May 19, 2018–March 4, 2019
Piccadilly
London W1J 0BD
United Kingdom
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–6pm
Friday 10am–9pm
The first installation in the Royal Academy’s new Architecture Studio opens to the public on May 19, 2018.
Invisible Landscapes will make visible the often-invisible presence and impact of digital technologies in our lives and everyday surroundings. The Royal Academy will invite practice-based researchers to present new work through three interconnected acts entitled Home, Environment, and Imagination. The installations will address how architecture can respond and engage with emerging contemporary issues around technology, suggesting new ways of being, belonging and living.
Today, digital technologies are often presented as the ultimate solution, connecting people and places, and making our landscapes and actions more efficient. However, the use of these new technologies also raises questions of privacy, security, sustainability, health and dependency. These technologies are creating radical transformations in the relationship between people and the environments they inhabit as well as redefining our understanding of the human condition.
The opening act of Invisible Landscapes explores the impact of digital technologies on domestic spaces and how this may be altering the meaning of home. Through an immersive installation, Barcelona-based architecture practice MAIO explores current transformations in contemporary domesticity in response to the changing social and economic structures provided by smart technologies and sharing platforms. This first installation examines the home not simply as an isolated space but as part of a wider open system where the boundaries between public and private, urban and domestic, are blurred.
Supporting events programme
Anna Puigjaner in conversation
Monday, June 4, 2018, 6:30–8pm
Architect and MAIO co-founder Anna Puigjaner will present the results of her research on London’s sharing economy platforms. The lecture will be followed by a conversation with Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, architect and Partner at OMA and creator of disruptive digital platform PANDA, and Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, Architecture Programme Curator at the RA and curator of Invisible Landscapes.
DOMA in residence
Wednesday, June 27, 2018, 6:30–9pm
DOMA co-founders Rokmaniko and Sebregondi will be joined by Jack Self, architect and co-curator of Home Economics, the British Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. Together they will explore and question the ways digital technologies could allow alternative models of ownership to tackle the housing crisis.
About the Architecture Studio
The new Architecture Studio in the Dorfman Senate Rooms provides a permanent home for architectural explorations. It is a creative space that invites audiences to engage with innovative and critical ideas on architecture, visual arts and contemporary culture. Each year the Architecture Studio will address a major theme, explored through a series of projects and installations that foster research, discussion and production around architecture, culture and society.
The studio space forms part of the Royal Academy’s reinvigorated new campus, which opens to the public on May 19, 2018. Following a transformational redevelopment, designed by internationally-acclaimed architect Sir David Chipperfield CBE RA the RA’s two buildings—Burlington Gardens and Burlington House—have been reconnected enabling the RA to expand its exhibition programme and to create new and free displays of art and architecture across the campus for visitors year-round.
About MAIO
Barcelona-based MAIO is the first commissioned architect in Invisible Landscapes. The award-winning firm combines architectural practice with academic, research and editorial projects and has developed a wide range of schemes: from furniture and exhibition design to housing and urban planning. MAIO was founded in 2012 by Maria Charneco, Alfredo Lérida, Guillermo López, and Anna Puigjaner, who received Harvard University’s Wheelwright Prize in 2016 for her proposal Kitchenless City.
Invisible Landscapes
Act I: Home (May 19–September 24, 2018)
Act II: Environment (October 5–December 3, 2018)
Act III: Imagination (December 14, 2018–March 4, 2019)
The Architecture Studio, The Dorfman Senate Rooms
Royal Academy of Arts
6 Burlington Gardens
London
W1S 3ET
