The collective effort that goes into any building is underplayed, the roles of craftspeople, builders, assistants and clients – co-creators, often women – are overlooked. The fixed and the eternal is favoured over the transient and the mobile, exteriors over interiors, masonry over fabrics. One shouldn’t assign gender roles to building materials, but as that is in effect what was done in the past – stonecutting for boys, weaving for girls – historians’ privileging of the hard stuff again masculinises architecture.
Radical Rooms, an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba), sets out to challenge these perceptions. It focuses on three houses commissioned and designed wholly or in part by women, and describes them from the inside out. It focuses on the floor plan – that is to say the arrangement of internal rooms – more than external form. Other projects relevant to the show’s themes, using material from Riba’s magnificent and underseen drawings collection, are also shown.
The exhibition is by Charles Holland, formerly of the architects FAT, and the multidisciplinary artist Di Mainstone. It represents its subjects in what, as far as I know, is an unprecedented combination in the world of architectural exhibitions: on the one hand there are drawings and photos, small-scale and requiring close attention; on the other are room-high projections of actors and dancers, dramatising the women concerned with words, music and action. The whole space is a soundscape, with the voices of the protagonists moving from one section to the next on a 30-minute loop. It is unified, visually speaking, by coloured and patterned pillars of cloth – they enclose the drawings, such that you have to pull the curtains apart to see them, something like entering a changing room in a shop.
The first of the show’s three main subjects is Hardwick Hall, the Elizabethan mansion in Derbyshire celebrated for its pioneering and radical use of glass, the work of its owner, Bess of Hardwick, and the architect Robert Smythson. The second is A la Ronde in Devon, an 18th-century house like no other. (Both are National Trust properties, open to the public.) It was created by the cousins Jane and Mary Parminter for their own use, and is circular in plan, with lozenge-shaped windows. The third is the Hopkins House in Hampstead, north London, a delicate two-storey pavilion in glass and steel designed in the 1970s by the architects Patty and Michael Hopkins for themselves, and where they still live.
Hardwick Hall is represented by a plan, a 437-year-old piece of paper conveying matter-of-fact information, and photographs of the tapestry-hung interiors; its ruff-wearing builder Bess delivers a passionate Tudor rap about her passion for construction and her indignation at being called a “shrew”. The Parminters are portrayed as first-wave punks, cleaned-up versions of Siouxsie and the Banshees or the Slits, dressed in floor plans of their house. They sing of the inspirations for the seashell decorations that are one of its many distinctive features: “A grotto of crustaceans/ Captured our imaginations.”
The Hopkins House sound is metallic and glassy, or Glassy – as in both the building material and the composer Philip – the idea being to reveal its high-tech architecture not only as functional and technical, but also as part of the cultural avant garde of its time. Terms such as “building component” are somehow set to music, while the performer at one point wears a venetian blind. Alongside, behind one of the patterned curtains, are photographs of the house and a spare-lined architectural drawing of its plan.
Radical Rooms is an ambitious project in a small space, dense in creation and invention; one that transforms the rather meagre and mediocre gallery in which Riba sees fit to promote the art of architecture. It runs a gamut from abstraction to animation, from diagrams to dancers, leaving the viewer to choose which is background, which is the focus of attention. Like its subject matter, it is a work of collaboration: not only by Holland and Mainstone, but also the composers Jay Malhotra and Mandy Wigby, the technologist Jonathan Hogg, several performers and technicians, and the curator Margaret Cubbage.
It is both serious and witty, and brings a smile to the face. It boldly addresses what is usually an absence in architectural exhibitions, by bringing fictionalised versions of the buildings’ makers and users into the room. It approaches its themes subtly, presenting itself as a show about the arrangement of space as much as about the roles of women in architecture. It imposes no conclusions.
For all its experiential appeal, it may, it must be said, be a little baffling to those not already in the know. If you’ve never heard of Hardwick or the Hopkins House, you’ll probably want a bit more material as to what they are and why they are important, which is a downside of the exhibition’s determination to approach its subjects from unconventional directions. The upside is that it offers a new and much-needed way of looking at buildings of the past.
• Radical Rooms: Power of the Plan is at Riba, London, until 30 July
