In what promises to be one of the hits of the summer, seven full-scale architectural projects by some of the most exciting emerging practices across the world have been installed in and around the 19th century museum. For the first time in its history visitors to the museum's normally quiet and sacrosanct spaces were walking past builders, scaffolding, and crumbling plasterwork as work was underway building the charcoaled-wooden tea room, a plaster cast of informal housing in Mumbai, libraries and performance spaces amongst other things.


What was the initial concept of this exhibition? What was your motivation to build architecture, rather than replicate it, on this scale?
The intention of the exhibition was to make an exhibition not about drawing or photographs but about presenting an unmediated experience of architecture to give architects the opportunity to build at full scale in the museum.
I've always felt that most architecture exhibitions present a very mediated view of architecture and audiences can often feel a bit detached and disengaged with the material and the final object, the building is often taken out of the exhibition this was about doing a show where visitors can completely access these structures physically and could experiences architecture as a spatial environment instead of about being an image which is how we experience it as magazines or online.

How did you make your selection? The architects that you have invited seem to have an existing affinity with small scale as well as a craft-like use of materials, was that intentional?
We started with a list of 19 architects and we invited them all to propose a 1:1 building for construction within the gallery, then seven were selected for full scale construction. Definitely, the broad sweep of architects that I was looking at were all architects that were preoccupied with modest scale building and a real affinity for materiality and tactical approach to building surface and detail. That's a craft-like approach to the building. I was fascinated with what they would create if they would give the chance to build something in the UK.

Are all of the buildings functional? Are they publicly accessible?
Yes, they are all fully accessible and one in particular, the Vazio A/S, the Brazilian practice is a series of interconnected performance booths and the idea was to create a piece of theatre set where it'll be a sort of blank canvas for companies to programme. We're going to commission companies to make performances which will be performed during the opening couple of weeks of the exhibition.
The Terunobu Fujimoro tea house is very much designed as a space where people can gather for intimate moments of conversation and discussion. People will go off for six of a time. Could be strangers, could be a group of friends that come along. They'd come and sit around in this very intimate space behind me and catch up and meet new friends.
A Norwegian practice have built a three storey reading tower by the national art library staircase. The structure will be a tower where the walls consist entirely of shelves and hundreds of shelves containing thousands of second hand paper back books. They're all arranged to face inwards so from the outside there is a lovely sense of greys and yellow pages but on the inside there is a rainbow of typographics and textures and spines and binding. You'll be able to walk into the structure and browse through the books and it leads to the three floors there is a reading chamber where you can take your selection and sit there and read for however long you want. That will be a wonderful revaluation of the archive. There's a wonderful relationship there and a refuge and retreat. There's a nice dialogue there between the two spaces.

Why do you think architecture exhibitions have a hard time attracting people other than architects or architecture students?
The whole architecture machine produces so much material. You can have endless CAD drawings, endless working drawings and then there's all the material that is generated afterwards. There's photographs, 3D visualisations, fly-throughs. That material all exists in an exhibition environment, there's almost like they're overcompensating for the fact that the building's not there. there has to be material to justify the fact that the audience isn't there. the audiences get very confused and the usual dense text you get on a standard presentation panel, audiences just don't know how to read that or interpret it compared to most museum exhibitions labelled which are usually much more concise. It's hard to find clarity. By showing architecture as experience with space can bring that back.

It doesn't seem to be a fault of the architects or architecture itself. More that a preconception on the part of the curators that they have to continue a tradition of architectural representation of drawings and models?
Yes, it's a panic, a feeling that architecture is this really complex system that needs to be explained in some way. It's understandable of course, a bit like if you try and do an exhibition of a film. Film and architecture have so many parallels; the collaborative process, the idea of the auteur in terms of who has their hand on the finished piece of work. In the same way as if you try and do an exhibition about a film and you try and summarise the material, it just would be a similarly confusing experience. That clarity that you get with a single painting or single painting you just can't get with architecture or film, you just can't explain that complicated material. So we thought we'd forget all that and have the building, which is after all the most important thing.

1:1 - Architects Build Small Spaces
V&A, Cromwell Road, Londra
15 June – 30 August 2010

Abraham Thomas is Curator of Designs at the V&A and lead curator for architecture. Past displays at the V&A which Abraham has curated include On the Threshold: The Changing Face of Housing, World Expo 2010 Shanghai: Designs for the British Pavilion and Paper Movies: Graphic Design and Photography at Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, 1934 to 1963.
Most recently, he worked on the V&A Tunnel Entrance commission by architect CJ Lim, Seasons Through The Looking Glass and earlier this year he curated the V&A's bicentenary retrospective on the Victorian designer and architect, Owen Jones.
Abraham is currently writing a book on fashion illustration and photography which will be published by V&A Publications in Autumn 2012.