Moonshine and moonshots: down at the RCA show

Anyone who isn't a trained architect and has ever loved and hated buildings, been baffled or inspired by them, will at some point ponder the question: how exactly do architects get the way that they are? In what sort of ideas and values are they immersed during their training? How are they taught in architecture school? What do they get up to while they are there? It occurred to me that one could get a clue by going to an student show. The Royal College of Art postgraduates were exhibiting at the weekend, so off I went to check out their stuff.

This year the architecture (and interior design) student exhibits were housed in The Workshop, a disused fire station in Lambeth also currently doubling a pop-up/temporary museum dedicated to the London Fire Brigade (complete with a fire engine inside the hall). The slightly odd, out-of-the-way location aside, the set-up was pretty much as you'd imagine: rows of vertical plyboard-mounted drawings, renders and posters forming aisles in which models, mock-ups and other project-related objets were displayed on tables. Around 80 students were exhibiting, mostly MA candidates. Seemingly none were on hand to discuss their work when I visited (but that may have just been because it was Saturday evening and the show had already been running a couple of days).

First thing to report: the degree of raw talent was impressive. All the RCA students seemed to be adept at making not only compelling architectural drawings but also artistic-quality renders, mixed-media models, and snazzy graphic design details; every one is a typography buff, colour coordinator and style guru. The spirit of gesamptkunstwerk is very much alive. You feel these kids would redesign your whole life if you let them. And you probably ought to at least give them a shake at it on this evidence.

On the other hand expectations are correspondingly daunting. You might think that to be worth one's salt as an architect it would be enough to be great at designing well thought-out buildings that are visually stunning and brilliantly meet their users' needs. No, philistine! A young architect has to aspire to much, much more. She or he must revolutionize the way we think about buildings, about places, about time and space itself.  The modest, the mundanely utile, doesn't cut it in the student architecture show. One has apparently to aim for the economically and/or technically impossible at this early stage in one's career.

Hence what predominates are fantasy projects: Archigram-inspired cityscapes, floating islands, Piranesian towers. There were even a couple of elaborately-realized satires such as a parliamentary assembly building imagined as a sort of garish game-show set. I liked the brilliantly piss-taking (I think/hope??) description accompanying Maegan Icke's Black Suns: "... a new psycho-economic strategy for the South Wales coalfield through exploring the cultural, geological and environmental significance of solar hegemony, stemming from the creation of an artificial sun for each town". 

I suppose the argument in favour of extravagance is that none of these projects actually have to be realised. This is the one time in these young designers' careers that they can do something that doesn't have a budget attached to it.  This is their one and only chance at an architectural moonshot.

Against that one might point out that economy and feasibility are part of the universe within which the architect's skill is supposed to operate and which gives context to that skill. How does one really grade a project with an unlimited budget? Even more so, how does one judge a project that turns on some engineering feat that might not actually be possible to achieve in technical terms?

In this vein, I found myself musing upon the award of one of the school's prizes to a project involving an upgrade of the London Underground. This envisaged using the pneumatic pressure of passing tube trains to draw, so I gathered, air through a ventilation system which would somehow use blocks of pink salt to filter it 'naturally'. Along with the elegant posters and pamphlets, there was a mock up of a piston/tube assembly. You were invited to operate a pump ("PLEASE PUSH HARD") to blow air into a jar, which was quite cool.

But I was left thinking: does this invention have any actual technical merit? Would it work? How would architecture professors, as opposed to mechanical engineers, be qualified to judge? If it is a brilliant technological innovation, why wasn't it being pursued as patentable device, as a real business proposition? If, on the other hand, it doesn't pass muster technically - if, instead, the point is supposed to be the overall 'vision', the persuasive way that the idea has been presented, or its 'commitment' to sustainability or whatever - not whether it works, then, in reality, we are talking about moonshine.  Congratulating well-presented nonsense is to imply that architects should aspire to be snake-oil salesmen. It's an oddly cynical message. On this basis, I preferred some of the more outlandish projects - the floating islands and conical towers - that made no claim to feasibility, let alone sustainability: they, at least, weren't trying to have their cake and eat it.

The one area nearly all the students fell down - where they simply crumpled under the pressure of being the vanguard of the future - was in describing their work in words that make sense.  Several writers, including Jonathan Meades and Timothy Brittain-Catlin, have pointed out just how dreadful the command of language is among the architecture profession.  The bad blurbs therefore weren't a surprise. Even so, there were some really choice examples here, eg: "The project is a network of highly compacted vertical public and domestic spaces sandwiched between each other, highlighting the relationship between the overlapping functions while forming three-dimensional open spaces on different levels that serve the broadest demographic of the city".  Pseud-y words like "hegemony" and "neoliberalism" abounded in a number of samey, half-baked, glibly-handled political commentaries. At least two interior design graduates started their viewing notes with the exact same Andy Warhol quote. You would think that one thing university lecturers could usefully try and do is hand out some basic advice on how to construct intelligible prose (one idea per sentence, etc). But, hey, I guess architects don't care about writing.  But it is a mystery then why they continue to churn out this hopeless verbiage as opposed to letting the designs speak for themselves.

Returning to the exhibits, my two favourite projects were at opposite ends of the modesty/ambition spectrum. Chris Pittway was pursuing the idea of building a football stadium on the Dogger Bank, the sandbank in the middle of the North Sea. This, of course, makes zero sense from any perspective. But the gusto with which this MA student made his case almost persuaded me that the success of the project was an inevitability. There were eerie renders of the foggy ground and a cool acrylic model whose vertical layers were on entirely separate scales: the football pitch itself, then the installation/artificial island it sat upon, below that the 6,800 sq mile Dogger Bank, and then below that the entirety of the North Sea. There were also no less than 5 separate booklets to pick up and peruse, covering everything from the decision of the owner of Forest Green Rovers FC to turn his club vegetarian, a study on Hanseatic crow-stepped gables as a possible aesthetic motif, the politics of stadium design to bathymetrics and current directions of the Dogger Bank. I liked Pittway's magpie-like approach to sources of inspiration and boundless ambition.

Stephanie Tham, in contrast, was playing with ideas within a much smaller compass.  As the (actually intelligible) blurb explained, the challenge she set herself was to fill a relatively circumscribed space - a gap between two other blocks - with individually shaped apartments, each one a different sort of space. Her witty solution was to create a set of largely Platonic 3D shapes slotted in around each other, as the lovely model in the photo below shows. Tham's renders, meanwhile, are beautifully done; they are also sweet with their roving population of green cats (a homely touch that would be anathema to architects with pretensions of world conquest). The neat little exterior drawings of the individual apartments come with twee dedications: "For the Acrobat who trapezes 24/7"; "For the Architect who is tired of walls in his home so he decided to live in a cylinder."  The little detail I liked the most, though, were the drawings in an accompanying booklet showing, in a matter-of-fact, wordless manner, a crane lifting each apartment into place one-by-one, as if the whole assembly was a building-sized game of Tetris.

Without - unlike virtually all of the other projects here - apparently setting out to dominate anything, this deft little display of architectural charm succeeded at least in winning me over completely. Tham describes herself in her profile on the RCA website as "a little architectural nomad who is interested in the development and design of homes in relation to personal comfort and pleasure". So out of step is that vision of architecture from that of her peers that she ends up coming across as the most radical of the bunch.