Thread as Blueprint: Mina Gospavić's Embroidered London

One hundred hours of stitching, and not a single line ruled with a straight edge. That is how architect and artist Mina Gospavić built Green Belt (2025), the embroidered artwork now hanging in the Architecture Room at this year's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

Gospavić, born in 1988 to British-Serbian parents and now based in Berlin, trained at the Bartlett School of Architecture, where the speculative drawing culture of Archigram, shaped by the school's own Peter Cook, still runs deep. But where her contemporaries reach for CAD software and parametric modelling, Gospavić reaches for a needle. Embroidery, for her, is a working method rather than decoration, a way of thinking through architectural questions with thread standing in for the computational tools that now dominate the profession. Having worked at established architectural offices in both London and Berlin, she brings that dual grounding to bear on the way she now questions the discipline from within.

‘Green Belt’, Mina Gospavić, 2025. Unique hand-embroidered artwork in cotton and felt fibres on linen canvas, in hand-painted frame.

Green Belt takes London's contested urban fringe as its subject. Rather than mapping the city as it stands, Gospavić imagines a stretch of green belt land reworked: infrastructure pushed underground, the surface given back to housing, fields and community life woven into one continuous fabric. The piece began as a hand-drawn sketch before being pulled into three dimensions on linen canvas, with block patches of coloured felt laid down first to ground the composition, followed by roughly a hundred hours of cotton floss embroidery.

‘Green Belt’, (detail), Mina Gospavić, 2025.

The technique carries the meaning. Long stitch floats trace the buildings, giving them clean architectural edges, while looser seed stitches render the marshes and threshing circles beyond, softer and less contained. The boundary between built and natural is drawn entirely through stitch type, an idea rendered visible only because it is worked in cloth rather than on screen. Colour does structural work too, marking out each building as a character on the city's edge, provisional enough to be unthreaded and relocated should the community around it need something different.

‘Green Belt’, (detail), Mina Gospavić, 2025.

This is Gospavić's third appearance at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, following an early commendation for the AJ/Lendlease Best First Time Exhibitor award back in 2013. Her practice has shifted since then, moving from abstract formal experiments towards work that speaks directly to housing, planning and land use today.

The 2026 Summer Exhibition, themed around Interconnectedness and with its Architecture Room curated by Adam Caruso and Peter St John, feels like the right setting for a piece built on exactly that premise: cloth and city, drawing and craft, held together by a single continuous thread.

. . .

Further Information:

Green Belt is on show at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, London, until 23 August 2026. Find it in the Architecture Room, curated by Adam Caruso and Peter St John.

@mina.gospavic.studio