Building Ideas: Sir Richard MacCormac RA and MJP Architects

11 December 2009—17 March 2010

In the Sir Hugh Casson Room for Friends of the Royal Academy

This exhibition is an opportunity to examine some key projects that illustrate the special position of Richard MacCormac’s practice MJP, within contemporary British architecture.

The exhibition acts as a visual summary of the practice's forthcoming monograph Building Ideas, to be published by Right Angle in March 2010, which will explore how the architecture of the practice has developed over time. The works in the exhibition trace the evolution of ideas that are rooted in geometry, the nature of materials, and in highly specific responses to context and culture.

The exhibition is divided into four sections; Translating History, Building in Context, Refining Construction and Special Inventions, which illustrate the diversity of architectural language evident in a complex and authentic modern architecture, which is engaged with historic precedent.

These four sections trace how the nature of materials and structure evolve in successive projects. Significant projects that explore this process include the residences for the British Embassy in Bangkok, together with the Ruskin Library and the dramatic interior of the Science Museum’s Wellcome Wing that is illustrated in this leaflet.

Richard MacCormac was elected a Royal Academician in 1993. Having studied at Cambridge University and the Bartlett, MacCormac went on to form his own practice in 1972, which later became MacCormac Jamieson Prichard (MJP). MacCormac was awarded the CBE in 1994 and received a knighthood in 2001.

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• Royal Academy of Arts