Jessica Reynolds on the Royal Academy's Sensing Spaces: Architecture Reimagined exhibition

Abstract

At the Royal Academy's exhibition, Sensing Spaces: Architecture Reimagined, curator Kate Goodwin sets a loose brief to seven international architects: to create works that ‘encourage visitors to question their ideas about architecture and test its capacity to move them’. While the resulting large-scale installations fulfil the brief's open agenda (what work doesn't deal with the field of sensory experience?), the exhibition goes no further to challenge the larger political issues at stake in architecture and the city today, which is problematic given that it is presented at a major London art institution and geared towards educating the general public about the importance of architecture.