01/09/2026
We are happy to announce our upcoming exhibition, TONY FRETTON: PRACTICE.
PRACTICE is a retrospective exhibition of selected projects by the London-based architect Tony Fretton (b. 1945). Through texts, photographs, and drawings, the exhibition offers an insight into Fretton’s architectural practice as continuity of reflection on the existing environment, including the social, cultural and political dimensions of the city and what lies outside it.
It begins with the studies in performance art, photography, and sketchbooks, together with the buildings for the Lisson Gallery (London, 1986/1992) that established his distinctive architectural position. This sensibility, further refined in The Red House (London, 2000), gave the basis for projects of larger scale and proved successful in buildings realised in other countries that responded to their cultures, among them the City Hall in Deinze (2014), the British Embassy in Warsaw (2009), Fuglsang Art Museum in Denmark (2008), and the apartment building overlooking the Rhein Falls in Neuhausen, Switzerland (2022).
Conceived and realised in close collaboration and direct exchange with Tony Fretton, the exhibition also gives equal weight to his writing and drawing, showing their role in the realisation of the buildings and as a means of understanding the built environment as an embodiment of collective memory and knowledge. Concluding the exhibition is a new photo essay, in which Tony Fretton reapplies these approaches to the historic Kunsthalle building, in which the S AM is located, and the surrounding city.
Please join us for the opening at 7 PM on Friday, 18 September.
On the following day, Saturday 19 September, at 6:30 PM, Tony Fretton will give a presentation at the S AM followed by a conversation with Roger Diener (architect, Diener & Diener) and Irina Davidovici (Director, gta Archives at ETH Zürich). Free with museum admission.
