I missed a conference about the future of architecture organised by Sauerbruch Hutton at the end of October, but was keen to see M9, the museum they have designed in Mestre, the industrial suburb of Venice.   The project was privately funded by the Fondazione di Venezia, the charitable partner of the Banco di Risparmio di Venezia.   They bought a big block in the centre of Mestre formerly occupied by an army barracks.   In 2010, Sauerbruch Hutton won an international competition to create a new urban district, incorporating what remains of a monastery.   The museum opened on 1 December 2018.

On the top floor is a big open exhibition space, currently showing an exhibition of Sauerbruch Hutton’s work, Draw, Love, Build:-

It includes a model of M9, a big building, but low-rise, its bulk to some extent disguised by their characteristic use of multi-coloured tilework:-

The exhibition shows the amazing range of their work across Europe, with many big projects in Germany, including Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt, but, also, for example, a new theatre at Brighton College (they make very beautiful models for their projects):-

And the Brandhorst Museum in Munich:-

M9 itself has an attractive intellectual austerity to it, many of the interior spaces in shuttered concrete, with two floors of very ambitious interactive displays on the social history and ethnography of twentieth-century Italy:-