The best exhibition of architecture I have ever experienced

Curtain walls, dreaming spires, crockets, finials, cantilevers, bush-hammered concrete, vermiculated rustication, heroic steel and delicate Cosmati work are all diverse parts of the architect’s vocabulary. But while Gothic, Classical, Baroque and Modern are well-thumbed volumes in his library of style, the architect’s real language is profound and prehistoric. Or, at least, it consists of prehistoric-style labels.

So much of the ‘debate’ about architecture has been crudely adversarial with tweedy historicists, conservationists and pseudo-classicists supposedly lined up against antagonising, pitiless and chromium-plated technocrats, futurologists, social engineers and ditsy dreamers. With well-meaning intention, but ill results, the Prince of Wales set up a false opposition between stage armies of old and new.

Really, the question is more about what’s good and what’s bad. But judging good or bad is a demanding task, hence the escape into cartoonish conflicts. So the Royal Academy’s Sensing Spaces exhibition is very welcome: it gets to the essence of architecture, what’s beneath every surface, what’s beyond the details. It makes the point, with appropriate and impressive theatrical bravura, that architecture is as much about feeling as about seeing. The sense of ‘hazard and surprise’ was how Soane liked to describe a good result. Here you have it.

Since it was founded in 1768, the Royal Academy has had a curiously mixed involvement with architects. Sir William Chambers, designer of Somerset House, schmoozed George III and won royal patronage for the new Academy, but it was the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds who became its first president. There have been some distinguished architect PRAs, notably Edwin Lutyens and Hugh Casson, but, perhaps because of their practical temperaments, architects feature disproportionately often in the list of the Academy’s treasurers.

Then there is the Royal Academy’s own history of architectural exhibits.