With mini-dwellings and public pavilions springing up everywhere (take for instance SANAA’s pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery, which is currently under construction), architectural art spaces and semi-buildings are writing a new language for architects around the world.
Taking this cross-pollinatory shift between art and architecture as its cue, Vienna’s Thyssen Bornemisza Contemporary Art will this week open its latest show, Transitory Objects, displaying work from key international architects and artists caught in the ever-shrinking gap between their two disciplines.

Mumur
See more of where architecture meets art in the show at Thyssen Bornemisza Contemporary Art
Among them, Olafur Eliasson and David Adjaye’s collaborative project from 2005, Your Black Horizon, will be on show, featuring a custom-designed pavilion by Adjaye filled with Eliasson’s horizontal, alternating light show.
Also up will be Matthew Ritchie’s ’Anti-pavilion’, The Morning Line - a black, beetle like structure designed to represent a ruin of the future - and Hernan Diaz Alonso ’s Pitch Black - exoskeletal robotic structures lurching out of the floor like light-up spiders. Transitory Objects aims to expose a new type of architectural practice, an energetic architecture rooted in flexibility, immediacy and ecological efficiency.
A key figure in the Thyssen show is Neri Oxman. Oxman’s award winning Materialecology project may sound complex but her ultimate aim is to use advanced photo sculpting techniques in order to better understand the relationship between architectural objects and their environments - and if that fails to get you going, the milky, boiled-sweet-esque objects Oxman produces are also utterly mesmerising.