Celebrate spring with a clutch of exhibitions

In early spring, the new crop of exhibitions emerges with the reliability of snowdrops and daffodils – and with equal variety and urgency.

The harvest started with the opening of the Norman Shaw show at the Royal Academy (until 25 May). It's a small and carefully chosen display of the free-style work with which the architect made his name, before he became a Classicist and produced such grand designs as the Piccadilly Hotel and Bryanston in the last two decades of his life.

Shaw's Old English and revived Queen Anne became widely emulated models, and as Shaw's biographer Andrew Saint points out in his informative hand list, if you 'look round any English city, town or suburb built between 1880 and 1930, you will see traces of the ghost of Richard Norman Shaw'.

From threshold to bed
Freedom of composition allowed him to respond specifically to individual clients and sites. No wonder that he was so influential: he had invented new and immensely versatile approaches to architecture that, though created in the countryside and much influenced by vernacular ways of building, could be adapted to virtually any circumstance, from grand country houses in Sussex to commercial buildings in the City like New Zealand Chambers (sadly destroyed by bombing in 1941). All his work is deeply imbued by understanding of how people would behave and feel in his buildings from the transformatory moment of crossing the threshold to the quiet drama of going to bed.

As Saint points out, another reason for Shaw's popularity was his command of late nineteenth century reproduction and printing techniques. Shaw, then his brilliant assistants like W.R.Lethaby, Ernest Newton and Gerald Horsley, drew wonderfully detailed and dramatic perspectives that were shown in the architectural magazines, and sometimes in the popular press. Few since Palladio had used print so effectively to publicise their talents and build up successful practice.

Festival of fractals
Equally attached to expounding their work through powerful media (mostly electronic nowadays) are members of the AA's Design Research Laboratory (DRL) whose work is on show at the school until 18 March.  Their exhibition of parametric urbanism is a festival of fractals (as shown in last week's AJ), and it's hard to avoid a sense of déjà vu when looking at yet another glorification of geometries that seem ignore people altogether.

Forms, based as they supposedly are on rules of nature, are often similar to vegetal ones. The resulting exhibition is a bit like a festival of surreal flower arranging using pond slime, exotic creepers and strange Banksia-like fruit bodies – combinations sometimes pretty and occasionally intriguing but rarely relevant to human life.

Here and there something looks almost habitable. I was struck by the tower by Sangyup Lee, Louis Fragrada, Natapon Junngur and Shu-Hao Wu under tutor Theodore Spyropoulis. Though members of the DRL seem to be embarrassed by mention of anything so vulgar as function, it seems to have similarities to some of Ken Yeang's work on climatically savvy skyscrapers in the tropics. At least it's a change from the products of what Jaffer Kolb called 'a Zaha boot camp' or the vapid application of gigantic botanically-derived decoration, like grotesquely overblown Sullivanesque writhings which are allowed to overwhelm everything.

Subterranean splendour
Botanical analogies are also irresistible at the Building Centre exhibition Underground, London's Hidden Infrastructure (until 19 April).  The mycelia of field fungi are the largest living known, sometimes acres in extent. Their huge interwoven mats of hyphae (hollow filaments that allow minerals to be taken up from the soil and waste products excreted) are the real long-lasting body of the fungus; the mushrooms we see in autumn are but ephemeral fruiting bodies.

The ratio of overground to underground is reversed in cities, but all urban developments are dependent on inter-twined subterranean services. From gas mains to metro lines, they grow unplanned, like hyphae. A transparent model of (some) of the things that happen under Kings Cross and St Pancras makes the analogy irresistible. But as Spencer de Grey pointed out when he opened the exhibition, everything that happens below ground is almost unplanned (virtually all that's required of an addition to the underworld is that it avoids damaging anything else that's down there).

With new possibilities offered for instance by combined heat and power systems and the possibility of underground refuse collection, clearly the time has come for planning the subterranean world, but the problems will be immense. There is not even a definitive map of the sewers of London – the city may have been one of the first to have a modern underground realm, but its history and complexity make new work complicated and in some cases impossible. 

Even so, the show hints that new possibilities in architecture are attainable underground using radical services technology and innovatory materials like tough self-cleaning glass. Personally, I'm rather more impressed by the possibilities offered by the troglodytic world than by the ones suggested by the parametric geeks, but the new underground will need architects with Norman Shaw's empathy if it is to realise its human potential.