REIACH AND HALL news

RSA Medal 2009

Reiach and Hall Architects with Neil Gillespie in collaboration with artist Roger Ackling win the RSA Medal for Architecture 2009

Reiach and Hall Architects, with Neil Gillespie in collaboration with artist Roger Ackling, have been awarded the RSA Medal for Architecture 2009. The Medal is awarded "for outstanding work, preferably a drawing, to encourage younger architects".

Neil Gillespie, design director of Reiach and Hall, adds that "We have become friends with many renowned artists from across the world through sleeper, a small gallery space that is embedded within our office. Sleeper was co-founded with artist Professor Alan Johnston. One of the artists who has shown at sleeper and who has become particularly influential is Roger Ackling. Roger Ackling is an internationally acclaimed artist and educator. He is Professor of Fine Art and Painting at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London."

The work exhibited in this year's RSA Annual Exhibition features the Ackling Cook Bothy, sited in the remote beauty of the Ettrick Valley, set alongside an Ackling work recently installed at Reiach and Hall's sleeper gallery.

The bothy is a refurbishment and extension of a remote cottage carried out for two artists, Roger Ackling and Martin Cook, and their families. The extension, clad in black charred timber slats, lies as a shadow behind the main house, whose accommodation has been opened up in section and plan to provide bright, modern living space. The stone cottage is of the landscape, and rests in the landscape, with no conscious boundary or garden.

Roger's work centres around drawing, drawing by means of the sun. He burns exquisite marks and patterns, using a magnifying glass, on pieces of found wood. The wood is always jetsam. Once useful but now discarded these pieces are rediscovered as works of art.

Reiach and Hall viewed the existing bothy almost as building jetsam, a once useful shelter that has now been abandoned. The architectural challenge was about how to renovate this shell and how to extend it on a limited budget in a remote location.

The concept for the new extension is a shadow on the hill. Imagining enlightenment from the North, a shadow is cast southwards from the basic bothy form. This idea combines notions and passions about Scotland and the North coupled with an understanding and reference to Roger’s work. The old bothy literally burns the new extension into the site.

www.royalscottishacademy.org _ www.sleeper1.com

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