RCA student show at Yard

An exhibition exploring the ‘realities of contemporary life that architects and designers usually ignore’ opens at the Architecture Foundation’s Yard Gallery in London tomorrow.

Don’t Panic will present a range of films, products, architectural projects and installations by recent graduates of the Royal College of Art, focusing on such themes as fear, danger and the ‘fragility of human behaviour’. The exhibition itself is designed by Joel Dunmore and David Pierce, with graphics by RCA students Quentin Walesch and Catherine Guiral.

Curated by Gerrard O’Carroll and named after a Metro newspaper headline about the bird flu epidemic scares, Don’t Panic draws inspiration from earlier critical works, such as radical architectural group Superstudio’s films of the 1960s and Rem Koolhaas’s early proposals for London in the 1970s.

Examples of graduate work on show include Tomas Klassnik’s The Great Indoors, a breeze block-faced shed installation designed for ‘a population sustained by a diet of uncensored electronic stimulation and takeaway meals delivered by low-paid immigrant labour’. Matthias Aron Megyeri’s Sweet Dreams Security offers a defence system with a cuddly twist: fences with bunny rabbit railheads, razor-wire woven with butterflies and padlocks shaped like teddy bears.

Don’t Panic runs from 1 June to 13 July at the Yard Gallery in east London.