The Architecture Room at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition is always a little different to the rest of the crammed exhibition. In every other gallery, salon-hang artworks of mixed subject, media – and quality – present the impression of the largest village fete art show, a large number of the works created by amateur artists. Architecture, however, is rarely now practiced by amateurs, and the room dedicated to the making of buildings has always sat a little separately from the main show.

A different architect is selected as curator each year, with the room’s display usually dominated by the work of practicing architects, and often mainly comprising normal architectural media and representations: models, sketches, and drawings – in the main work which is a by-product or process of getting a building designed and maybe built, rather than art for arts sake or visual exploration. This year, however, in a display overlooked by a boulder column by the late Phyllida Barlow – a tower looking as hard as granite but formed of maleable hessian, paper, plywood and foam – there is a playful curation which amongst the big-name models and drawings celebrates a softness of material and design process.


2023’s Architecture Room is pulled together by Peter Barber, an architect celebrated over recent years for design (model above) dedicated to vernacular, density, and community-focused buildings – usually using brick. So central is brick to Barber’s work that a visitor to his room may have gone in expecting it to be dedicated to the building block, but what is presented has a much softer and more nuanced exploration of materials and their interconnectedness.


For an architect so associated with the regularity and hardness of brick, a visitor may have been expecting equal solidity and ruggedness in his exhibition. However, while the end result of designing buildings is often a lump of solidity, built into form and place, it is essentially a soft process of shifting ideas and malleable concepts. To be soft is less predetermined, authoritative, harsh, and iconic – approaches that need to be infused into architectural making and language.

Here are some of the soft highlights of Peter Barber’s 2023 Architecture Room: