Sam Jacob

April & May

Bexleyheath semis

Hardwick Hall part 2

Hardwick Hall (part 1) Architecture before the idea of the architect existed (at least in England). Rather buildings made under the supervision of the excellently termed "master artificer". Shared authorship between Robert Smythson and Bess of Hardwick. Built between 1590.and 1597 but with a kind of immediate rawness that feels eternally modern. A precursor to Adolf Loos' Raumplan, Corbusier's Viila Savoye and OMA's Rotterdam Kunsthal. A kind of stretched out looping 3D internal promenade. A looseness of space, circulation and function that transitions though thresholds, scale, significances, moods. In turns, ambivalent then defined. Hard and soft. Stone and textile. Light and dark. Glass and tapestry. Like a series of fragmented buildings nested and/or threaded together. Domesticity and ritual delivered through a spatial quality of “incidents and accidents, hints and allegations”. @hardwickhallnt

Bricolage life @samjacobstudio

24 hrs in Mamlö featuring: Lewerentz: Bus stop, Chapel + bus stop, Chapel, Flower kiosk Bo100 housing / Ivo Waldhör Malmö Konsthall / Klas Anshelm Folkets Park mini golf, cafe and rusty equipment Moody half timber

Baz Luhrmann has resurrected the King of Rock and Roll for one last hurrah.⁠ ⁠ In a new column for ArtReview, architect Sam Jacob (@_samjacob ) recently indulged in a dose of nostalgia by watching ‘EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert’, a spinoff of the director’s 2022 Elvis biopic. Archival clips of Elvis in Las Vegas, shot in the early 1970s, were scanned, reconstructed and made legible via a Machine Assisted Learning ‘demixing’ technology using ‘spectrogram modelling, pattern recognition and deep learning training to prise voices and images out of muddy recordings, damaged or otherwise unusable film’.⁠ ⁠ ‘Extracting value from historic IP is nothing new’ writes Jacob. ‘“Re-issue, re-package, re-package / Re-evaluate the songs / Double-pack with a photograph / Extra track and a tacky badge,” as The Smiths put it in 1987’. Luhrmann’s reconstruction of a long-dead artist’s image is perhaps an indication of where culture is heading. ‘Like fracking, new technology enables new forms of extraction of value from the archive. Expect more of this very soon as other estates realise they can hone their archives into super-big, super-long product.’⁠ ⁠ Read the full article at the link in bio. ⁠ ⁠ All images courtesy of ‘EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert’, 2026, dir Baz Luhrmann. Courtesy Universal Pictures

Madelon Vriesendorp / 'Every Clown Has A Silver Lining' This Thursday at the IoA, legendary artist and OMA co-founder Madelon Vriesendorp will be in conversation with Sam Jacob. Expect a wide ranging list of subjects including (but not limited to): New York, Freud, games, Laurel and Hardy, how to survive creativity, freaks of culture, copying yourself, souvenirs, potatoes. Madelon is the author of some of the most powerful and strange images of architecture, posesdor of a surreal, playful and provocative vision, as well as perhaps the most generous and inspiring figure in all of architectural culture. Unmissable! Thursday 23rd April, 6pm, the Square, Institute of Architecture, die Angewandte, Vienna. As ever, open and free to all.

Souvlaki 1 Souvlaki 2 @samjacobstudio

The Factory As It Might Be  Last stop on the @studio_jacob_ioa William Morris total immersion field trip at Norman Foster's 1982 Renault Distribution Centre. We were lucky enough to see it between tenants, totally stripped out with 25,000 square metres of structured emptiness. Morris and Foster might seem unlikely bedfellows but perhaps these late 70s / early 80s high tech workplaces were a realisation of Morris' dream of the factory as a place of dignified, pleasurable labour. “… as to the buildings themselves I must ask leave to say something, because it is usually supposed that they must of necessity be ugly, and truly they are almost always at present mere night-mares; but it is, I must assert, by no means necessary that they should be ugly, nay, there would be no serious difficulty in making them beautiful, as every building might be which serves its purpose duly, which is built generously as regards material, and which is built with pleasure by the builders and designers; indeed, as things go, those nightmare buildings aforesaid sufficiently typify the work they are built for, and lack what they are, temples of overcrowding and adulteration and over-work, of unrest in a word; so it is not difficult to think of our factory buildings showing on their outsides what they are for, reasonable and light work, cheered at every step by hope and pleasure. So in brief, our buildings will be beautiful with their own beauty of simplicity as workshops, not bedizened with tomfoolery as some are now which do not any the more for that hide their repulsiveness!” The Factory As It Might Be William Morris 1884

The Welcome Building at the @scienceinnovationpark Showing students from @studio_jacob_ioa the recently completed @samjacobstudio project for the Science Museum Group. Thank you @mwrmoore1975 !

The Science Museum Group's collection centre at the Hawking Building. It holds over 300 000 objects from across the Science Museum, Museum of Science and Industry, National Rail Museum and the National Science and Media Museum. @scienceinnovationpark