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London’s Architecture Foundation has named Sarah Ichioka as its new director, replacing Rowan Moore, who left the post earlier this year after the organization scuttled plans for a new Southwark headquarters designed by Zaha Hadid.
Ichioka, 29, has served as deputy director of the London Festival of Architecture. She previously worked as a consultant curator for the Global Cities exhibition at the Tate Modern, and was exhibition content coordinator for the 10th Venice Architecture Biennale.
”The Architecture Foundation under its new director Sarah Ichioka will inevitably be changing its shape to accommodate what it perceives as the changing needs of this challenging period,” said Brian Clarke, chair of the Architecture Foundation, in a statement. “The board of trustees are thrilled at the prospect of working with Sarah and are confident of an exciting future bringing our passion for the best in contemporary architecture to an ever wider audience.”
“I am absolutely delighted to be given the opportunity to lead The Architecture Foundation into its next stage,” Ichioka said in a statement. “I look forward to building a focussed, pertinent programme for the Foundation, developed in close collaboration with its trustees, staff and patrons.”
Established in 1991 as Britain’s first independent architecture center, the foundation had high hopes that its Hadid-designed building, sited near the Tate Modern, would sharply boost its public profile. But following the architect’s selection in 2005, in a competition that included MVRDV and Foreign Office Architects, the project succumbed to mounting costs and a gloomy fundraising climate.
Moore, who was named director in 2002, is an architecture critic at London’s Evening Standard, and had said he expected to move on to focus on his writing career, regardless of the new building’s fate.
