Tony Fretton: Practice

Description

The S AM Swiss Architecture Museum is pleased to announce the retrospective exhibition PRACTICE featuring selected projects by architect Tony Fretton (born 1945 in London). In 1984, he founded Tony Fretton Architects in London, which was active until 2024. He has published numerous texts on architecture and has taught as Chair of Interiors Buildings and Cities at the Faculty of Architecture at TU Delft, as well as a visiting professor at GSD Harvard, ETH Zurich, and EPFL Lausanne. He lives and works in London. Fretton's buildings and projects are presented at S AM through texts, photographs, and drawings. They collectively showcase his practice as a continuous reflection on the existing environment, including the social, cultural, and political dimensions of the city and its surroundings. In his approach, which he described in a straightforward text titled 'A Method' in 1998, he visualized and addressed both the material aspects of buildings and the forms of their use — and how these would change over time, physically and narratively, which was yet to develop. The exhibition at S AM was conceived and realized in close collaboration and direct exchange with Tony Fretton. It begins with studies on performance art, photographs, and sketchbooks that established his distinctive architectural position, as seen in the buildings from 1986 and 1992 for the Lisson Gallery in London. At that time, he wrote: 'I was looking for design approaches that surprise and provide fundamental pleasures, that have political dimensions, are physically experienced, and provide means for artistic engagement and idea development. I found them in existing buildings: in how social and political ideas affected them, the change in their meaning through oral tradition, literature, and visual media, as well as through modifications made by people physically and in their imagination.' This sensitivity, further refined in The Red House (2001), formed the basis for larger-scale projects and, notably, proved successful in buildings realized in other countries that responded to their cultures — including the Town Hall in Deinze, Belgium, the British Embassy in Warsaw, the Fuglsang Art Museum in Denmark, and the residential block overlooking the Rhine Falls in Neuhausen, Switzerland. Fretton's writings and drawings hold the same importance in the exhibition. This underscores their role in the realization of the buildings and as a means to recognize that the fabric of the structures around us embodies collective memory and knowledge. In the new photo essay concluding the exhibition, Tony Fretton applies these approaches again: to the galleries of the Swiss Architecture Museum itself, to the historic building of the Kunsthalle where the museum is housed, and to the urban environment. An important monograph on Tony Fretton's work will be published independently of the exhibition by Quart Verlag. Tony Fretton
A METHOD (1988)
In projects that were later demolished or remained largely unrealized, such as Mute [1986, unrealized project for the headquarters of Mute Records in London], I developed the following method: Substitute for design: copying and modifying things that already work well;
Substitute for architectural ideas: narratives of the users;
Substitute for form: sequence and change;
Substitute for surface design: ensuring life happens directly in front;
Substitute for furnishings: recurring natural events like the sun's path;
Substitute for stability: drifting on the remnants of former certainties, on a current with an unknown destination.

Highlights

• Retrospective exhibition of Tony Fretton
• Presentation of texts, photographs, and drawings
• Focus on social, cultural, and political dimensions

General Information

The PRACTICE exhibition at the S AM Swiss Architecture Museum showcases selected projects by architect Tony Fretton. It offers insights into his architectural practice and reflects on the existing environment in urban contexts.

Location

Steinenberg 7, 4051 Basel, Switzerland

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