The Weird, the Wacky and the Wonderful at the RA

Clearly I was not going to miss an exhibition on architecture with the title The Weird, the Wacky and the Wonderful, especially when the image used to promote it was this colourful and wonky apartment block in Austria.

My first problem was finding the exhibition.

It was listed as being in the "Architecture Space" but nothing on the RA website gave any clue where that was. still, I have been to architecture exhibitions at the RA before so I was pretty certain that this was the small gallery on the top floor.

I was wrong.

It is, in fact, a short stretch of corridor on the ground floor that leads to the restaurant. The walls had been lined with what looked like acoustic absorption material in to which about twenty circular glossy but not very detailed photos had been inserted. Each had a brief description that told you little more than its name and the city it is located in.

Not quite what I was hoping for given that I had set aside between one and two hours for the exhibition. I could have done it in five minutes easily but I wanted to get my money's worth and I managed to drag it out to ten.

I managed to take ten minutes over it because I do like the weird, the wacky and the wonderful and the exhibition certainly had that.

There was the Spirit Hotel in Bratislava that looked like a scrapheap.

I was determined to stay there the next time I went to Slovakia until I looked it up and discovered that the spiritual theme of the hotel is as weird as the building.

In Tirau, New Zealand, we can find two commercial buildings that look like a sheep and a dog. Wonderful indeed.

Nautilus in Mexico is a house that looks as though it was designed by Roger Dean with its psychedelic mushroom shapes.

But my favourite was the Macedonian Monument from Kruševo, simply because it looks like a teddy bear. And that's definitely weird, wacky and wonderful.