waste was a 2 x 1 m freestanding section of a building made entirely from materials found on the street. There were also sculptors’ study models and volumetric castings like the National Opera Studio Design Study by Elena Tsolakis that won the Student Prize. 

Waste by Lucy Tauber

Two-dimensional work was also presented but was difficult to view. Best was Yaojen (Alan) Chuang from the Tom Dixon Studio. Alan recently finished at the Bartlett having studied in Unit 20, with Cruz and Colletti. Indeed the room resembled last year’s Bartlett show and this impression was enhanced by the role call of fellow exhibitors and ex-Bartlett students/tutors such as AHMM, Matthew Springett, CJ Lim (Studio 8 Architects), Sixteen*(Makers), Sara Shafiei, Ben Cowd and Tobias Klein. All seem to share our interest in production processes to fuel design. 

Friend and Co awarded its best in show to AOC for its ‘We have great expectations, Charles Dickins Primary School Southwark’, a cross between a Pollock’s Toy museum exhibit and a fairground attraction. This one really did beg to be taken off the supermarket shelf and carried to cashier.

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition runs until 16 August