In recent years London has seen a spate of architecture retrospectives for the industry’s largest and most revered names. With the approaching London Festival of Architecture and the forthcoming retrospective of John Pawson at the Design Museum, these exhibitions continue to attract an audience seeking to understand architecture as well as experience it first hand.
The work of the architect is often presented as that of a single artist, however, ignoring the complexities of the architectural process. This summer London’s Ambika P3 gallery at Westminster University will host Land Architecture People, an exhibition that challenges the traditional methods of communicating architecture.
Curated by architects Pierre D’Avoine and Andrew Houlton and anthropologist Clare Melhuish, Land Architecture People treats architecture as an anthropological artefact and discusses how it is informed and manifested through creative vision, human demands and legal constraints. ‘We are assessing the reality of architecture with the implied impression one often receives in an architectural exhibition,’ says D’Avoine. ‘In Copenhagen we found the response to the exhibition to be rather childlike. This is our aim: to give people another kind of experience’.
Working across international and local scales in their respective practices, D’Avoine and Houlton have also taught together at the Architecture Association in London. In 2009, they presented the LAP exhibition in Copenhagen to mark D’Avoine’s appointment as Special Visiting Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
Previously, in 2005, D’Avoine and Melhuish collaborated on Housey Housey: A Pattern Book of Ideal Homes, which was a retrospective of D’Avoine’s work compiled as a series of patterns. Breaking the projects down into components allowed for an alternative discussion about design and technical rationalisation, which underpins the ideas behind Land Architecture People. In removing the material aesthetics and all trace of occupancy, the models are experienced as blank canvases; architecture as a container for life.
It is clear, however, that this approach wouldn’t lend itself so easily to other practices: D’Avoine and Houlton’s work is stylistically conducive to this particular line of enquiry, focusing heavily on legibility. The models of their work have been made on large scales, stripped of detail and primed offwhite. As though demonstrating exercises in massing, volume, form and space this layout allows visitors to draw their own conclusions about the relationship between each piece of work. With supporting drawings, writing, maquettes and architectural pattern books, it offers a way in to understanding the symbiotic relationship between architect and client, as well as discussing the more prosaic nature of land tenure restraints and land-use restrictions.
The models are coloured by candid interviews by Claire Melhuish with the clients, occupants and developers who live in or worked on the projects, offering a right of reply to the architect that is so often missing from exhibitions in a similar vein. These end-user studies are an extension of the process the curators have used to decode the role of the architect and recount first hand the disagreements, clashes of personality and fractures between the parties involved. The transcripts from Melhuish’s interviews explore the cultural role and significance of architecture in contemporary society. ’The object of the research is not specifically to feed back into the design process,’ says Melhuish. ‘The interviews are not conceived as a design tool, but rather to contextualise the design process, in order to achieve a better understanding of what it means to all parties concerned, and as the latest chapter in the history of architectural production.’
This exploration of meaning and value provides a critical evaluation of D’Avoine and Houlton’s work. Land Architecture People offers a new model for retrospective exhibitions. Its approach challenges the all-too-familiar exhibition format opted for by most architects. A polished display of models and videos curated by an institution that celebrates (deservedly or otherwise) an architectural ‘greatest hits’ package is usually accompanied by a glossy monograph by an author deemed of academic stature in order to enlighten the world to the architect’s polemic. In contrast, Land Architecture People undermines the idea that architect is an auteur who solves spatial and social briefs. Rather, they are depicted as part of an evolving process that has no definite end and shifting boundaries.
Indeed, this is echoed in the level of control transferred to the visitors of the exhibition, who are not prescribed a set of values or a standpoint from which to experience the work. Importantly, Land Architecture People’s approach demonstrates the curators’ belief in the audience to critically engage with the work beyond pure aesthetics.
Land Architecture People opens 25th June at the Ambika P3 Gallery, 35 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5LS. Until 1st August.
Open Wednesday – Sunday 10.00 – 18.00
