Architecture

is a tricky thing to convey in museums, because it’s usually resigned to photos,

blueprints, and weird little models. Which can be about as

interesting as watching paint dry. So London’s Victoria & Albert asked architects to throw up

structures in the museum itself. The result: 1:1 – Architects Build Small Spaces

displays seven real, live mini-buildings that, as the press materials

tell us, “push the boundaries and possibilities of creative practice.”

The theme is refuges. That’s obvious enough in Sou Fujimoto Architects’s acrylic cube (top), an abstraction of a tree that looks like a giant princess-cut diamond, and one of Terunobu Fujimori‘s whimsical teahouses (an old example below, and then video of the new project being built).

Helen

& Hard Architects axed ash trees from a forest

in their native Norway to make this exuberant pavilion, which

references both Norse folklore and British garden folly from the 18th

century (back in those quaint, pre-InterWeb times when putting odd crap in your backyard counted as high entertainment).



Not

everything’s a refuge in the strict sense of the word, this being

architecture about “pushing boundaries and possibilities.” Consider the contribution from Studio Mumbai Architects. It’s the cast of a sliver of a hovel

that’s tucked into a narrow corridor behind the firm’s offices and

peopled by a family of eight. Sounds more like a domestic war zone than a

sanctuary, but according to the project description, unauthorized dwellings

of this sort “offer intelligent design solutions” in a place, where

scarce land and skyrocketing real estate prices conspire against the

city’s poorest residents. “As well as shelter, they provide spaces

for refuge, contemplation and worship,” we’re told.



Representing

Team America is Rural Studio, the Auburn U architecture

program that lets schlubby college students cobble together buildings in

the backwoods of Alabama. Here, they built a woodshed that would only

look like a refuge in, well, the backwoods of Alabama.

