ArkDes ExhibitionArkDes ExhibitionArkDes Exhibition
For the first time in many years, ArkDes hosted an exhibition featuring currently active Swedish architects. It was also the first time the studio’s work was presented in its entirety. The installation comprised 432 square metres of glass surface, inviting visitors to experience the exhibition as a gathering space—akin to a town square—that could be used for reflection, discussion, and activities relating to architecture and its role in society. The space brought visitors into contact with a full-scale architectural experience.
The Drill Hall is one of Sweden’s iconic exhibition spaces, serving first Moderna Museet and now ArkDes. At the intersection between the museum’s desire to showcase a retrospective of ThamVidegård’s practice and the task of creating a spatial installation that allows visitors to experience architecture at full scale, we identified a unique opportunity to utilise the existing space while highlighting it.
Consequently, the spatial concept was developed with minimal architectural additions: only the entirely open Drill Hall as found and a transparent glass floor. Displayed beneath the floor is a selection of projects executed from 1999 to 2023. The projects function as interconnected stories; there is no marked path that forces the visitor to browse in a specific order. Instead, it is a completely open platform, inviting visitors to explore what they find enticing in any order they choose. The desire to discover what lies beneath the next glass pane guides movement through the room.
The exhibition features a broad selection of projects from the studio’s over twenty years of practice. These include the Konstnärliga faculty of arts building for the University of Gothenburg, the 150-metre-tall +One Tower and main entrance for the Swedish Exhibition and Congress Centre in Gothenburg, the Denfert art centre in Paris, and a spectacular office building at Sveaplan—a new cornerstone on the northern approach to Stockholm.
The exhibition’s title, On:Architecture, stems from Tham and Videgård’s wish to ignite a conversation about aspects of architecture that are often overlooked. By engaging in an architectural debate that frequently avoids core issues, the exhibition highlights elements of ThamVidegård’s work to shed light on some of the fundamental facets of the profession.
''The exhibition ThamVidegård - On:Architecture opened in November 2022 at ArkDes, the national museum of architecture and design in Stockholm, Sweden. It was the largest exhibition of a contemporary Swedish architecture office for many years at the museum. It was also a spectacular spatial experience, designed by the office, that created a gigantic glass floor, a setting for models, drawings and photography of 73 projects, from their earliest works to projects on the drawing board today. The last 20 years of Tham & Videgård’s work has been compelling, the future projects possibly even more so. The exhibition at ArkDes this book accompanies, under its 432 sqm glass floor, also created an experience for the public of floating above the work.
The freedom of this open, empty room, the wandering it encouraged, is quite unlike any other exhibition experience I have been involved in. Hovering somewhere between the abstractness of pure geometric form and the charged, political reality of all city spaces, the installation is as much an illustration of ThamVidegård’s approach to architecture as the projects themselves. We are very proud to have hosted the work at the museum and are happy that this book will help those who were unable to visit to experience the work of one of Sweden’s finest architects.” Kieran Long, from the book On:Architecture produced in conjunction with the exhibition.
