Space Saga at the Danish Architecture Center

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Space Saga - a new exhibition about recent research into how people could live on the moon - has just opened at the Danish Architecture Centre and in time for the start of the school winter holiday.

There are certainly plenty of things to occupy children and trigger their imaginations - including a chance to build a moon module in Lego - but intriguing and complicated concepts are also explored that apply more widely to life down here on earth ….. so, for instance, on how light or lack of light effects our sleep patterns, and with a direct impact on our mental and physical health, and important questions are raised about the food we need rather the food we want and the importance of smell and taste in our lives.

With space exploration, there is the stress of very real isolation or, rather, isolation with a few other people in a tightly-confined space so this exhibition is, in part, about how humans have been such a successful animal because we find the ways that help us adapt to even the most extreme and hostile environments.

At the centre of the exhibition is the Lunark module from SAGA Space Architects that was built to help understand how people could survive if a long-term or even a permanent settlement was established on the moon.

In 2020, Sebastian Aristotelis and Karl-Johan Sørensen took the pod to Moriusaq -a bay over 1,000 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle in Greenland - where, for 60 days, it was a base for them to investigate the “psychological effects associated with isolation” in an extreme and hostile environment.

The form of the pod, with interlocked and hinged panels, was inspired by Japanese origami so it could be collapsed down for transport but, unfolded, held within a light aluminium frame and anchored down, it formed a stable structure.

I would not survive for long in such a confined space … I find it difficult to cope with small spaces so I need to look out at sky and light at regular intervals and I tend to pace up and down at regular intervals as I work. On top of that, I suffer badly from SAD during long winter nights so would certainly have failed any profiling tests for selection for this trial although, on the plus side, and for reasons I’ve never been able to fathom, I have never suffered from travel sickness or jet lag so maybe not a complete non starter.

When you look inside the pod, it’s clear that it was designed primarily as a tightly-organised lab in which to work because there is no real space for anything else. There is a small table or workbench on each side, that can be folded back, and with two chairs and a very small stove on the floor - cooking was basic so about boiling a kettle for hot water to rehydrate dried food - and, above on each side, there are cramped bunks buried into the thick insulation panels. In the small lobby of the entrance, or what is euphemistically called the airlock, there is a toilet and that is about it.

The mission was the subject of a series of programmes - Eksperimentet: 60 dage på månen - that were broadcast in June 2021 but can still be viewed on the DR tv channel (in Danish).

A Space Saga
Danish Architecture Centre
from 12 February to 4 September 2022

 
 

Life Without Energy

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This project from SPACE10 was undertaken with the Indian design lab Quicksand. They visited 40 families in Kenya, Peru, Indonesia and India to look at how little or no access to electricity restricts or controls day-to-day life and limits opportunities.

With limited incomes, several families who were interviewed spent available money on improving or constructing a more secure and solid home - above any priority for electricity - but then used power, often solar power, first for charging mobile phones as that gave them access, for the first time, to banking and to ways of selling their produce at more competitive rates.

Lighting for safety or security and for extending the working day is important and it was interesting to see that some preferred to continue with traditional forms of cooking on open fires rather than buying stoves that can be expensive and unreliable. It was not just that fridges and electric stoves could be expensive to repair but the supply of electricity could be intermittent or unreliable or family income could be unpredictable so some form of backup like kerosene was kept for when the family could not pay for electricity.

Here, in the exhibition, there are photographs from the project with extended captions that set out the difficult choices that many people have to make when they do not have access to reliable or affordable or safe energy.

Life Without Energy: Needs, Dreams and Aspirations - is the report that came out of the research project and it can be read on line.

the exhibition Life Without Energy
continues at SPACE10 until 17 April
read the report  Life Without Energy: Needs, Dreams and Aspirations

note:

In the World there are around 2 billion people with restricted access to electricity and of those there are as many as 860 million people with no access to electric power of any form.

Access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy is one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 along with efforts to improve sanitation, nutrition and access to safe water.

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Jørn Utzon Horisont / Jørn Utzon Horizon - Dansk Arkitektur Center

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A major new exhibition has just opened in the Golden Gallery – the lower exhibition space at the Danish Architecture Center in Copenhagen – to mark the centenary of the birth of the Danish architect Jørn Utzon who was born in April 1918 and who died in November 2008.

Under the title Horisont / Horizon, the exhibition makes extensive use of models, audio-visual presentations and the reproduction of many photographs taken by Utzon himself as he travelled widely and looked at traditional buildings in North Africa, Iran, Nepal, China and Africa and at the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright in America that all inspired his work or were, at least, used as a starting point for some of the most imaginative and most eclectic modern buildings of the second half of the 20th century.

 

8 November 2018 - 3 March 2019
Dansk Arkitektur Center / Danish Architecture Center

FORSK! - research projects from Aarhus School of Architecture

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This exhibition at the entrance-hall level of the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen is on the work of eight research students and graduates from Aarhus School of Architecture. 

These projects cover a wide range of subjects from understanding natural and historic man-made drainage as it has to adapt or be adapted for increased rainfall - a consequences of climate change - through new possibilities in the way we use traditional materials like concrete and, for wood, how new techniques of digital fabrication can be used to develop new forms of construction. 

 As people move into cities some buildings in rural settlements in Denmark have been abandoned and one of the projects looks at how we assess buildings that are no longer needed and might be demolished and looks at how we understand and remember buildings that are part of a common cultural heritage.

The project by Elizabeth Donovan explores how a strong visual or graphic presentation that shows the complex history of sustainability over a century reveals new connections and suggests hierarchies or priorities when “bridging the gap between discourse and practice.”

“Each project further illustrates a rising need for interdisciplinary dialogue to both develop and build knowledge and hereby influence the world.

Aarhus School of Architecture labels this research by design. This methodology, developed at the school, tests ideas and theories through real-life case studies … a proposed solution to a relevant problem, rather than a theoretical consideration.”

Timber curtain by Niels Martin Larsen and Maya Lahmy
explores how we shape materials - here by using digital control of a router to cut precise joins to construct a complex lattice of curved and twisting sections of timber.

Mass and Manipulation by Jon Krähling Engholt
Concrete is normally flat and relatively smooth but here a rubber membrane that has a pattern of cuts made with a laser is used for the former and is supported in different ways as the concrete sets. The weight of the concrete means that the rubber stretches and as the cuts stretch they distort or twist to reveal a different characteristic of concrete that as it sets changes from a viscous fluid to a solid.

Don’t Blame the water! Katrina Wiberg
In many settlements, particularly if they are low lying or close to the coast, modern expansion is often over marginal land - building on meadows and marshland that had taken or slowed down surface water when rain was heavy. 

Maps can show features of the landscape that have been overlaid by man-made drainage systems over decades or even over centuries.

The study area for this project was the settlement of Lystrup. Historical maps, contemporary maps and flood maps were compared to correlate  historical wetlands with flood-prone residential areas to resolve the actual relationship.

Decisions about climate resilience have to include "the planning processes and decision-making mechanisms that shape urban development."

We claim or reclaim land for new developments to extend urban areas and settle in places that in the past were considered to be either unsuitable or difficult for habitation and studies like this will make it possible to distinguish between the Dry and Wet City because "When the cloudburst occurs, the water takes over, and the ice age landscape emerges. The Wet City awakens."

 

Bespoke Fragments Anders Kruse Aagaard
 … explores concrete wood and steel but uses them in a way that challenges our perception of these traditional materials that normally we barely notice.
Concrete is twisted over curved and almost free form steel reinforcing rods to create shapes that are closer to sculpture than structure and in Intermediate fragments from 2014 ash is cut and curved and twisted using digital machining and then slotted into a complicated concrete base for a striking interplay of materials and forms.

Urban Carpet by Polina Chebotareva
10,000 pieces of Douglas fir were linked together with steel wire, the wood charred to form an unfamiliar surface that protects the surface from moisture using a technique related to the Japanese Shou Sugi Ban. 
When it rains the wood gives off a slight scent of smoke that enhances the experience and with use the colour changes to brown so you can trace where people have walked.

For the festival in Aarhus in 2018 the Urban Carpet was installed on a traffic Island in the middle of the main road in front of the central railway station - an area of 100 square metres. 50,000 people cross over here every day but normally people do not notice the island so it is described as an overlooked urban space. The carpet challenges preconceptions and invites people to experience a familiar route in a new way.

Transformation of the abandoned Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag
This project looks at the impact as people migrate from the country to the town and buildings are abandoned. It recorded but also intervened in the decay cutting through some buildings that are destined for demolition to reveal new views and a new focus on both the structure and on perceptions about how it was used and its role in the community as it is  lost from a common history.
Biopsies of the abandoned 2015 looked at a farmhouse in Ydby dated 1780 and tracked the decay of a pig shed.
The reverse biopsy 2016 looked at an abandoned confectionary in Hurup  two months before it was demolished. The building was cut through and for the first time that opened a view and link between the shop in the front and the bakery at the back and revealed a stratification and private history to stimulates a reassessment of the place these buildings had in the lives of people … those who lived in them and those who visited them or possibly knew them only from the outside.

 

Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design

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 This is the second major exhibition at the new Danish Architecture Centre and covers both the early life of Ove Arup and then the major projects around the World of the design and engineering company that he founded in London in 1946. There are profiles of the major engineering projects they have completed including the Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre in Paris with models, drawings, films, interviews and historic photographs.

The story is continued through to current projects including work by the Arup Sound Lab. Arup were the consultant engineers for the road and rail bridge over the sound between Copenhagen and Malmö and for the design and construction of the new building for the Danish Architecture Centre.

  

Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design
 12 October 2018 - 17 February 2019
at the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen

Practice Futures

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A major exhibition, Practice Futures, has opened at KADK - the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation.

The full title of the exhibition is Technology in Architecture, Practice Future, Building Design for a New Material Age, and this is an import examination of that area, if you see it in terms of a Venn Diagram, where the disciplines or professional expertise of architecture, engineering, techniques of construction and the development and the technology of materials meet and overlap.

Fifteen research projects are presented here from international PhD students working in six major European research departments and working with fourteen established partners including major architectural practices, engineering companies and construction companies.

These ongoing studies are reassessing well-established materials such as timber and concrete and rediscovering or reassessing or developing techniques to shape, bend, finish and join materials to achieve new forms of construction such as large scale, computer-controlled extrusion or printing and the development of new materials for large-scale building projects. 

This is about new tools and new approaches for reassessing traditional materials and established craft techniques but also about using computers to assess complex information; to solve unconventional design problems and to control systems for constructing new forms and new types of building. 

Projects presented here are prototypes to demonstrate customised solutions to realise challenging new construction projects that not only have to take into account the need for high energy conservation but also have to tackle rapidly-developing problems or social pressures from population growth, and, as a direct consequence, find new solutions to the demands of cities that are growing at an unprecedented speed. This is construction design trying to deal with political and economic constraints and with the added and pressing demands of global climate change.

KADK Udstillingen og Festsalen
Danneskiold-Samsøes Allé 51-53
1435 København K

the exhibition continues until 7 December 2018

 

umsicht regards sguardi 17 - SIA at Design Werck

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An exhibition has opened at Design Werck in Copenhagen to show major engineering and design projects that were selected for their annual award in 2017 by SIA … the Schweizerischer Ingenieur- und Architektenverein or the Swiss association of engineers and architects.

“The SIA invited architects, engineers, public authorities, companies, investors, and private and public developers to submit projects covering schemes of any size. Each project was then judged on the design’s response to its environment and on the way it applied solutions that would meet users’ needs in an exemplary or novel way.”

Six projects received awards and two others were given honourable mentions for their pioneering roles in designing evolutionary living spaces and their contribution to the sustainability of Switzerland’s built environment

Photographs are by Beat Schweizer and films are by Marc Schwartz.


The exhibition continues at Design WERCK until 7 October 2018

 

Lenschow & Pihlmann at DAC

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The current exhibition in the Dreyer Architecture Gallery, on the upper level at the Danish Architecture Centre, explores the work of the Copenhagen partnership of Kim Lenschow Andersen and Søren Thirip Pihlmann. This is the first of exhibitions here through the Autumn that will look at three young architectural companies.

Parts or elements from the construction of recent buildings by Lenschow & Pihlmann are detached and isolated here, rather as if they are sculptures. Although these are simply components, when they are spotlit like this, they do justify closer scrutiny. A building is the sum of its parts so here, reversing the process and extracting parts of the buildings, it emphasises the technical and engineering aspects of many modern buildings and highlights how our increasing focus on insulation and on appropriate and careful use of materials has changed radically the way that buildings are constructed.

As a consequence, contemporary buildings seem to be less concerned with space and architecture in a plastic sense - about form and shadow defining and enclosing space - but buildings as relatively light structures with thin walls that are arranged as a series of flat planes.

 

continues at Danish Architecture Centre Strandgade until 4 November 2017

Lenschow & Pihlmann

Circular Economy

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A major exhibition at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation to show fourteen projects that offer new solutions and strategies for the development of new sustainable materials along with the development of new technologies, the exploration of new approaches to building and construction and the recycling or re-circulation of materials.

“The conversion means that we need to work innovatively and experimentally on the development of new materials and the recycling of old ones, while also using our knowledge to create solutions that people actually want to use. That is the way we work at KADK, so our research and the skills of our graduates can play a major role in terms of giving people a better life without putting pressure on our planet.”

Lene Dammand Lund.

 

Through the Autumn there will be a series of open seminars to “draw on knowledge and experience from some of the world’s leading architects and designers in the field of circularity, who will be invited to talk about their work.”

 

the exhibition Circular Economy continues at KADK at Philip de Langes Allé 10 in Copenhagen until 3 December 2017