There's nothing that releases your inner child quite like being told 'yes, of course you can climb on the art work!' By an RA gallery assistant.
Sadly, the giddy excitement this initially filled me with, only lasted up a spiral staircase until the top of a pine cube, before the concept was old and the novelty expired.
In this huge architectural installation, we are asked to question materials and how they create the spaces around us and how we interact with them. A great idea, but the pieces themselves were just a little boring: some twigs with a light up floor and some long drinking straws I plaited and stuck in some corrugated plastic. It wasn't exciting and I forgot I was supposed to be intrigued. Diebedo Francis Kere, who came up with this claims to want to use architecture to 'respond to the users needs'. Well sadly, I was bored and you didn't entertain me!
Curator, Kate Goodwin, says this show should "encourage visitors to question their ideas about architecture and test its capacity to move them". Until I stepped into he Grafton Architects concrete structure room, I would say this exhibition had failed; but this installation is simply awe inspiring. It's not a half-cut attempt to show off your practices mission statement, nor overly playful. There is just a beautiful simplicity to walking under tonnes of vast, geometric concrete-esque plaster blocks. They are overpowering, quite literally as they hang over you, but subtle; you still see what's ahead, they are not obscuring your view. The play with light is superb and typical of Grafton's practice. They look at how structures sit in their surroundings and they alter a landscape, a practice which shines through, quite literally, in this installation. Go and see this exhibition just for the wonder of this piece.
Royal Academy, London, until 6 April 2014
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