The Turner prize-winning Assemble collective has curated the architecture rooms at the 2024 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition with a vision to inspire visitors by bringing the raw creativity – and messiness – of the studio into the heart of the institution.

Maria Lisogorskaya, co-founding member of Assemble, explains the group decided to “flip” this year’s Summer Exhibition main theme “Space making” to celebrate “spaces for making” – the workshops and studios where creativity gives birth to form.

Assemble, which has collective Royal Academician status, set out to capture the clutter of the creative workspace. One of their two rooms in the show is intended to represent an industrial warehouse space, but resembles more the storeroom of an architecture practice, with models stacked high on industrial shelving. The other, the lofty Central Hall – given over to architecture for the first time in Summer Exhibition history – hints incongruously at the studio or workshop, with works from eminent academicians perched on a well used joinery bench or drafting table.

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