Sensing Spaces at the Royal Academy

Architecture is such great part of our daily lives yet we only rarely mindfully experience it as something more than as just a backdrop of our day-to-day activities. Recently SPA visited much debated exhibition Sensing Spaces at the Royal Academy which – as they say in the gallery guide – invited us to re-imagine what architecture really is…

The spaces created by seven different architects aim to provoke us to fully engage all our senses and feel the space around us. So, when we move through the spaces we notice the smell of the fresh sawn timber, the natural lumpiness of branches, the sound of pebbles under one’s feet, the playfulness of colours, the play of shadow and light, of mass and weightlessness, and the fragile fineness of the detail…

For sure, an exhibition well worth the visit. The only thing we could not agree on was how well did the new structures related to its surrounding of the Royal Academy. Was the juxtaposition of old and new sometimes awkward or did the newly created spaces embrace the imposing rooms of RA? I think the last.