Not as complex as a building

Newsletter #9. Farshid Moussavi has curated the Summer Exhibition at the troubled Royal Academy. She tells Tim how the organisation must now deal with architecture.

Hello Superurbanists!

Summer time and the living is… fascinating, complex, engaging but rarely easy.

In the face of post-Covid financial woes the Royal Academy in London recently mothballed its architecture department. In the wake of that event, Farshid Moussavi was charged with co-ordinating that wonderful annual event, which survives every travail, the Summer Exhibition. She’s the first architect to do so since Eva Jiřičná in 2013.

Her solution was to collapse the boundary definitions between art and architecture, subsume them into one show and propose a new methodology for the venerable institution going forward.

Tim spoke to her and briefly to Stephanie MacDonald who curated the not-architecture room.

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