Farshid Moussavi RA
X-ray talk
Monday 3 July 2017 8.30 - 9.30am
Sir Hugh Casson Room, The Keeper’s House, Royal Academy of Arts
£8, £5 concessions. Includes tea, coffee and pastries.
Summer Exhibition 2017
A breakfast talk with Farshid Moussavi RA and Rowan Moore discussing the motivation behind the brief for the Architecture Room in the Summer Exhibition, which explores architecture as an ‘instruction-based art’.
Discussing the theme of the Architecture Room this year, Farshid Moussavi RA says:
“A building’s 'architecture' is its assemblage; the way that it brings all of its physical elements together with its colours, textures, shapes and forms to make rooms and open spaces with a distinct presence or 'thisness', while incorporating the many separate, distinct and irreconcilable challenges that a building must address today… The architect must determine how the different disciplines are to interrelate, what is to be experienced and how, what is to become visible and not visible, audible and inaudible, and what will be present or absent in people’s experiences of buildings as they go about their everyday activities.”
As curator of the Architecture Room in this year’s Summer Exhibition, Moussavi's innovative theme examines architecture as an "instruction-based art" and invites entrants to submit construction coordination drawings. These x-ray visualisations show the interrelationships and full complexity of different systems and parts of buildings, providing a rare view of the “backstage” areas of architecture. They are also the starting point for a new series of talks exploring this complexity and the impact it has on people’s experiences of architecture.
In this x-ray talk, Moussavi is joined by Rowan Moore, architecture critic for The Observer, to discuss the ideas behind the Architecture Room at this year's Summer Exhibition, and how these concepts play out in her own architectural practice. She explores the challenges of managing aesthetic, experiential, technical and functional decisions that inform building design, and how such designs are conveyed through construction coordination drawings.