Sensing Spaces - The frisson of a threshold

One of the most annoying criticisms ever sent my way was that I love everything. Levelled at me during my Masters degree by a wealthy and privileged gothic girl who walked around as if the world might as well stop trying to impress – aside from Nietzsche and Marilyn Manson who were excused – it did cause some soul-searching at the time. The Sensing Spaces exhibition at The Royal Academy caused me to revisit that again. 

Was I too much in awe of anyone who engaged in any type of creative process? Did my own slow cultural growth mean that I enthusiastically over-reacted to anything that entered my senses? Or was I just still high on the fact that I was getting paid to engage with something that I loved? Perhaps. But then I do have some touch-stones that show that I am able to exercise a level of discernment. Notwithstanding the importance and savage imagination of his novels, I find Orwell’s prose flat and lifeless. I think that most conceptual art, beyond an initial overarching idea, is cold and lacks depth. And if I don’t have a drink in my hand, frequenting some down at heel, smoky dive bar, jazz washes over me like grey February weather. 

Pezo von Ellrichshausen - A way in? 

That said, it does still surprise me when I am left underwhelmed. The Sensing Spaces architecture exhibition at The Royal Academy did just that. It’s closed today, so if you haven’t visited already, you won’t be able to test my opinions.  

Pezo von Ellrichshausen - Up in the gods

The premise of the exhibition is to change the way that we think about and engage, particularly physically, with architecture.  By taking buildings or constructions and placing them back into an isolated formal space - a kind of rarified architectural laboratory if you like - the hope is that the public will think longer and harder about what they are encountering. And looking around at the exhibition - let’s face it, half the fun of any show like this is people-watching - this seems to be working. Children, in particular, gleefully react to these installations. Chilean architects Pezo von Ellrichshausen have erected a large pine wood structure with four wooden spiral staircases leading up to a viewing platform that places the Royal Academy’s stuccoed gold-leafed cherubs directly in your eye-line, before taking you on a more leisurely downward trajectory via a wooden ramp that - Donkey Kong like - switches back on itself. Unsurprisingly children dash around as if in some playground castle.

Kengo Kuma - scent and sight

Kengo Kuma, a Japanese architect, has come up with an intricate bamboo structure that exhudes a lovely aroma of Japanese cedar wood. The concept here - and this is probably my favourite - is to minimalise material in order to heighten the sense of smell. The darkness and gentle miniamilist lighting certainly help achieve this, and there’s a temporary sense of peace, particularly after the raucous wooden castle.

But then it's back to the noise. Diébédo Francis Kéré’s effort, a tunnel with two curved openings, invites everyone to insert long multi-coloured drinking straws into the structure. Again, children react with joy - but then we all know how children can react to discarded boxes at Christmas - our bad, not theirs - and all I could think of was how many eye injuries had been caused by those long prickly straws being flashed around like light-sabres. There were indeed two children fighting with them. And it was that thought that caused me to dig a little deeper. I know that I am not culturally jaded, so what was bothering me?

Diébédo Francis Kéré - Careful with that straw, Eugene

The answer hit me about an hour later as I walked past St George’s Church in Bloomsbury. A few years earlier, I’d seen the door to the church standing wide open, and - as we too infrequently do - entered.  Christopher Wren’s protégé Nicholas Hawksmoor was the architect - London, particularly the City, is brimming with the works of these two - but what really pulled me in was the knowledge that this is the church that looms in the background of William Hogarth’s print Gin Lane, a stern but impotent chastising of the feckless denizens of Seven Dials. I loved that feeling as I crossed the threshold that I was stepping back in time, not just into a church, but one that Hogarth had deliberately inserted into one of his most famous pieces. Dickens too had used the building in one of his early sketches, ‘The Bloomsbury Christening’.  His chattering caricatures go about their daily businesses in an all too real city; to read that sketch again is to inhabit that world more solidly.

Gin Lane - William Hogarth (1751) 

A building is a kind of cultural palimpsest – not just about what we see, or how we experience buildings, but how others have experienced a building too. And not just historical persons. Perhaps that is why I enjoy other people’s reactions to exhibitions - see my very first post on Turner’s Fighting Temeraire - and my distraction at the Sensing Spaces exhibition. My inherent enthusiasm and open eyed curiosity meant that this exhibition was redundant for me. I don’t need ‘recalibrating’ as the show’s blurb would have it. I know full well that when I walk around London, or any other city for that matter, that it’s important to not only look up, through and around, but, where possible, to enter and explore, with every single sense working hard. That attitude was one that led me to find my very own secret garden in the midst of Regents’ Park (you’ll be so surprised how few people turn into the pathway that leads into St John’s Lodge, and you’ll be overjoyed to find the almost magical garden, replete with rogue peacocks and mysterious pathways, that are suddenly revealed). Varying a route, or turning into a road or an alley that you have never ventured down, can yield amazing discoveries. Out in the country, or even better the wilderness - and if we are not too burdened by a map - to cast loose and follow the road ‘less traveled by’ is incredibly liberating.  Likewise with doorways: enter them and explore, feel the frisson as you pass over a threshold. And as in architecture, the same in books. A great piece of literature that you have never read – the gentle coursing thrill when you turn over the first page and cross the threshold into that opening paragraph.

St John's Lodge in the Inner Circle of Regent's Park

Yep, my enthusiasm can sometimes result in a lack of clarity, or cause me to overpraise the mediocre - I can’t for the life of me fathom what I found so charming about Gertrude Stein’s intentionally leaden Tender Buttons - but it also means that I’m willing to explore and not care about the risk that a ten minute detour might hazard. Which of course means that I shouldn't really see the Sensing Spaces exhibition as a failure. Let's hope those children carry their enthusiasm - and both of their eyes! - into later life, and maybe one or two adults keep all of their sensory faculties on full alert the moment that they walk back out into Piccadilly and the hustle and bustle of the real world.