I haven’t ventured into the RIBA for quite a while, despite it being only a few minutes’ walk from where I spend my London days. Since joining the organisation some 45+ years ago I have rarely passed through its doors, and it has rarely troubled me with assistance, benefits, and opportunities in my particular line of architectural work.

But with the new youthful leadership there comes hope that the ever-clubby atmosphere will begin to recede and a newfound focus on the breadth and quality of impact that can and is being made by our profession can be represented, encouraged, and promoted. So these days on occasions I check to see what’s on and if, as happened only last week, I find a subject or two that interest me, I will wander around the corner and pass again into the hallowed halls.
 
There are three exhibitions presently, two of which interest me as they vaguely relate to people and thinking in my education and early career, while the third is a hot topic largely due to the efforts of my fellow AA alumni, Simon Sturgis.
 
Spoiler Alert: I was disappointed.

My first despair is that the introduction to Monica Pigeon’s photography that piqued my interest, that discusses her life immersed in the important architects and architectural education of the late twentieth century, is largely all there is.

The exhibition itself, with one notable exception, comprises some OK holiday shots of her trips to Brasilia and various cities of Western Europe. They are not bad photographs, although mounted in such a way that many are lost in the reflections of their glass, and there is some interest in the changes in landscape and clothing since, but a reflection of the introduction they are not.

Upstairs lies the work of another fine lady immersed in a slightly later group of architects and architectural education, that of the sculptor and architect Celia Scott.

This exhibition is a slightly strange concoction, with more to think about. For here we see Celia capturing her surroundings, these being the closely knit coven of north London and North American architects that lay within the orbit of her husband, Robert Maxwell, about and from whom the walls are postered.
 
The introductory image sets the scene, and it’s a scene that so perfectly mirrors my image of the clubby emporium in which I am standing. 
 

I briefly worked with Celia more years ago than either of us would care to remember and I recall she had a streak of ironic wit beneath her calm and measured exterior.  Gathered together in this exhibition her work captures a few of this close-knit group of architects in the classic, self-important poses of a senatorial clan, a group of architects and theorists that, while undoubtedly skilful, were also mutually supportive in the dining rooms and college halls of each other, and who, by listening attentively to the opinions of their immediate colleagues, were largely isolated from broader criticism.

The group is as interesting in who it does not include as who it does. With the occasional exceptions, those who we would now classify as the disrupters of the day, the Archigrams, the Fosters, while living in the same north London and North American locations, are not invited or chose not to attend.

Instead, you see a proud, Greco Roman collective rubbing their absent shoulders in the halls of rhetorical debate, theorizing philosophically in their close-knit community, falling into the po-mo trap together. You see debates about the importance of structured urban variety and social appropriateness, adjacent to built projects that exhibit quite the opposite. You see a style of critique that while intellectual, is also comfortable and conservative, hardly challenging the work or the architect or the audience towards better things, and so appearing introverted, opaque to the wider consumer. 

I almost pass up on the opportunity to see the third exhibition, so unenticing is the promotion, but I find it tucked away on the ground floor and persevere.

Long Life, Low Energy is well meaning but immediately sets off in the wrong direction, being mounted in a room haplessly full of timber screening - reusable apparently, but unnecessary in fact.

Here the RIBA has sought to compile a small exhibition on a major subject, a subject that should be an opportunity to promote the skills and ambitions of all architects and architecture in general, but instead uses whatever examples it can muster from the past work of half a dozen individual practices.

The piece on reuse-rather-than-demolition comes across as a woeful begrudgement of the loss of architectural heritage, which is hardly the point. A piece on the use of hyper-local materials sits cheek by jowl with a piece that extols the virtues of 140 tonnes of steel from a demolished building in London being redeployed to other London sites - via North Yorkshire. With matters of this magnitude, it is despairing to see the RIBA treating it with such misdirection and amateurism.


And so to me, these exhibitions only reinforce the stereotypes, looking inward, doing little to promote the true benefits of the profession, recording for posterity rather than challenging the future. They would be of little interest to the casual observer, the public we should serve, who are unsurprisingly missing from the building in the two days I attended.