1:1 with the V&A’s Small Spaces
A teahouse on stilts, a tower of books, a woodland shelter – seven one-off buildings have taken root in the V&A's galleries. Jonathan Glancey gets a sneak preview of a striking new show
Finding a fairytale Japanese teahouse sprouting from wooden stilts in a corridor of the Victoria and Albert museum is an unexpected yet curiously apposite experience. Unexpected, because this bewitching structure is one of seven brand-new, imaginative and full-scale buildings installed through the museum's galleries this week; and apposite because this glorious Victorian pantechnicon is so jammed with curiosities that Terunobu Fujimori's Beetle's House looks almost part of the furniture.
It's not immediately obvious, but there is a powerful thread animating and holding together these seven buildings, commissioned by the V&A's curator of designs, Abraham Thomas. The thread is made of what I'd call resistance – architectural resistance to the ever-growing world of buildings that look as if they have been designed by computers and built by robots.
Like Fujimori's teahouse, each building has been designed both as an escape from the world of one-dimensional, globalised architecture, and as a means of expressing what can be done with a paucity of materials and a wealth of imagination. These are not mere installations but solid buildings (you can walk into and through them), placed within the museum in a way that enhances their architectural host and its kaleidoscopic collections. From the top of a timber book tower, for example, named The Ark and designed by Rintala Eggertsson Architects (a Finnish-Icelandic team based in Oslo), you look across a wall of books and the frame of the tower itself into the hushed reading room of the National Art Library.
Even better is a plaster cast of an ad-hoc living space in Mumbai, squeezed between a warehouse and the architects' office (Studio Mumbai). Walk in, look out through the chutes and slits that pass for windows, and a cast of Michelangelo's David stares you in the face. It's an odd conjunction, and yet this beautifully cast house, with its shadowy, shoulder-high alleys, narrow stairs, shrine for contemplation, sleeping platforms and internal courtyard wrapped around a plaster-cast tree, is at home amid the V&A's haunting Victorian reproductions of Renaissance marvels.
No architect had a hand in the original Mumbai building, and yet an empathetic local firm has been inspired by its improvised architecture. And there is much to be learned from it: the way its narrow, shady corridors open on to a courtyard where the dazzling Mumbai sunshine is cooled by the canopy of a tree. While poor in terms of electrical and mechanical services, a house like this has more soul and beauty – accidental as well as deliberate – than almost any new home in a modern British cul-de-sac. Sadly, the original Mumbai house has been demolished, but its genial spirit now lives on alongside Michelangelo's David.
Bijoy Jain, who founded Studio Mumbai in 1995 after studying in St Louis, Missouri and working in Los Angeles, has said he is confounded by the mysteries of modern India. He is fighting his own architectural resistance movement against an India in which, as he says, local people are trained to speak in faux-British accents in call centres, while highly trained structural engineers email drawings to overseas contractors to realise expensive buildings (some of them designed by British architects) on the cheap. He designs modern Indian buildings. Like all seven architects contributing to this show, he believes in working with his hands as well as his mind and eyes.
Elsewhere, two very different architectural studios – one from Tokyo, the other from Stavanger in Norway – show how computer-aided design and construction can be used to craft new forms of building, combining the most sophisticated man-made and the rawest natural materials. Sou Fujimoto's Inside/Outside Tree, growing from a landing outside the museum's architecture gallery, is a transparent shelter built entirely of sheets of acrylic polygons, held together by white plastic cable ties. Designed with the help of a computer, the structure is based on that of a stylised tree cut from an imaginary cube. If this sounds a little arcane, the result is enjoyably ethereal – especially when the afternoon sun floods through the high windows behind and sets the structure aglow.
Out in the museum's John Madejski Garden, Helen & Hard Architects (based in Stavanger) have created a building named Ratatosk, after Ratatoskr, a mythological Nordic squirrel. This is made from ash trees that have been split apart and then milled by a computer-driven machine. This curious forest building is currently an empty shelter, but it would make another fine teahouse.
Small Spaces is a modest but inventive exhibition with a powerful message about the importance of nurturing local architecture, whether working with traditional materials or the very latest technologies. Architecture should be led by imagination and skill rather than by slick imagery and marketing. Clearly, those of us who believe this have a long fight on our collective hands, but in the design and making of the V&A's seven small buildings, we have at least the beginnings of the necessary ammunition. When this show closes at the end of the summer, I hope the museum keeps these buildings in its capacious fold. The curators haven't yet made up their minds. But even when they become historic curiosities, these buildings will have something worthwhile to tell us.