Scottish architect Kathryn Findlay is being celebrated at the V&A Dundee after making history as one of the country’s top designers
Kathryn Findlay was the first woman architect elected to the Royal Scottish Academy and spent her career pushing boundaries with her bold and experimental designs. Now 11 years after her death, the design museum is unveiling ‘Ushida Findlay: Unbroken Spaces’, a free display hailing her success.
The exhibit will open next month and will explore the creativity, curiosity and courage that shaped Kathryn’s creations, which continue to inspire artists today.
“The drawings and models that will be on display at V&A Dundee were simply part of everyday life growing up,” says Kathryn Findlay’s daughter Miya Ushida. “We always knew our parents were extraordinary and it is a great pleasure to be able to share their work with the public.”
Running from 4th July to 28th August, the exhibition will bring together rare materials from old archives. It will showcase the pioneering collaboration she formed with partner Eisaku Ushida and tracing the evolution of her architectural career. The display offers a unique look at how the partnership combined art and science with landscape to create an architecture entirely their own, from early concept ideas to project documents.
Miya, who is now an architect herself, says “Having worked with my mother during the later years of her career and knowing how deeply connected she felt to Scotland, it is especially meaningful to see her work celebrated in the place she came from.”
Kathryn was even part of the earliest conversations about bringing a V&A museum to Dundee. When her own bid was unsuccessful, Kathryn later recalled suggesting that the engineers, Arup, connect with Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, an introduction that helped bring the current building into being. Visitors will be able to see her initial architectural ideas as part of the display celebrating her career.
“Although I never had the chance to meet Kathryn, it’s been wonderful uncovering who she was through the Ushida Findlay archive,” says James Wylie, Curator at V&A Dundee. “I’m delighted to be working with her daughter Miya and the RSA to celebrate one of Scotland’s architectural mavericks.”
Angus-born Kathryn grew up in Finavon as the daughter of a sheep farmer before training at Edinburgh College of Art and the Architectural Association in London. She then moved to Japan and set up the architectural practice Ushida Findlay with her husband.
In 1999, the firm contributed to the ‘Homes for the Future’ development on the edge of Glasgow Green as part of ‘Glasgow 1999: UK City of Architecture and Design’. It was their first building in Europe, marking the beginning of Findlay’s return to the UK, from where she embarked on a series of ambitious projects.
Known for their bold imagination and fluid, organic forms, Ushida Findlay made a name for themselves in the 1990s with wildly imaginative and otherworldly houses in the UK and Japan.
In Kathryn’s final years, working with her daughter Miya and others as Ushida Findlay Architects, she worked across a range of projects in scale and ambition, most notably the ArcelorMittal Orbit for the London 2012 Olympics. She was announced the winner of the The Jane Drew Prize, an award considered the most prestigious award for elevating the profile of women in architecture, shortly after she died on 10th January 2014.
V&A Dundee
1 Riverside Esplanade
Dundee
DD1 4EZ
Visit the V&A Dundee website | Follow V&A Dundee on Instagram
Excited by the Kathryn Findlay exhbition? Learn about some other exhibitions at the V&A Dundee.
Unearth the extraordinary world of garden design at V&A Dundee
