A couple of days ago I spied a picture on Instagram, I can't remember what it was, just that it was about an exhibition that was coming to an end very soon, Sensing Spaces at the Royal Academy.
I showed mum and yesterday we went up to the big smoke to check it out.
There were seven different installations, each aiming to generate senses by using body, volume, vistas and smells.
This was the first piece, an enormous wooden castle by Pezo von Ellrichshausen, you had to climb up one of the four towers to reach the top of the fort.
When you reached the top there were several peepholes, but this one was my favourite, because when you peeked through you came face to face with one of the beautiful gold angels that holds up the ceiling.
This was most certainly the liveliest part of the exhibition, Diébédo Francis Kéré had made an enormous pyramid which was formed out of plastic with lots of holes in,
You grabbed yourself some straws and had to stick them in yourself, all the littlies in the exhibition loved this, and they weren't the only ones,
Mum definitely had a lot less trouble than I did, I was tiptoeing around for ages trying to get them in,
(Sporting a lovely skiing tan beard, but that's a story for another time)
One of the architects, Li Xiaodong, had transformed one of the rooms into a woodland maze, we could hear a faint crunching noise but we didn't really think anything of it...
Until you reached the centre of the maze which had been filled with stones, and the littlies had been stomping about, creating a stark contrast between the peacefulness of the wood and the noisiness of the gravel!
An enormous mirror made the room double in size, and out of all the pieces, I think this was my favourite.
But that doesn't mean that there isn't more to see!
We slipped into another room through a curtain and into a blacked out room, where Kengo Kuma had created these beautifully lit up, for lack of a better word (sorry Kengo), sticks, which had been fragranced to bring in the sense of smell.
The last one I want to show you is by Grafton Architects, which was really quite scary because the slab was so oppressive and intimidating, it felt like it could fall on you at any minute!
It's a shame because the pictures, no matter how hard I tried, could capture how impressive each piece was!
