Ushida Findlay Exhibition Reviews Soft and Hairy House
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- V&A Dundee opens an exhibition tracing the career of Kathryn Findlay and her partnership with Japanese architect Eisaku Ushida, part of the Royal Scottish Academy's bicentenary programme and drawn from one of the largest archive donations in the RSA's history
- Kathryn Findlay and Eisaku Ushida completed the Soft and Hairy House in 1994 in Tokyo, taking their cue from Salvador Dalí's 1922 declaration that "the future of architecture will be soft and hairy," with a shaggy planted roof, plumply rounded contours and a bright blue bathroom pod puncturing the courtyard
- Their best-known Truss Wall House read as "living sculpture," a reinforced-concrete shell Findlay likened to "a worm eating an apple" — carving voids from a solid mass rather than framing spaces in the conventional sense
- Findlay died of a brain tumour in 2014 aged 60; she was the first female architect to become a Scottish academician, and the exhibition includes her pre-digital "slimy drawings" plus 35mm slides displayed on a vertical lightbox with magnifying glasses supplied
- Before the V&A Dundee building existed, Findlay introduced engineer Arup to Kengo Kuma — a connection the review credits with helping bring the museum itself into being, while Findlay also served as delivery architect for Anish Kapoor's ArcelorMittal Orbit at the 2012 Olympics, enabling it to handle 700 visitors an hour
Why it matters: For the architectural record, the RSA's custodianship of the Ushida Findlay archive consolidates a body of pre-computerised drawings, models and slides that would otherwise risk dispersal after Findlay's early death at 60. The exhibition also surfaces Findlay's overlooked role in brokering the Kengo Kuma connection that produced the very gallery now showing her work.
