Adam Szymczyk Appointed Director of S AM Swiss Architecture Museum
77Oct. 23, 2025
Curator and criticAdam Szymczykhas been named director of S AMSwiss Architecture Museum. The appointment marks a homecoming of sorts for the Zürich-based Szymczyk, who spent more than a decade as the director and chief curator of Kunsthalle Basel; it also marks a pivot, as he has to date devoted his career to art rather than to architecture. He succeeds Andreas Ruby, who led the Basel institution for ten years and will depart the role at year-end. A search committee assembled by the museum unanimously chose Szymczyk from among a pool of fifty-eight candidates.
Born in Poland in 1970, Szymczyk for the past eight years has been an independent curator in Zürich. From 2013 to 2017, he served as artistic director for Documenta 14, which took place in Kassel and in Athens simultaneously. From 2002 to 2014, he was director and chief curator of Kunsthalle Basel, where he organized more than eighty exhibitions. Concurrent with his tenure there, Szymczyk in 2008 co-curated the Fifth Berlin Biennale alongside Elena Filipovic. He is a co-founder of Warsaw’s Foksal Gallery Foundation, established in 1997, and has additionally taught seminars at the gta Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zürich, at the Universities of Basel and Zürich, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Szymczyk holds a master’s degree in art history from the University of Warsaw and completed his curatorial training at De Appel in Amsterdam.
“I am very much looking forward to leading the program of S AM as its director from 2026 onwards. Having followed S AM’s activities and development closely since 2003, I am excited to work again in Basel — the city I love and consider home,” said Szymczyk in a statement. “After over twenty-five years curating contemporary art exhibitions, I am eager to apply my knowledge and experience in a different context. In my work as curator, author and lecturer, I have often addressed architecture and architects, with growing awareness of the political dimension of the profession and the discourse that shapes architecture within a broader social, economic, and cultural context. I often think about the daring vision shared by those who created the Architecture Museum in Basel in 1984.”