All works

The Positive Necessities of Life

Exhibition · 2026 · Red House, Bexleyheath

An exhibition of personally significant domestic objects on the dining table at Red House. Taking its title from William Morris’s 1880 lecture The Beauty of Life, it explores how usefulness and beauty are shaped by individual lives. Architects, designers and people from Bexley nominate objects that carry memories, identities and stories.

Curated by Studio Jacob at the Institute of Architecture, die Angewandte, Vienna.

The Positive Necessities of Life, Red House
The exhibition table

Lives, things and meaning

Morris understood the home as a social, cultural and political space. The exhibition brings that idea into the present through objects selected on their owners’ own terms.

The tablecloth, designed and fabricated by Marlene Ortner, Zoe Oschwald and Xaver Roos, reimagines Trellis, Morris’s first wallpaper design. Its flowers and foliage are removed, leaving a woven grid that organises the display.

Installation view, Red House

Contributors

Installation view, Red House

Architects, designers, critics, curators, manufacturers, filmmakers and politicians, alongside people from Bexleyheath and Erith.

Glenn Adamson

Stephen Bates

Anthony Burrill

Chila Burman

Aric Chen

Sam Chermayeff

David Chipperfield

Brendan Cormier

Jeremy Corbyn

Ben Evans

Formafantasma

Adam Nathaniel Furman

Takeshi Hayatsu

Edwin Heathcote

Patty Hopkins

Margaret Howell

Catherine Ince

Anab Jain

Meneesha Kellay

Crispin Kelly

Ken Loach

Stephanie Macdonald and Tom Emerson

Michael Marriott

Jasper Morrison

Alice Rawsthorn

RESOLVE Collective

Zandra Rhodes

Sonia Solicari

Deyan Sudjic

Faye Toogood

Sumayya Vally

Richard Wentworth

Bethan Laura Wood

Ellis Woodman

Olly Wainwright

Objects on the table

Objects on the table

Objects on the table, detail

Objects on the table, detail

Objects on the table

Objects on the table

Objects on the table, detail

Objects on the table, detail

Objects on the dresser

Objects on the dresser

Object on the dresser

Object on the dresser

Objects on the dresser

Objects on the dresser

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].