Good rooms + AR House - The Architectural Review issue 1517

Rachel Whiteread’s Young V&A exhibit of dollhouses, photographed in colour on a grey background

What is a good room? For this issue, we asked architects, curators and writers to describe a good domestic setting – real, remembered or imagined. For some, the room is one designed by Álvaro Siza or Jean-François Zevaco; for others, it is one depicted in an artwork, from a Berliner Zimmer in an 1845 painting by Adolph Menzel, to a pavilion painted in a 14th-century Chinese scroll by Ni Zan.

Some responses challenge the idea of what constitutes a room, choosing an ancient fig tree in South Africa or simply a roof that offers shade instead. A few offered reflections on the absence of satisfactory living spaces in subdivided apartments or the disappearance of the living room in London’s overheated housing market.

Good rooms are also recognised in the AR House awards, now in their 15th year. An outdoor room is inserted at the centre of a house in the mountains near Brisbane, while the home for a Colombian artist is a single, continuous living space that extends out to the Antioquian landscape. Abolishing fixed hierarchies of use, a project on the Isle of Wight brings together the owner’s family with temporary residents in shared spaces.

Refuting the idea that a room must be a permanent and enclosed box, Laura Bonell’s keynote essay proposes that the room is a space defined by its objects, views and rituals instead. This more fluid and porous definition of a room is a reminder that architecture’s primary function is to ‘create a sense of place and a space for life’.

1517: Good rooms + AR House

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Cover (above) photograph by François Lauginie / Frac Centre-Val de Loire / Donation Ettore Sottsass
Ettore Sottsass created the photographic series Metafore (Metaphors) while travelling in Spain and the Pyrenees in the early 1970s. The cover image, taken in Seo de Urgel, conjures the bare bones of a room, a ‘virtual architecture’ (as per Sottsass’s inscription) entirely open to the surrounding landscape

Folio (lead image) photograph by Jamie Stoker
Place (Village) by Rachel Whiteread at the Young V&A consists of more than a hundred dolls’ houses collected over a period of 20 years

Keynote
Unmaking rooms
Laura Bonell

Good rooms
The in-between room
Elizabeth Hatz

Floating annexe
Noelia Monteiro

Balcony room
Kirsty Bell

Pavilion in nature
Lu Wenyu and Wang Shu

Front room
Michael McMillan

The unswept floor
Sam Johnson-Schlee

An oculus
Aziza Chaouni

A room in the wall
Sameep Padora

Well-appointed rooms
Zosia Dzierżawska

Window to the world
Gloria Pavita

Artist’s studio
Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats