There is a lot of architecture in V&A Dundee this summer: models, material fragments and films in the exhibition Maggie’s: Architecture that Cares; set designs, sites and bodies in Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show; crip critique, invention and spatial activism in Design and Disability (transferred from V&A South Kensington); and material culture in the Scottish Design Galleries. And, with the 2025 Doolan Prize film playing through the open door of the adjacent lecture theatre, there’s also an exhibition of the work of the Scottish-Japanese Ushida Findlay Partnership.
Kathryn Findlay (1953-2014) is one of three women architects included in The New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (published 2019). She is ‘seen’ in architectural history: the first female architect elected as a Royal Scottish Academician (2007); and awarded the Jane Drew Prize (2014). In the last five years of her life, interviews, tributes and obituaries traced her ‘huge and global’ reputation, ‘total life’ and ‘exceptional creative power’. Fionn Stevenson in Architectural Research Quarterly highlighted the practice’s ‘three remarkable houses that transformed architectural thinking’ and how its work was ‘viewed as an alchemical fusion of Findlay’s wild imagination and Ushida’s technological prowess’.
Montage of 35mm slides of Ushida Findlay’s work
Source: Grant Anderson
Ushida Findlay: Unbroken Spaces comprises samplings of this creative practice. A range of visual material – 35mm slides, ink drawings, digitised video, pamphlets, sketchbooks, interview footage, text panels – is displayed in the modest V&A Designer in Residence Studio. Much of this content has already appeared in the public domain. There is only tantalising evidence of the messiness and technicalities of construction, the hard ‘enabling’ work that, Findlay notes, is not seen; how the practice’s ‘slimy drawings’ were made; or in what work configurations the partnership played out. There are just glimpses of the vivacity and constructional adventures that generated the Open House: Art and Life event at Truss Wall House in Tokyo (1993) or the 1:1 ecological provocation of 1009 Footpath installation at the 1996 Adelaide Festival.
Twelve years after Findlay’s death, the exhibition is a convergence of documents moving from family to institutional care. The Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) is beginning to reflect on its own history and position after 200 years. The acquisition of the Ushida Findlay archive settles their transnational, collaborative work into the Scottish artistic establishment, if far from their built works.
Exhibits at Ushida Findlay: Unbroken Spaces
Source: Grant Anderson
The exhibition’s sketched chronological organisation highlights Findlay’s early biography, the commission for Homes for the Future, Glasgow in 1999, later UK projects and her influence on the V&A Dundee design team’s selection while being a professor in the city. I didn’t, however, spot any material on the Maggie’s Cancer Care Centre planned for Wishaw. As a homecoming, this Scottish skew is of interest to a local audience. By presenting the work as that of a specific RSA academician, it also potentially diminishes the importance of collaboration in her work, as well as her working life as it was structured through inventive iterations of architectural practice.
Exhibits at Ushida Findlay: Unbroken Spaces
Source: Grant Anderson
In a photocopied bi-lingual catalogue dated 8 May 1993 from the aforementioned event at Truss Wall House, Findlay writes of ‘finding the feeling of the house’: of her music composition as a ‘double-reeded relationship’ for shakuhachi (japanese flute) and saxophone, an interplay between western music based on heart-beat and eastern music’s determination by breath, with a nearby trainline as ‘a third collaborator’. Ushida Findlay’s architecture can be read as sculpted form but also as experiential, amplified through movement and sound. Ushida and Findlay’s fascinating 40-minute film Truss Wall House Inside: Out and its commentary make a visit worthwhile, although it deserves a much larger screen and access to audio.
Collage of images of the practice’s Truss Wall House
Source: Grant Anderson
This exhibition registers the institution of an archive. It is a critical shift from private memorabilia to public view, of decisions around what is amplified or silenced and who decides this. An archive can only ever be a partial legacy of an adventurous, relational life. The Kathryn Findlay Future Fund at Scene and Heard, a theatre artist mentoring charity in London, is now being used in concrete ways for their own projects of art and life. Ushida Findlay’s portfolio can be placed within an elite definition of architectural culture and discourse, reputational capital built through private clients, competition entries and publication. Yet it is coursed with a maverick, grounded intelligence that provides a positive touchstone for a multiplicitous approach to architecture, driven by experiential imagination.
Exhibits at Ushida Findlay: Unbroken Spaces
Source: Grant Anderson
Ushida Findlay: Unbroken Spaces, part of the RSA’s 200th anniversary celebrations, is free to visit at the V&A Dundee’s Designer in Residence Studio until 28 August 2026
Suzanne Ewing is professor of architectural criticism at the Edinburgh School of Architecture
In the AJ Buildings Library
