Big Ideas Stuffed Into Small Buildings at the Victoria & Albert

Architecture is a tricky thing to convey in museums, because it's usually resigned to photos, blueprints, and weird little models. Which can be about as interesting as watching paint dry. So London's Victoria & Albert asked architects to throw up structures in the museum itself. The result: 1:1 - Architects Build Small Spaces displays seven real, live mini-buildings that, as the press materials tell us, "push the boundaries and possibilities of creative practice."

The theme is refuges. That's obvious enough in Sou Fujimoto Architects's acrylic cube (top), an abstraction of a tree that looks like a giant princess-cut diamond, and one of Terunobu Fujimori's whimsical teahouses (an old example below, and then video of the new project being built).

Helen & Hard Architects axed ash trees from a forest in their native Norway to make this exuberant pavilion, which references both Norse folklore and British garden folly from the 18th century (back in those quaint, pre-InterWeb times when putting odd crap in your backyard counted as high entertainment).

Not everything's a refuge in the strict sense of the word, this being architecture about "pushing boundaries and possibilities." Consider the contribution from Studio Mumbai Architects. It's the cast of a sliver of a hovel that's tucked into a narrow corridor behind the firm's offices and peopled by a family of eight. Sounds more like a domestic war zone than a sanctuary, but according to the project description, unauthorized dwellings of this sort "offer intelligent design solutions" in a place, where scarce land and skyrocketing real estate prices conspire against the city's poorest residents. "As well as shelter, they provide spaces for refuge, contemplation and worship," we're told.

Representing Team America is Rural Studio, the Auburn U architecture program that lets schlubby college students cobble together buildings in the backwoods of Alabama. Here, they built a woodshed that would only look like a refuge in, well, the backwoods of Alabama.

Whatever, there's a cool idea at play. The shed's made of thinnings, the smallest, weakest trees in a forest, razed to let stronger trees thrive. They're a key, if non-intuitive, hallmark of sustainable forestry management, and they have some promising applications in architecture. This pavilion will host improv jazz sessions. So you can watch woodshedding in the woodshed. Get it?

We're refreshed to see actual buildings in an exhibit about buildings (even though it isn't the first to do so). For diehard architecture nerds, it's a refuge own right.

1:1 - Architects Build Small Spaces opens tomorrow.