How our major galleries are failing architecture
The RA’S Renzo Piano exhibition opens soon – but will it capture the general public’s imagination? Mark Hudson fears the worst
Imagine ascending over the rooftops of Paris on the external escalators of the Pompidou Centre, the era-defining arts complex, opened in 1977, which the Italian architect Renzo Piano designed with Richard Rogers. Or gazing up at the silver-sleek surfaces of Piano’s Shard – London’s tallest building – tapering apparently endlessly into space.
Then, if you will, imagine seeing these experiences represented in an exhibition, reduced to a collection of plans, models and wall texts.
The Royal Academy’s forthcoming Piano exhibition next month is the first in a programme that will bring architecture to the forefront of the gallery’s exhibition programming. Yet my first instinct is that I won’t be rushing to see it. And that isn’t because I’m not interested in the subject: a quick glance at 80-year-old Renzo Piano’s portfolio is enough to convince that he’s one of the chief creators of the urban world as we’ve come to know it.
No, it’s because, like many gallerygoers – probably the majority – my instinctive expectation of an architecture exhibition is that it will be arid, academic and preoccupied with technical matters that are of little interest to the general public.
“There certainly has been a perception that architectural exhibitions can be dry,” admits Kate Goodwin, the RA’S Director of Architecture, and curator of the Piano exhibition. “People have become much more receptive to architecture generally. The Open House scheme has made people curious about buildings, while TV programmes like Grand
Designs have encouraged them to think about what they can do in building themselves, even if it’s just an extension to their existing house.” It’s hard to see, however, how this enthusiasm will be addressed in a show on one of the world’s most exalted architects. Indeed, as Goodwin admits, an RA visitor survey of 2014 confirmed that most gallery-goers’ expectations still fall into what she calls the “models and drawings realm”. The general public opinion was confirmed in an extraordinary claim by no less an architecture insider than Graeme Russell, the then exhibitions director of the Royal Institute of British Architects, that most architecture exhibitions are “c---”. Ingrained antipathy from the architectural establishment to the idea of making them more “entertaining and glamorous” as Russell hoped, may explain why he left his job just a few months after making that statement.
But the worst thing about architectural exhibitions in my experience isn’t just that they lack “punch and excitement”, as Russell claims, but that they invariably ignore the controversies and social issues that make architecture most interesting.
Take the example of Piano’s largest and most infamous work, The Shard, completed in 2012. It is very far from universally loved by the people it supposedly serves – the population of London, whose objections to it are almost limitlessly diverse. To cite a couple of my own: isn’t there something graceless about the way it diminishes the scale of everything around it? And something inherently exploitative in its megalomaniac size?
Yet it hardly seems likely, certainly not judging from its bland title, that the RA’S Renzo Piano: The Art of Making Buildings – “designed and curated in close collaboration with Piano himself ” – will be broaching such issues. “Our aim isn’t to change people’s opinions about particular buildings,” says Kate Goodwin, “but to provide background that will enrich people’s perceptions of a building, like The Shard, and help them understand why it is the way it is. When you understand the way it manages its many uses – offices, hotels, restaurants, apartments – you can watch the lights going on and off on the various floors at different times of day and night, and you can start to read it as a city in its own right. Architecture relates to so many aspects of life: economic, aesthetic, cultural, political. The public are starting to realise that there are many ways into it.”
People do indeed consider buildings from a remarkably broad range of perspectives. Even so, in the context of an exhibition, it’s very easy to feel you’re looking at architecture from the “wrong” point of view, that your own “way in” is isn’t valid, especially if you’re confronted with wall-texts concerning the load-bearing capacities of concrete, for instance, or the way people move through space.
“I’m all for an emotional architecture that takes account of people’s visceral experience of buildings,” says Piers Gough, the British architect who curated the architecture room at this year’s RA Summer Exhibition. “You can’t give people a big lecture in an exhibition and then send them off to look at a building. Buildings have to be experienced first emotionally.”
But how do you make that a reality? Both Gough and Goodwin refer enthusiastically to the RA’S Sensing Spaces exhibition (2014) as an example of a sensory exhibition that was, in Gough’s words, “almost like real architecture”: a collection of playful walk-through environments created by architects, “reimagining the fundamental elements of architectural space”, from towering wooden platforms to drinking straws inserted into a honeycomb of white plastic.
Entertaining as it was, though (and there have been a number of shows along these lines over the years), it’s when architecture actually gets built that it actually has an impact on us. Perhaps the primary issue architecture exhibitions habitually ignore is the massive perceptual gap between architects and the mere mortals – you and me – who consume their work. They effectively control the way we live, after all. Lest we forget, architecture, as the philosopher Nietzsche asserted, “is the language of power”.
Structures such as Piano’s Shard embody the aspirations of the corporate and political forces that control us, just as much as, say, Michelangelo’s St Peter’s reflected the power of the popes.
Yet you won’t find an architect admitting to any personal power. They see themselves as thwarted creative individuals whose vision is perpetually stymied by patrons, planning authorities and the mood of the times. And they are, as a breed, remarkably interested by what each other does.
“You have to accept that architectural exhibitions attract architects,” says Gough. “They are probably the primary audience. And architects want to understand how buildings work. The public go along for the ride, and they enjoy it – or they don’t.”
And that feels rather a poor offer for a public that pays for and lives in the work of architects, confirming the sense of the architecture exhibition emanating from a rarefied milieu where architects busy themselves creating a perfect, tidied-up world for us to live in.
Yet there is surely space for architectural exhibitions that take account of the messy, imperfect world that the rest of us inhabit?
Renzo Piano: The Art of Making Buildings Royal Academy, Sept 15 - Jan 20. Details: royalacademy.org.uk
‘I’m all for an emotional architecture that takes account of people’s visceral experience of buildings’