All works

Yantian Dolmen

Public art · Yantian, Shenzhen

A sculpture and piece of urban furniture for Shenzhen’s former Yantian port district. A dolmen-like slab combines the language of a Neolithic monument with an everyday street shelter. Its position between parking, planting and pavement makes room for informal social use.

Yantian Dolmen installed beside a street in Shenzhen

Yantian Dolmen

The structure introduces a sculptural place at the edge of the street. Its deliberately ambiguous form leaves its uses open to the people who encounter it.

Closer view of the canopy and contrasting supports of Yantian Dolmen

Monument and furniture

Different supports hold a single broad canopy. Ancient structural references and familiar municipal elements are combined into an object whose role is not fixed.

Design visualisation of the Yantian Dolmen

An open proposition

This design visualisation explores the dolmen as part of a family of urban objects. Their meaning develops through use, allowing occupation and interpretation to change over time.

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

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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].