Of the whopping 1,710 works in the Royal Academy's 2024 Summer Exhibition, 211 of them are in just two galleries, curated by London-based collective Assemble. One feels like an industrial archive, the other evokes a creative studio. The Summer Exhibition always includes architecture, but this year, Assemble reaches beyond it to sample tools, processes, materiality and media from wallpaper to candles.
The RA’s 2024 Summer Exhibition and its architecture rooms
The RA’s theme for the whole show is 'Making Space', but as Assemble’s Kaye Song says, in Room VI, ’we flipped the theme and made it into Space Making’. Mirrors from last year’s show are also re-used, as Assemble co-founder Maria Lisogorskaya says, to ‘open the room up’. Despite its burgundy-painted walls, the use of steel shelving racks, pegboard screens and a stainless steel sheet repurposed as a plinth creates a workshop-like environment. Simultaneously, the space is an archive of architectural projects and curious objects.
The aggressive hydraulic claws in sculptor James Capper’s ‘Nipper Family’ make probably the most startling work in the gallery. Wall-mounted works include ‘Young Londoners’ London’, a grid of cast blocks mapping urban features by students of Open City’s Accelerate programme, next to ‘Cast Gallery’, a cabinet of exquisite models by architects Stanton Williams. Elsewhere, photographs cover subjects from working maker spaces and timber logging to the buildings of recently deceased high-tech architect Michael Hopkins.
Hassell displays a model of its ‘Habitat Radiation Protection Zone’ for a base near the Moon’s South Pole using 3D-printed ‘tetrapods’. Eric Parry counterpoints a model of his redesigned 290m-high One Undershaft skyscraper with human figures and a wooden truss element beside it.
Not everything has an architectural angle. A pottery work and montage of the Queen dancing with Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, is the subject of Elsie Owusu’s joyful Dancing Queen, while fellow architect Nigel Coates offers charming ‘Mini Chairs’ just centimetres high, in wire, plasticine, wax and bronze.
Different materials can be so attractive, it’s difficult to resist touching them – especially in the next room, the Central Hall. At the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018, Assemble commanded a similarly eight-sided classical domed space but, with Granby Workshop, they just tiled the floor. At the RA, Lisogorskaya says, ‘the space needed something vertical’. It is transformed by long hanging banners by Jessie French, who used tinted non-petrochemical polymer, and Shanelle Ueyama, whose materials include Japanese kozo paper, dried hog gut, bamboo husks and more.
Below them, there’s another eclectic mix, including a trolley, bowls and terrines in fantastic stone and a bronze cast of Diplodocus vertebrae by Structure Warehouse. High on a wall is ‘Tufting Tests’, incorporating wool and cotton yarns, by Material Institute of New Orleans, with whom Assemble has long collaborated. The same colours in Anthony Whishaw’s enigmatic painting Sundown IV appear above it, in patches that Assemble daubed around the walls with left-over paint. Assemble members themselves contribute studio works, including an exquisite maquette for the façade of a workshop.
Assemble has dissolved any silo mentality separating architecture from other disciplines, and its celebration of creative processes chimes with the trend to recognise and foster the craftsmanship and processes of making. Its two rooms are Summer Exhibition must-sees.
The Royal Academy of Art's Summer Exhibition runs from 18 June – 18 August 2024
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