All works

A Very Small Part of Architecture

Public art · Highgate Cemetery, London

Adolf Loos’s unbuilt 1921 mausoleum for Max Dvorák is recreated at full scale in Highgate Cemetery. Timber framing and scaffold net turn the heavy original proposal into a translucent apparition. Commissioned by the Architecture Foundation, the installation imagines another kind of memorial: one to unrealised possibilities.

Illuminated stepped installation at Highgate Cemetery

A Very Small Part of Architecture

The stepped form is reconstructed among Highgate’s existing monuments. Light reveals the timber frame through the scaffold net, making a solid-looking design become transparent.

Side view of the translucent installation at Highgate Cemetery

A ghost of an idea

The original mausoleum was never built. Its full-size reappearance lets a familiar architectural image be encountered as a temporary structure in a real landscape.

The lit installation seen beyond a stone wall

Tomb and monument

The title comes from Loos’s 1910 essay Architecture, which places the tomb and the monument within the realm of art. The installation tests that proposition through a temporary public encounter.

Design visualisation of the proposed Highgate installation

An alternative future

The design visualisation places the open frame within the cemetery. AKTII provided engineering support; ZHA, Carmody Groarke and RCKa supported the Architecture Foundation commission.

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

Opening the files…

Selected works

50 works in 4 files. More to come.

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].