All works

A Clockwork Jerusalem

Exhibition · 2014 · British Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale

Co-curated by Sam Jacob (FAT) and Wouter Vanstiphout (Crimson Architectural Historians), and commissioned by the British Council for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. An exploration of British modernism through its buildings, landscapes and cultural imagination, from ancient monuments to postwar housing.

Liz Leyh’s Concrete Cows, borrowed from Milton Keynes, stand on either side of the entrance like Venetian lions. Tree trunks and a luminous galloping horse transform the portico into an electric landscape.

Models of Hulme, Thamesmead and Cumbernauld explore the ambition of postwar housing and the societies it sought to create.

The earth mound connects ancient burial sites with landscapes formed from demolition rubble. Around it, a panorama brings architecture into conversation with pastoral traditions, popular culture and science fiction.

Earth mound and panoramic mural in the central gallery of the British Pavilion.

A Clockwork Jerusalem

Photography © Cristiano Corte / British Council

The British Pavilion with two concrete cows outside its entrance.

British Pavilion, exterior

Photography © Cristiano Corte / British Council

Architectural models displayed in the outer galleries.

British Pavilion, gallery view

Photography © Cristiano Corte / British Council

Visitors enter the central gallery beneath a panoramic image of British culture.

British Pavilion, earth mound

Photography © Cristiano Corte / British Council

For exhibitions, acquisitions and commissions: [email protected].

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Selected works

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About Sam Jacob

Sam Jacob makes work that explores the strange lives of familiar things. His work draws on the images, objects and fragments of history through which we construct ideas of nature, culture and ourselves.

Across drawings, objects, installations and curatorial projects, he examines how architecture and material things embody social and cultural ideas, how ‘fictions’ become ‘real’, how ideas become things, and how things become ideas.

Collage, copying and processes of reconstruction are central to this practice, which also moves between digital processes and physical materiality. These transformations and translations bring both humour and unease to questions of memory, value and meaning.

Solo exhibitions include Against Nature (2023) and Empire of Ice Cream (2019) at Betts Project, London, and Disappear Here at the RIBA Architecture Gallery (2018). His work has also been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the V&A, MAK Vienna, the National Museum in Oslo, the Graham Foundation in Chicago and Secession, Vienna, and at Manifesta and the Venice and Chicago architecture biennials.

Curatorial projects include A Clockwork Jerusalem, co-curated with Wouter Vanstiphout for the British Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale; The Lie of the Land at MK Gallery; and Pattern as Politics, with Priya Khanchandani, at the 2019 Lisbon Architecture Triennale.

Jacob is a columnist for ArtReview, writes Strangeharvest, and is the author of Make It Real: Architecture as Enactment. He is Professor and Dean of the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Die Angewandte), and directs Sam Jacob Studio, a collaborative architecture and design practice.

For exhibitions, gallery enquiries, acquisitions and commissions, contact [email protected].