Architect: Tony Fretton

Fuglsang Kunstmuseum: Facts and interpretation in staging a museum

Fuglsang Kunstmuseum: Facts and interpretation in staging a museum

Tony Fretton

The following text was first published in OASE #111: Staging the Museum (2022). Drawing Matter would like to thank Tony Fretton and the issue’s editors Aslı Çiçek, Jantje Engels, and Maarten Liefooghe, for allowing us to reproduce the text. Purchase a copy of OASE #111 here. Fuglsang Kunstmuseum is located on the… Read More

Working with Tony Fretton

Working with Tony Fretton

Jonathan Sergison

In the early 1990s a number of architects, academics and artists came together in a rather fluid manner, meeting regularly in my Bloomsbury apartment. Tony Fretton was older than most of us and had already established a clear critical position. The conversations we had, and sometimes the arguments, were instructive… Read More

Drawing Powers 4: the drawing-object

Drawing Powers 4: the drawing-object

Fernando Poeiras

This text is the fourth in a series of five in which Fernando Poeiras (ESAD.CR/LIDA), explores the different powers of drawing within architectural design projects. Each text is illustrated with examples from the Drawing Matter Collection. Find the introduction to the series here. After I have developed a feel for the programme,… Read More

On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery

On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery

Nicholas Logsdail

A conversation with Nicholas Logsdail, standing in the farmyard at Shatwell, on the day he came with Freeny Yanni her sons Yanis and Cassius Hammick, to look at Tony Fretton’s sketchbooks for the Lisson Gallery. By way of response, Tony gives us his account of the genesis of the commission.… Read More

On a handrail

On a handrail

Jon Lopez

What drew me to the drawings Tony made, and the handrail itself, is the line it treads between standardisation and customisation. The way in which, for instance, standard sections of steel are bundled together and expressed to form thicker newel posts or to hold the glazing panels of the balustrade.… Read More

Tony Fretton: Tolerance

Tony Fretton: Tolerance

Richard Hall

The following text is an excerpt from AMAG 20 | Tony Fretton Architects. Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the editors of the magazine for allowing us to reproduce the text on drawingmatter.org. To order a copy of AMAG 20, click here. Tolerance is a measure of… Read More

Tony Fretton: Drawn Closer

Tony Fretton: Drawn Closer

Tony Fretton and Sarah Handelman

Sometimes you make drawings to tell yourself the project is going okay. Well, that’s what I do. This drawing came quite late in the design of the first Lisson Gallery. In the way I used to work, you would reach a point where you’d have a very thorough sense of… Read More

Alternative Histories: Raamwerk on Tony Fretton

Alternative Histories: Raamwerk on Tony Fretton

Alternative Histories: ECTV on Tony Fretton

Alternative Histories: ECTV on Tony Fretton

We are very happy with this new commission. Thinking of a third phase for the London Lisson gallery is an honorable and challenging design assignment! Without false modesty, we must recognize that a Belgian architect is particularly well-placed for this task. After all, Belgians are very skilled in row-house configurations… Read More

Alternative Histories: Dyvik Kahlen Architects on Tony Fretton

Alternative Histories: Dyvik Kahlen Architects on Tony Fretton

A Ruin The sketch is finished and unfinished at the same time, it’s precise and equally ambiguous. In a way architecture should be the same, somewhere between a ruin and a loved space. A ruin understood as a spatial sequence that follows it’s own internal logic, void of an immediate… Read More

Mystery as Ground

Mystery as Ground

Andrew Clancy

I We could start here, with this image in the exhibition Disappear Here, found in Abraham Bosse’s (c. 1602–1676) Maniere universelle de M. Desargues pour pratiquer la perspective. Two men stand looking at a four-sided form projected on the ground. Rather than an orthogonal, universal perspective that privileges one point outside the picture,… Read More

Alternative Histories: Tony Fretton Architects on Erik Gunnar Asplund

Alternative Histories: Tony Fretton Architects on Erik Gunnar Asplund

We recognise modernism as a continuing program to find architecture for the present time, and Asplund’s work as part of its history.  Our project is a thought experiment on the central aspects of architecture’s modernism – social responsibility in combination with freedom to work with current sensibilities. It has proceeded… Read More

Tony Fretton: Lisson Gallery 1

Tony Fretton: Lisson Gallery 1

Tony Fretton

84-7-1 is a singular image, a drawing of Lisson 1 seen from Lisson Street. It shows the back gallery as it was first intended – but which is not what it became, because the client kept buying land and adding to it. This sketch explores how a piece of architecture… Read More