Hypha Studios & recessed.space have announced the next exhibition in their collaborative gallery at No.1 Poultry in Hypha Gallery 2.
The Bank of England in Ruins, is curated by Sam Jacob / Studio Jacob is an exhibition about architecture, ruins, value, and money.
With the gallery opposite the Bank of England, the exhibition directly considers its urban context with a centrepiece of a large physical model made by Studio Jacob based on a drawing by Joseph Gandy showing John Soane’s design of the Bank of England. Soane’s building had only recently been completed, but Gandy’s drawing (1830) shows the bank in ruins after some unspecified future catastrophe.
Alongside the model of the Bank of England in Ruins the projects on show are explorations of (some) of these questions including:
•Drawings of the architectural fragments used in the design of bank notes, where buildings are used as symbols of both solidity and state.
• A tower-object reprising Soane’s Pasticcio, a surreal stack of varied, incongruent architectural pieces in the courtyard of his Lincon’s Inn Fields home reimagined with fragments of Soane, Stirling and fragments of banknote architecture.
• Responses by international architects to documentary photographs of the real ruination of Soane’s Bank of England, demolished 1925 to 1939. Dreams of reconstruction creating alternative forms value. Ruins not as ending but as a beginning.
• Souvenir architectural models cast from shredded bank notes.
The Bank of England in Ruins will include works by: Studio Jacob and Asl? Çiçek, Bamidele Awoyemi, CAN, David Kohn, DRDH, Drawing Architecture Studio, Fala, Hugh Strange, Jamie Foubert, Joseph Zeal Henry, Kuehn Malvezzi, Madelon Vriesendorp, Maria Lisogorskaya, Mary Duggan, MBL architects, MOS, Muoto, Nigel Coates, Paradigma Ariadné, Paul Anderson, Peter Wilson, Pier Paolo Tamborelli, Piovenefab, Point Supreme, Sam Chermayeff, Sean Griffiths, Sergison Bates, Shahed Saleem, Space Popular, Supervoid
The Bank of England in Ruins, 12th December – 17th January 2026 Hypha Gallery 2, No.1 Poultry
Curated by Studio Jacob (check website for Christmas opening)
Kindly supported by Cheapside, Sir John Soane’s Museum and the Institute of Architecture / di Angewandte, Vienna
On the same evening, Hypha Studios launch two further exhibitions in the other two No. 1 Poultry galleries: Cheapside, curated by Rachel Mortlock & India Stanbra. INFO HERE
Processing Process – No EnD In SiTe, curated by Raisa Desypri & Korina Pavlidou. INFO HERE
About
recessed.space is a platform for new writing around the space between arts and architectures. Founded and edited by Will Jennings, a director at Hypha Studios, educator at UCL Bartlett, and freelance writer, the platform has covered projects from across the world seeking to find connections and conversations between the built environment and other cultural sectors. It has featured interviews with many leading figures, including Kengo Kuma, Mike Nelson, Cristina Iglesias, Jeremy Deller, Do Ho Suh, Peter Cook, and Sumayya Vally. @recessed.space
Studio Jacob is one of three Architectural Design Studios in the Master’s Program (MArch) at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. The Studio explores architecture as representation. For architecture, representation is simultaneously a technical, cultural and political question. It raises questions about who, what and how things are represented.
Sam Jacob was co-curator of the British Pavilion in Venice (2014), is columnist and critic for Dezeen and Art Review as well as Contributing Editor for Icon magazine. Previously, Sam was a founding director of FAT Architecture. studiojacob.at/about
