Firmness and delight
I have a problem with the end-of-year shows. By temperament I want to see everything, and divine some kind of order in the detail before I can be confident that I understand it. The shows don’t – can’t – allow this. Despite all efforts made to structure an exhibition, to edit and elucidate, the quantity of material makes any close and detailed reading impossible. Most of it isn’t even in the exhibition. Each drawing signifies the absence of so many others – the abandoned trials and supporting studies that are an essential part of the design process. A year’s work by each of hundreds of students; hundreds of years of work. The very thought makes my chest tighten and the blood drum in my ears.
Perhaps the only way to make sense of the exhibition is to consider all of these carefully worked drawings and models as marks in a larger pointillist composition – the unit. Going on impressions is risky, but it seems to me that one can make some broad statements about the state of the school on that basis. The first, ironically, is that a growing plurality in the lines of inquiry pursued by individual units makes blanket assertions difficult. There may always have been more diversity in the school than is commonly recognised outside, but this is becoming more apparent. Concern with constructional detail is at the heart of what one unit does, but incidental to another; a deep engagement with the way a potential building might be used, and impact on an existing social ecosystem preoccupies one set of students, but appears unimportant to others. So while one might observe an interesting classical strain emerging in several units, for instance, there is too much that runs contrary to it to proclaim classicism as the new London Met agenda. This variety is probably a good thing, even if it works against the development of a strong identity for the institution in the wider world; coherence can easily trip over into homogeneity.
Having seen the London Met show get more progressively more ambitious over the last ten years or thereabouts, I felt that (with the exception of a few units) the physical mounting of the exhibition this year seemed somewhat halfhearted. No doubt this is a symptom of post-assessment exhaustion as much as anything, but it is in marked contrast to the underlying health of the school, which seems very good, not only in terms of student numbers and quality which are undoubtedly on an upward trajectory, but in terms of a confidence palpable in the forumation and execution of projects. There was a (sometimes risky) ambition about many of the briefs and the students’ responses which generally seems to have paid off. And with this sense of freedom has perhaps come a greater emphasis on delight, to add to the commodity and firmness for which the school is already well known.
ASD Summer Exhibition 2008
