217: Two museums, four exhibitions
SOTO's House of Tsuzumi, Junya Ishigami's water museum, LANZA's Serpentine Pavilion, McGlashan and Everist's Heide gallery, Cheng Yuzheng in Beijing, and Kneer at Blue Velvet.
Six projects this week, split between buildings that hold art and the work that fills them. In Japan, SOTO-ARCHiTECTS sets House of Tsuzumi as a residence with a single theatrical gesture. In China, Junya Ishigami and associates float the Zaishui Art Museum across an artificial lake. In London, LANZA atelier is named for the Serpentine Pavilion 2026. In Australia, Heide by McGlashan and Everist returns through Danny Kai’s lens. And in Beijing, Cheng Yuzheng’s Life on Mars opens at Reflexion, with Julian-Jakob Kneer’s Gestalt closing the week at Blue Velvet.
The thread running across the six is the porous edge between architect and artist. Ishigami builds a museum that behaves like a body of water. LANZA approach the Serpentine commission as sculpture. McGlashan and Everist’s 1960s gallery house is reread as composition rather than container. Cheng Yuzheng treats the exhibition as terrain, Kneer treats the figure as instrument, and SOTO-ARCHiTECTS lets a single curved wall do the work of a stage set. Six positions on how form proposes a programme, and how a programme answers back.
From Jutaku: Wedged between Edo-era workshops and apartment blocks in Tokyo, SOTO-ARCHiTECTS designs House of Tsuzumi, a three-storey volume cinched at its waist to pull morning light into rooms the sun would otherwise skip.
A kilometre of building brushes the surface of an artificial lake in Rizhao, Shandong in China, where junya ishigami + associates places the Zaishui Art Museum as Ishigami’s “gentle giant.”
From London Guide: On the lawn beside the Serpentine South Gallery in London, Mexico City studio LANZA atelier builds a serpentine, a 2026 pavilion of red brick walls that bend rather than stand straight.
On the Birrarung in Melbourne, McGlashan and Everist built Heide for John and Sunday Reed in 1967, a Mt Gambier limestone gallery designed to outlast fashion and read, eventually, as a ruin.
Inside a vaulted concrete hall in Beijing, Reflexion opens Life on Mars, Cheng Yuzheng‘s first Beijing solo, ten small acrylic and oil paintings hung sparsely across white walls.
Inside Blue Velvet Projects, a converted apartment in Zürich, Julian-Jakob Kneer mounts Gestalt, a body of work that treats the executive attaché case as portable law and prosthesis of self-control.
