V&A Dundee Showcases Ushida Findlay's Soft Architecture
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- V&A Dundee opens an exhibition exploring Kathryn Findlay's career, cut short by her death from a brain tumour aged 60 in 2014, as part of the Royal Scottish Academy's bicentenary programme.
- The Royal Scottish Academy now holds and curates the Ushida Findlay archive — one of its largest donations in history, gifted by both families — comprising photographs, drawings, models, sketchbooks, and 35mm slides.
- The 1994 Soft and Hairy House in Tokyo took its cue from Salvador Dalí's 1922 prophecy to Le Corbusier that "the future of architecture will be soft and hairy," layering a shaggy fringe of greenery over plumply rounded contours and a bright blue bathroom pod.
- The Truss Wall House, the duo's best-known work, was a reinforced-concrete conchoidal form Findlay compared to a worm eating an apple — carving spaces from a solid mass rather than filling a frame.
- Findlay traced an unconventional path from a sheep-farming family in rural Angus to Edinburgh College of Art, London's Architectural Association, and Tokyo, where she worked for modernist Arata Isozaki before meeting Ushida.
- Findlay served as delivery architect for Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond's ArcelorMittal Orbit at the 2012 London Olympics, enabling the structure to handle 700 visitors an hour during the Games.
- Findlay personally introduced engineers Arup to Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, a connection that helped bring the V&A Dundee building itself into being — giving the exhibition's host venue a direct line back to the architect on its walls.
Why it matters: The Royal Scottish Academy holds one of its largest-ever archive donations through this exhibition, marking a major institutional moment for Scottish architecture. Findlay's own introduction of Kengo Kuma to the V&A's engineers gives the display personal stakes beyond the gallery — the architect's influence is literally built into the museum hosting her work.
