The London Festival of Architecture, which launched in 2004, is Europe's biggest annual architecture festival. It lasts a month, and that month is June so it kicked off this week. I clicked through the map-based listings trying to find events that were a) open yesterday, b) interesting c) free, and eventually picked six. Some were much better than others.
You'd expect an installation at The Royal Institute of British Architects to be good, indeed their downstairs exhibition space has hosted several classics over the years. But whereas they usually focus on architectural models and photos, this one's essentially a film across two big screens. The underlying theme is that new buildings are all very well but what really matters is how people interact with them once they've been built. What you're about to sit through is a sequence of a dozen recently-completed structures, from sports halls to school theatres and reading rooms to mainline stations, each with people doing what comes naturally when they use the space. Tourists wander over a bridge, shoppers in Hackney sit on a wall and make phone calls, worshippers enter a mosque, that sort of thing. It is beautifully shot, the building always present but human actions very much to the fore, and the dual screen aspect helps maintain the momentum. I assume Jim took loads of footage and picked out the best minutes, like the Windermere ferry chugging dutifully past the rain-splashed cafe window or the moment when a car pulls up and perfectly frames the woman on the pavement behind, and it totally works. The presentation is 30 minutes long, it turns out, and yes there are a few models on the way in and photos on the way out to help you identify what you've just seen. Also if you've never been inside RIBA HQ that's an additional treat, especially at the weekend after the architects have left the building.
draw! by Anna Gibb
Barbican Library (2-28 June, 9.30am-5pm)
Anna is a qualified architect and a dedicated artist who often gets involved in the London Festival of Architecture - I followed her 'All Along The Dock Edge' trail back in 2019. This year she's taken over the foyer of Barbican Library and filled four cases and a wall with a decadesworth of illustrations in her own inimitable style. Anna's work is precise but lively, dense but colourful and invariably with a quirky take that merits closer inspection. Modern skyscrapers often appear, perhaps with eyes and legs, as do cityscapes real and resolutely fictional. Of all the exhibitions I visited Anna's was by far the busiest thanks to pretty much everyone entering or leaving the library pausing for a good look, indeed it's very dipinnable. Her work is also pretty reasonably priced should you fancy a print, compared to the usual extortionate prices artworks generally go for. Turn up on any of the next three Saturday afternoons and you can meet Anna and join in with a sketching workshop, pens and paper provided, and perhaps also learn how to be fiddlily brilliant.
Grahame Park, built on the former Hendon aerodrome, looks every inch a 70s council estate. Banks of blocks of flats twisted round walkways and lawns. An angular community centre subsequently brightened with planters. A spiky hexagonal church. A windswept central piazza lined by shuttered shops. A large pub someone's tried to reinvent as a business incubator. A warren of cul-de-sacs for those who'd rather have a front door and a garden. And a large fenced off area where the local council are sequentially knocking the place down and replacing it with something generically 20s instead, because of course they are. The exhibition's in the church and is essentially a wall of black and white photos from when all this was sparklingly new, which it very much no longer is. Yesterday you could also have enjoyed an introductory talk and a free chocolate croissant, making a more convincing excuse for a visit, otherwise it is a bit of a trek. But it's fascinating to match the images indoors with the reality outdoors, indeed I hadn't previously appreciated the full variety of the site, before it's destroyed and ends up looking as bland as the rest of the architectural vacuum that is 21st century Colindale.
I confess to being mildly excited when I heard this year's LFA would contain an exhibition on concrete cooling towers, an increasingly endangered species, so rocked down to Wigmore Street with high hopes. But stepping through the door of number 34 I realised I had in fact walked into a clothes shop, or rather a clothes gallery with a minimal number of beautifully designed garments on a handful of rails. The exhibition covers two walls and includes just ten photos, admittedly excellent photos but not quite what I'd hoped for. The information boards by the 20th Century Society are also faultless - how do the towers work, how many survive, should we be retaining more as repurposed landscape artefacts? - but again are few in number. I appreciated the display case containing hyperboloid mugs, the obvious Ladybird book and a CEGB leaflet about Didcot Power Station, but I was not inside the shop long and I was glad I'd worn my best pair of trousers.
Nest by Angela Wright
Southwark Cathedral (all month)
Angela's made a nest out of wire and lodged it in a tree in Southwark Cathedral's herb garden. You're supposed to be able to see it from London Bridge's high pavement but I spotted nothing so forced my way down through the cathedral instead. The herb garden is at the farthest extremity of how far you can walk, that's along the corridor, across the nave and all the way through the courtyard garden they no longer let Borough Market's streetfood buyers gobble in. And yes, there it was in the crook of a plane tree just a lot smaller than I was expecting, a gold mesh with a pleasingly organic aesthetic. After I'd battled back past the choir from Northampton who'd come to do Evensong I looked down from the bridge and there it was, now I knew where to look, and that's 'Nest' for you, nice but no need to make a special effort.
This list is in decreasing order of interestingness, if you hadn't already noticed, and here we are at the bottom of my LFA half dozen. I'd been hoping for an on-point exhibition in the little side-room but what I got was twelve labels. The Architecture gallery at the V&A is now in its 20th year and was devised with a focus on structures and materials rather than culture and inclusivity. What they've done is invite a dozen diverse experts to add a label to one of the exhibits expressing a additional take, say pointing out the importance of women or reminding us that Trafalgar Square is a focus for Pride. Sarah hoped to make an observation on an African building but found the continent unrepresented so instead left a painfully sarcastic comment beside 'an empty space'. All the intervention's done is highlight that this gallery probably needs a refresh, hopefully less patronisingly than this, but the V&A moves slowly and what is an Architecture gallery for anyway?
