By Nazanine Nouri
The Royal Academy of Arts in London has held a Summer Exhibition every year without interruption since 1769. This year, for the first time, the Exhibition is curated by an architect: Farshid Moussavi, who is also a Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
The Summer Exhibition (which opened this week and runs through Aug. 17) is the world’s largest open-submission contemporary art exhibition, providing a unique platform for artists to showcase their works to an international audience, from painting and printmaking to photography, sculpture, architecture and film. The majority of the works are for sale, and the funds raised support the exhibiting artists, the postgraduate students studying in the RA Schools, and the work of the Royal Academy.
The Summer Exhibition has played a major role in funding the training of young artists in the Royal Academy Schools – the longest-established art school in the United Kingdom, which offers the only free three-year postgraduate program in Europe.
In her curating of the Summer Exhibition, Moussavi is breaking with conventions: This year, architecture is not consigned to a separate space, but rather integrated with the artworks throughout the exhibition.
She said it was “hard to believe” that the RA Summer Exhibition had never been curated by an architect before.
“The first thing I thought was: we need to take architecture out of its own confined space,” she said in an interview with RA Magazine. “We should not be saying different categories of art – sculpture, painting, printmaking – are all mixed up as art, and then architecture goes in a separate room. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the fact that you walk around the galleries and then get to the architecture room, and it becomes very professional.”
“In a normal exhibition, there’s a curator who very carefully, over an extended period of time, selects works and puts them next to each other,” she added. “In the Summer Exhibition, that rarely happens.”
Moussavi’s chosen theme for the Summer Exhibition is “Dialogues,” i.e. the dialogue between art and architecture and the capacity of art to open up conversation.
“The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2025 will be dedicated to art’s capacity to forge dialogues and to afford us sensitivity towards societal concerns, such as ecology, survival and living together,” said Moussavi in the RA press release. “These dialogues can be between people of different races, genders or cultures; between humans, all species, and the planet; or across different disciplines – art, science, politics for example.”
Moussavi said she hoped visitors will see “the dialogues – between works, between spaces, between themselves and the art,” make them pause and “think a little differently.”
Moussavi was born in Shiraz, Iran in 1965 and moved to the United Kingdom in 1979 to attend boarding school. She went on to study architecture at the University of Dundee and University College London, before graduating with a Masters of Architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
After working for Renzo Piano and Rem Koolhaas, she came to prominence in 1995, when together with her then husband and business partner, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, they shot to fame winning the competition for the Osanbashi Yokohama International Passenger Terminal in Japan, which became one of their most acclaimed and award-winning international projects. Together, they founded Foreign Office Architects, in reference to their foreign origins and the fact that they were working in London on a project in Japan.
Other projects she co-authored at FOA included the Spanish Pavilion at the 2005 Aichi International Expo in Japan; the John Lewis Department Store and Cineplex in Leicester; the Coastal Park with outdoor auditoriums in Barcelona; the Carabanchel Social Housing in Madrid; the Bluemoon Hotel in Groningen; and the Meydan Retail Complex in Istanbul. FOA received several awards from the Royal Institute of British Architects, as well as the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale Award and the Kanagawa Prize for Architecture in Japan in 2003.
Following her breakup with her then husband and business partner, Moussavi re-established her practice in her own name, Farshid Moussavi Architects (FMA) in 2011. FMA designed the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, Ohio; Victoria Beckham’s flagship store in London and Hong Kong; the Harrods department store in London; and the Ismaili Cultural Center in Houston, Texas. Other projects include residential complexes in Paris and Montpellier, France; the 130 Fenchurch Street Office Complex and the Zabludowicz Collection Gallery in London.
In 2018, Moussavi was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition of her services to architecture. She has been a visiting professor at UCLA, Columbia, and Princeton universities as well as at several architecture schools in Europe. She was Chair of the Master Jury of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2004, and served as member of the Award’s Steering Committee until 2015.
Moussavi was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Whitechapel Gallery and The Architecture Foundation in London between 2009 and 2018, and, since 2018, the Norman Foster Foundation. She was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2015 and has been Professor of Architecture in the RA Schools since 2017. She has authored a number of books including three based on her research and teaching at Harvard.
