Tate St Ives exhibition of one of the pioneers of constructivism, Naum Gabo, brings together sculptures, paintings, drawings, and architectural and public projects. The model for his ‘ideological contribution to Constructivism’ that flanks the De Bijenkorf department store in Rotterdam will be on display for the first time, demonstrating his ideas about redefining public spaces with sculptural forms. The exhibition opens at the end of January.
Langlands & Bell
Langlands & Bell’s exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum in March explores the artists’ views on architecture and what they see as the disconnect between a building or object’s intended narrative and what it ends up conveying about contemporary society. The show starts with objects they gathered from the rubble and detritus of Whitechapel in the early 1980s, to their recent explorations of the slick hyper-determined buildings of Silicon Valley’s tech giants.
Langlands and Bell: Degrees of Truth
Munch Museum
Munch Museum by Herreros Arquitectos
Oslo’s long-awaited new Munch Museum opens this spring. Designed by Spanish practice, Herreros Arquitectos, the 13-floor, 26,000 sq. m building in the waterside area of Bjorvika is located just 200 metres from the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet by Snøhetta. When complete it will be world’s largest museum dedicated to a single artist.
Venice Architecture Biennale
True to form, the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale, opening in May, has a theme so vague as to give participating countries a free rein to do almost anything they want.
In 2018 the Irish architects Grafton (Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell) came up with the theme of Freespace. This time the curator, MIT’s Hashim Sarkis, has decided to pose the question – ‘how shall we live together?’.
Representing the UK, architect Madeleine Kessler and writer and educator Manijeh Verghese have chosen to explore the ’creeping epidemic’ of privatised public space in cities across the country.
In fact, the pavilions tend to say more about the condition of the national psyche and in 2018 Britain was revealed as a schizophrenic nation, both wildly eccentric and emotionally retarded. If nothing else, it’ll be interesting to see how we are perceived two years on.
Ando in Paris
Tadao Ando’s conversion of Paris’s Bourse de Commerce into a contemporary art museum for French billionaire collector François Pinault that opens in June, will be on a lot of architects must-do list for 2020. This is because it’s classic Ando – in this case the insertion of a concrete cylinder into the 19th century building’s core creating a suite of double height galleries. Along the top of the cylinder a circular walkway will allow previously inaccessible views of the 19th Century building’s internal façade. The museum will open in June 2020.
Museum of the Home
Opening in mid-July, the £18 million expansion of the Museum of the Home, (formerly the Geffrye Museum) by Wright & Wright will have 80% more space for exhibitions, events and collections and a new entrance opposite Hoxton station. The former Marquis of Lansdowne pub, which was to have been demolished under previous plans by David Chipperfield, will be a café open outside museum hours.
