Tony Fretton

The S AM Swiss Architecture Museum is pleased to announce the retrospective exhibition “Practice” featuring selected projects by architect Tony Fretton (born in London in 1945). In 1984, he founded the firm Tony Fretton Architects in London, which remained active until 2024. He has published numerous texts on architecture and has taught architecture in various capacities, including as Chair of Interiors, Buildings, and Cities at the Faculty of Architecture at TU Delft and as a visiting professor at the Harvard GSD, ETH Zurich, and EPFL Lausanne. He lives and works in London.

Fretton’s buildings and projects are presented at the S AM through texts, photographs, and drawings. Together, they reveal his practice as a continuous reflection on the built environment, including the social, cultural, and political dimensions of the city and its surroundings. In his approach to work, which he described in a 1998 text simply titled “A Method,” he visualized and explored both the material aspects of buildings and the forms of their use—and how these would change over time, both physically and in the narratives about them that were yet to unfold.

The exhibition at S AM was conceived and realized in close collaboration and direct dialogue with Tony Fretton. It begins with the studies on performance art, the photographs, and the sketchbooks that established his distinctive architectural stance, as evidenced in the buildings he designed in 1986 and 1992 for the Lisson Gallery in London. At the time, he wrote: “I was looking for design approaches that surprise and bring elementary joys, that possess political dimensions, can be experienced physically, and provide the means for artistic engagement and the development of ideas. I found them in existing buildings: in the way social and political ideas influenced them, in the transformation of their meaning through oral tradition, literature, and visual media, as well as through the changes that people had made to them, both physically and in their imagination.”