Dreyers Arkitektur Galleri at the Danish Architecture Center

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Nye bølger i dansk arkiektur / New Waves in Danish Architecture

Dreyers Arkitektur Galleri exhibits the work of young Danish architects and provides an opportunity for them to show recent work or to explore new directions and new trends.

When the Architecture Center was in the old warehouse building close to Knippelsbro, there was a relatively large gallery space on the first floor and exhibitions by the Dreyers Galleri could spread out to a landing area but at BLOX exhibitions so far have been on the rather awkward staircase gallery that spread down three challenging and restricted landing spaces.

Now, for the first time, the Dreyers Arkitektur Galleri has spread out to include space in the ticket entrance area to BLOX and the outer lobby to the car park. It is an opportunity to show just how broad a church the architecture profession is - to use a useful English phrase - with the work of four very very different architecture offices.

New waves in Danish architecture
continues at the Danish Architecture Center
through to 16 February 2020

Rural Agentur

Studio Elements
Christiansen & Andersen

Mette Lange Architects

Poetic Pragmatism - POINT at Dreyers Arkitektur Galleri

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POINT was founded in 2013 by Laust Sørensen and Michael Droob who both studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture.

“Our ambition is to create endurable aesthetically pleasing solutions that evoke positive emotions and form the basis for creating memories. We believe this is possible by uniting a pragmatic approach with an elegant architectural solution that brings to life the inherent poetry and the unique attributes of the location and sparks an awareness in the beholder in this precise moment.

… we consider the social aspects to be the primary premise for developing the best possible society.”

The exhibition is tightly or even rather formally arranged with projects shown with a single image and below, set on a large cube, a 3D printed model. These models emphasise the mass or form of the buildings and obviously show the topography of the site better than any site drawing could - here mostly printed as distinct layers retaining the map contour lines - giving the models a slightly detached feel that seems remote from anything organic like rock or mud. The models also remove any real sense of materials or surface texture or colour on the buildings and show groups of volumes or mass with little idea of the plan of these buildings or any distinct function of the different parts or any impression of the experience of moving through the internal spaces.

POINT works with a company that produces computer games so they are ahead of many architectural offices in understanding and using virtual reality. Here, in this exhibition, virtual reality programmes that show their buildings and designs are seen not just through a headset but are also projected onto a sweep of semi-transparent screen that loops out from the gallery level above the book store of the Architecture Center. 

Several of the projects, particularly those for buildings or monuments in parks or gardens - including a proposal for a new raised pond at Mindelunden, the war memorial in Hellerup - have a stunning and elegant simplicity and a design for Hellerenhus, a group of buildings for a museum set in a gorge at Jøssing fjord in Norway, is both appropriately simple and starkly dramatic.

The POINT studio is in the former drawing offices of the old Burmeister & Wain shipyard at Refshaleøen in Copenhagen.

  

the exhibition is at Dreyers Arkitektur Galleri in the Danish Architecture Center
until 29 November 2018

POINT

 

WE architecture at Dreyers Arkitektur Galleri

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"The name WE Architecture is based on the philosophy that architecture is not the result of only one person's stroke of genius" … but  "believe that the best results occur through teamwork and transdisciplinary networks."

 

Jagtvej 69

WE architecture was established in Copenhagen in 2009 by Marc Jay and Julie Schmidt-Nielsen.

Much of their work takes, as a starting point, an exploration of how people and the community respond to and use architecture … what they describe as understanding how physical surroundings "inspire people to create new relationships or to cultivate existing relationships" … exploring the "potential for innovating the framework of communities."

This raises interesting questions because it implies that there can be an enlightened and well-defined relationship of trust between the architect and the end user as well as with the commissioning client. This is not the place to discuss the issue of politics and economics in social architecture, in the broadest sense, in Denmark but possibly a place to raise this important subject.

One project, shown here through a number of models, is a new and ongoing development for Jagtvej 69 in the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen with temporary housing for homeless people and community gardens. This is now an empty plot but was the site of a community centre, Ungdomshuset, which was cleared and demolished in 2007 precipitating street riots … cobbles thrown in the riots are one of 30 objects chosen for an exhibition at the National Museum - Din Ting - to represent key events or movements of the first years of this century. This is precisely what makes Danish architecture so important … designs that responds to the changing needs of society with an awareness of and a sensitivity to broader political issues.

Certainly, looking at the work of the studio over the last ten years it is good to see that so much of their work is in housing, education and culture and all these projects have a strong relationship with their landscape or townscape setting. Models - so massing of elements and overall form - are clearly important as different options for sites are explored through making many models at the initial stages.

The Dreyers gallery has three main levels alongside a steep staircase down from the main exhibition area and WE Architecture have exploited this by stacking up timber boxes to break down the sudden transition from each level to the next. This provides platforms and surfaces for displaying models and photographs of the projects undertaken by the team but they have also incorporated work stations where, for the period of the exhibition, staff will work but are available to discuss their buildings and answer questions.

WE architecture 

the exhibition continues until 2 November
in the Dreyers Arkitektur Galleri at the Danish Architecture Centre

 

Studio Fountainhead

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An exhibition of work by Dominique Hauderowicz and Kristian Ly Serena who founded Studio Fountainhead in 2013. This is the third of three exhibitions in the gallery over the Autumn to show the work of young architects from Copenhagen.

Studio Fountainhead

Dreyers Arkitektur Gallerei at Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen

continues until 30 December 2017

 

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