The UK capital is set to offer a spring season of nonstop cultural events on architecture and\u00a0the arts of the project, hosting several important exhibitions in its most prestigious museums.
\nThe first anniversary of the fire that damaged the Glasgow School of Art, will mark the\u00a0opening of the exhibition Mackintosh Architecture at the renovated galleries of the Royal\u00a0Institute of British Architects, in Portland Place, up to the 23rd May 2015. Billed as the\u00a0first major retrospective of the work of the Scottish architect, artist and designer Charles\u00a0Rennie Mackintosh, the exhibition features 60 original drawings and watercolours, as\u00a0well as models, films and portraits. Designer of exceptional talent, Mackintosh began\u00a0his architectural apprenticeship at the age of 16, and took evening classes at the\u00a0Glasgow School of Art before proposing, at the age of 29, the project for the School\u00a0itself, subsequently built between 1897 and 1909. The exhibition also illustrates the\u00a0context in which Mackintosh worked: the city of Glasgow, opportunities and clients;\u00a0his apprenticeship and the beginning of his collaboration in an architectural studio, his\u00a0independent work as architect and designer; the inspiration he drew from the tradition of\u00a0Scottish baronial architecture and the collaboration with his wife, the artist and designer\u00a0Margaret Macdonald. The London exhibition, curated by Susan Pugh of Riba Drawings and\u00a0Archives, is ideally completed with a programme of events at the Riba and with a visit to\u00a0the homonymous exhibition curated by Pamela Robertson at the Hunterian Art Gallery in\u00a0Glasgow, also responsible for four years of research that has involved the gathering and\u00a0cataloguing of Mackintosh\u2019s work, as well as making it available online.<\/p>\n
In a room of the Architecture Gallery of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the temporary\u00a0exhibition, Architects as Artists, curated by Roisin Inglesby, starts by quoting Leon Battista\u00a0Alberti and Edward William Godwin, in questioning the boundary between architecture\u00a0and art, and illustrating exemplary cases in which the architect expressed himself according\u00a0to artistic canons. Through nearly 50 drawings from the collection of Riba and the V &\u00a0A, the short but precious exhibition offers a reflection on the artistic tools available to\u00a0architectural practice. The works are classified according to the categories \u201crepresentation\u201c,\u00a0\u201cexploration of places\u201c, \u201cpresentation\u201c and \u201cimagination\u201c, drawings by Raphael, E.W.\u00a0Godwin, Hugh Casson, Cyril Potenza, Virgilio Marchi, Iakov Chernikhov, Tom Noonan,\u00a0William Burges, Augustus Pugin, FAT Architecture, Alfred Waterhouse and William Walcot.\u00a0Each experiment illustrates the architects\u2019 ability in defining two-dimensional architectural\u00a0space, the importance of drawing from real life and the field study of historic buildings\u00a0and landscapes, expressive properties and the adoption of pictorial conventions in\u00a0communicating with customers or the public.<\/p>\n
A short distance away, in Kensington Gardens, from the 26th June until the 18th October\u00a02015, you can visit the fifteenth Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, designed by Spanish studio\u00a0Selgascano and its architects Jos\u00e9 Selgas and Luc\u00eda Cano. According to annual custom,\u00a0about six months before the inauguration, the project is entrusted, upon invitation, to an\u00a0internationally renowned architect who has not yet created a building in the UK, but this\u00a0year there will be an exception to the rule; in fact the Spanish architects had already\u00a0made themselves known in London last November, owing to the sensational success of\u00a0the renovation of Second Home\u2019s offices, in a former carpet factory just off Brick Lane in\u00a0Shoreditch. Prior to them, on the lawn beside the pavilion for the 1930s which hosts the\u00a0Serpentine Gallery, architectural experiments have been carried out by the likes of Smiljan\u00a0Radic, Sou Fujimoto, Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei, Peter Zumthor, Jean Nouvel,\u00a0Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, Frank Gehry, Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen, Rem\u00a0Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond, \u00c1lvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, MVRDV (not\u00a0completed), Oscar Niemeyer, Toyo Ito, Daniel Libeskind, and Zaha Hadid. The appearance\u00a0of the pavilion, which will house a caf\u00e9 and events during the summer, has not yet been\u00a0divulged, but Selgas, professor of design at the MIT in Boston, who favours nature over\u00a0architecture, has promised \u201can absolutely experimental pavilion which will truly embrace\u00a0the garden\u201c.<\/p>\n
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A presentation of the most important ongoing initiatives in London.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":291,"featured_media":8119,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events-exhibitions"],"yoast_head":"\n