Tony Fretton: Practice
Opening: 18/9/2026, 7 PM
The S AM Swiss Architecture Museum is proud to announce PRACTICE, a retrospective exhibition of selected projects of architect Tony Fretton (b. 1945, London). He established Tony Fretton Architects in London in 1984, which ran until 2024. His published texts on architecture are numerous, and he has taught extensively, including as Chair of Interiors Buildings and Cities at the Faculty of Architecture at TU Delft, and as guest 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. Together, they show Fretton’s practice as continuity of reflection on the existing environment, including the social, cultural and political dimensions of the city and what lies outside it. In his working approach, described in a text from 1998 called simply ‘A Method,’ he envisaged and addressed both the material aspects of buildings and forms of their use—and how these would change over time, physically and in narrations yet to unfold around them..
The exhibition at the S AM is conceived and realised in close collaboration and direct exchange with Tony Fretton. It begins with the studies in performance art, photography and sketchbooks that established his distinctive architectural position manifested in the buildings for the Lisson Gallery in London of 1986 and 1992. At the time, he wrote “I was looking for design approaches that were surprising and appealing in basic pleasures, had political dimensions that would be experienced bodily and gave the means for artistic exploration and the development of ideas. I found them in buildings that existed, in the effect of social and political ideas on them, the inflection of their meaning by word of mouth, literature and visual media and in changes that people made to them physically and in their imagination.”
This sensibility, which was further refined in the Red House of 2001, gave the basis for projects of larger scale and, significantly, proved successful in buildings realised in other countries that responded to their cultures—among them the City Hall in Deinze, Belgium, the British Embassy in Warsaw, Poland, Fuglsang Art Museum in Denmark and the apartment building overlooking the Rheinfall in Neuhausen, Switzerland.
Fretton’s writing and drawing will have equal weight in the exhibition, showing their role in realisation of the buildings and as a means to see that the fabric of buildings surrounding us embodies collective memory and knowledge. In the new photo essay that concludes the exhibition, Tony Fretton reapplies these approaches to the galleries of the Swiss Architecture Museum itself, the historical building of the Kunsthalle, in which the museum is located, and the city that surrounds it.
A major monograph on Tony Fretton’s work will be published by Quart Verlag, independently from the exhibition.
Tony Fretton
A METHOD (1988)
In projects that were later demolished, or that remained even more unbuilt than Mute [1986, unbuilt project of Mute Records headquarters in London], I devised this method:
- substitute for design: copying and modifying things that already work well;
- substitute for architectural ideas: narratives of the users;
- substitute for composition: sequence and change;
- substitute for composing a surface: arranging for life to take place in front of it;
- substitute for decor: recurring natural events such as the sun passing;
- substitute for stability: floating on the wreckage of former certainties on a current moving in an unknown direction.
