Five up-and-coming architectural practices are staging an exhibition that allows the public to experience architecture, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor

There's something quite flat about most architectural exhibitions - all those panels of drawings and photographs, interspersed with a few balsawood models. Yet the built environment comes in three dimensions and that's how we experience it.

If architecture is all about making space - and it is, of course - the five up-and-coming architectural practices featured in an adventurous exhibition at the RHA's Gallagher Gallery in Ely Place have certainly shown how to do it.

And on a very limited budget of just €35,000.

Each one was allocated the same amount of "territory" on the gallery's main floor - a module measuring 2.9-metres wide, 3.6-metres high and 9-metres long - and got to do what they liked with it. Yet, though they all produced something very different, it hangs together.

Patrick Murphy, the gallery's director, says the idea germinated from a conversation he had with architect Paul Kelly.

"I said my problem with architectural shows is that they rely too much on drawings, models and photographs. So you're constantly reading, rather than experiencing."

Murphy recalled seeing Kevin Roche's first Irish exhibition in the early 1980s.

"What I remember most about it was not the plans or photographs but the sketchy orangerie he built in the middle. So what I wanted for this exhibition was to give people that spatial experience."

Twenty younger generation architects (i.e. aged under 40) were invited to submit projects and, from these, six were selected to participate in Practising Architecture - Boyd Cody, FKL, Hassett Ducatez, Heneghan Peng, Dominic Stevens and Tom de Paor, who had to pull out because of other commitments.

Given the level of professional jealousy among architects, the five who went ahead might have ended up with daggers drawn. But Dermot Boyd says it wasn't a case of individual practices elbowing each other out because they all had an interest in "making it read as one piece".

At a time when much contemporary art consists of installations of one sort or another, the aim of this exhibition is to show the public what architects do by turning architecture into an installation that people can walk through and experience.

It is also about architecture as art.

Patrick Murphy agrees that the process of putting Practising Architecture together was more collaborative than it would have been if artists were involved. "The modular solution would not have got very far if any of them were using sound because there would be noise overspill." With this exhibition, there was no hierarchy, according to Dermot Boyd.

"The order just evolved, depending on what each practice was planning to do with its space," he says, laughing off any comparison with prototype kitchen designs on RTÉ's Beyond the Hall Door.

The first slot is occupied by Heneghan Peng - a pair of parallel walls in black, with a band of translucent screens on one side and a matching band of mirror glazing on the other. The projected backlit images inevitably include their Grand Egyptian Museum project.

Next door, Boyd Cody is concentrating on perspective and how it can be distorted as well as showing how light can be manipulated within a series of asymmetrical spaces in a very small area.

It's a playful project, and the white ramp is bound to end up covered in shoe prints.

Hassett Ducatez has suspended a box full of tricks diagonally between their two white walls.

Using mirrors and coloured reflective glass and other optical illusions, space is projected within the half-tonne box, with overlapping planes and dots floating towards infinity.

FKL has gone for elemental geometry to give a completely different spatial experience. As Gary Lysaght says, their installation in unpainted plaster twists from one side to the other, creating subsidiary spaces and giving a sense of mass and compression as one walks through.

In the last slot, Dominic Stevens has created a labrynth in a dungeon, which will be a great hit with kids.

Six narrow openings lead into a dark congested space with square columns all offset and two holes in the low (1.8-metre) ceiling giving views into an open white-walled space above.

As different as chalk and cheese, the individual projects took much longer to conceive than to execute. "I suppose we spent 80 per cent of the time thinking and only 20 per cent actually doing it," says Dermot Boyd.

For them all, it was a question of how to represent themselves.

"The exhibition revolves around five architectural pieces which, in the main, have no direct narrative. This is not a retrospective and we are not showing our work. The exhibition surrounds the actual pieces each practice has made and how architecture is experienced," he insists.

Though some of their colleagues will brand Practising Architecture as shameless exhibitionism, the five practices involved believe this is the first time such a show with the declared aim of making architecture more tangible to the general public has been curated here.

It certainly fills the first floor of the RHA gallery in a way it has never been filled before.

There will, of course, be a table of reference material near the entrance, including catalogues illustrating the participating architects' projects and competition entries in recent years.

"It might make people look at buildings with a new eye and think about architecture as an experience in time," Paul Kelly says. Or even about the ability of architects to deliver projects on limited budgets - in this case, by throwing themselves into the construction, hands-on style.

Patrick Murphy hopes the exhibition will be the first of many - perhaps once every two years - that will "try to tackle architecture". A book is being produced to go with it, but it will not be available until the end of February.

In the meantime, just go to experience the architecture.

Practising Architecture is running at the RHA Gallagher Gallery in Ely Place, Dublin, until March 28th