This post—the third in a series highlighting projects from At the Intersection of Ideas and Material Conditions—features Islands, a project by Jacob S. Bang and Anne Romme AR'05, both faculty at the Royal Danish Academy.

The exhibition, currently on viewing the Third Floor Hallway Gallery, is part of an ongoing dialogue between faculty and students of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture and the Institute of Architecture and Culture at the Royal Danish Academy. Faculty work from both schools was recently shown in Practices of Risk, Control, and Productive Failure, an exhibition held at the Brønshøj Water Tower in Copenhagen, Denmark from May 17 to June 10, 2022.

Romme and Bang describe their project as follows:

“Despite its well-defined boundaries, the island is a very fuzzy entity” states landscape architect Stefania Staniscia. (1) As a result of their geographic reality, islands, throughout history, have been used for isolation, political separation, and quarantine. Yet they are also used extensively as metaphors, embodying a variety of dichotomies without necessarily resolving them. The project Islands represents such an unresolved fuzziness. It investigates the island as having a non-binary relationship to its surroundings. It asks: What is an island if understood as an artistic problem of combining technology and accident, intent, and force? 

Islands is a manifesto for giving form to new water-based inhabitation for a flooded future—a system of structures that simultaneously function as flood barriers, mooring platforms, and housing. Forms which are eaten up by internal structures, like a hermit crab or an abandoned cocoon. Morphologically, the structures are akin to coral reefs and algae. Sounds and smells come from the ocean. Their rhythms are in tune with the tide. They contain a seaweed harvesting plant, an obsolete oil rig, a birth clinic, and a crematorium at one and the same time. 

All structures are in a constant state of flux, in an ever-changing symbiosis between accumulation and deterioration. The architect Raimund Abraham noted “While you build the wall, you shall destroy the stones.” (2) Likewise, the sculptor Willy Ørskov reminds us that building up and breaking down are not just opposites, but also necessary forces of creation. (3) It seems ever more relevant that architects work within these opposing, yet productive forces. Islands is inseparable from the working process in which the intentional and the unintentional are given equal value. The process of making and negotiation is inseparable from its form and intent.  As we see an urgent need to find models for how architecture and urban development can grow organically and gradually, we engage directly in a process which does exactly that. Every piece of work passes between the two of us numerous times, as well as between digital and analog tools and methods. 

There is no end result, as such. Sometimes the final object becomes so perforated or fragmented that it disintegrates. Other times, it merges with other islands to become an archipelago, or becomes its own double by being placed in relationship to a large mirror. 

It is our intention to push our methods and materials towards boundaries, where the unexpected, and sometimes the undesirable, happens. Glitches in the transformation from digital to physical are accepted. We intentionally undermine the idea of the single author, the artist genius. We ‘destroy’ and erase parts of each other’s work, and allow for misinterpretations, faults, and mistakes. Just as we cannot always control water and keep it contained, our artistic research incorporates failure as a productive part of our practice. 

1) Staniscia, S. “The “Island Effect”: Reality or Metaphor?” New Geographies 08 “Islands,” eds. Daou, D. and P. Perez-Ramos, Harvard University Press.
2) Abraham Raimund, [Un]built, Wien, 1996.
3) Ørskov, Willy, Aflaesning af objekter, Copenhagen, 1966.

Jacob Sebastian Bang is an associate professor at the Royal Danish Academy and the head of its BA program Helhed og Del/Whole and Part. His research interests are architecture and representation, and artistic methodology. He works within multiple media—painting, drawing, model-making, and graphical techniques. 

Anne Romme AR'05 is an associate professor and the head of the Finder Sted/Taking Place program. She also runs an independent architecture practice invested in critical, experimental projects. Her work ranges from theoretical inquiries into the commons in architecture, to digital fabrication and the design of a building system based on pure plate shell structures. 

This post—the second in a series highlighting projects from At the Intersection of Ideas and Material Conditions—features Motherboard: A Collective Territory, by Ida Flarup and Maria Mengel, faculty at the Royal Danish Academy.

The exhibition, currently on viewing the Third Floor Hallway Gallery, is part of an ongoing dialogue between faculty and students of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture and the Institute of Architecture and Culture at the Royal Danish Academy. Faculty work from both schools was recently shown in Practices of Risk, Control, and Productive Failure, an exhibition held at the Brønshøj Water Tower in Copenhagen, Denmark from May 17 to June 10, 2022.

The project, as described by Flarup and Mengel:

The table: We gather around it; sharing meals, ideas and disagreements, playing games, making plans. It is a tool for civilizing human interaction. It is the most common object framing our daily routines and rituals, as well as a stage for starting wars and negotiating ceasefires. It is an architectural gesture, a construction lifting the ground, establishing a framed territory for social interaction. 

Motherboard—a central point for connection and memory—is simultaneously a physical table and a scale model of the former seaplane hangar at Holmen in Copenhagen, which now houses 150 students of architecture. The spatial gesture of the hangar—its large, open, flexible space invites us to experiment with teaching formats and encourage a culture of collaborative practices. Motherboard is the beginning of a conversation about this shared territory. It is an object, a memory, and a place for making things—together. 

The table can be folded and extended into various positions, thereby changing the social dynamics around it. It is portable, which makes it possible to establish the hangar territory in various external contexts. We ask: Can the table hold a memory of a unique culture which can be unfolded elsewhere? What makes ‘a culture’ and what role do space and objects play.

Ida Flarup and Maria Mengel are architects and teaching associate professors in the Royal Danish Academy’s BA program Finder Sted/Taking Place, located in the seaplane hangar at Holmen. 

Alongside their teaching collaborations at the Academy they have founded the studio VAERK>STED and cofounded the exhibition space Modtar projects, focusing on craft and direct, spatial sketching in 1:1 scale. The Danish word ‘omforandring’ can be seen as a common denominator for their practice. It translates to ‘change’ and ‘transformation,’ but it also connotes craft, and can therefore be explained with words like alter, reorganize, renovate, adapt, repair, and modernize. 

This project—16-8: Various Things of Different Sizes–A Grid of (no) Ideas—by Anders Abraham AR'91 is drawn from At the Intersection of Ideas and Material Conditions, a Third Floor Hallway Gallery exhibition showcasing work by architects, researchers, and teachers at the Royal Danish Academy. The exhibition is part of an ongoing dialogue between faculty and students of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture and the Institute of Architecture and Culture at the Royal Danish Academy. Faculty work from both schools was recently shown in Practices of Risk, Control, and Productive Failure, an exhibition held at the Brønshøj Water Tower in Copenhagen, Denmark from May 17 to June 10, 2022.

A gallery of images from Abraham's 16-8 project can be viewed here, and he described his project as follows: 

…by nature, the grid is abstract, and when, for example, Le Corbusier used it in the beginning of the twentieth century it implied a strong ideological positioning: the grid started in ideological opposition to the historical context. New technology originating from early industrial building systems created the floor plate-column construction which, throughout the twentieth century, became the most dominant construction form in the world. In the same period, city centers, in particular, developed with a high degree of complexity—becoming a new nature—with increasing levels of infrastructure, density, and heterogeneity. 

Today the grid is no longer in distinct opposition to the historical—we experience the same buildings in Ørestaden, Tokyo, New York, and Beijing. In the rapidly growing city, urban space and building interiors are alike-but-different. 

The grid creates a placelessness! The pure grid creates an ideal condition which deletes all local traces: spaces are so alike that the site is transformed from a specific locality to a non-place. 

Concrete building systems have developed from being specific, like the Hennebique system, to being anonymous and non-specific. Construction is independent of design, and architecture becomes a curtain wall of tiles or a wallpaper of glass. The grid no longer has an ideological dimension; it is pure pragmatism. In a modern concrete building system, all differences have been eliminated—it is a rationalized version, an anti-vision! 

From Abstraction to Figure: 
Compared to the complexity of the world, the grid is too simple. By introducing building components that create alternative directions in the grid, a space emerges which is autonomous. It is not a universal condition—and that is its strength and potential! Its different elements create local spaces—bushy clusters—which do not point to an order x, y, z, but to a more heterogenous field. It is not about introducing a systematics of creating differences, but instead adding complexity to something simple. All parts are different but alike—the elements are the same, but different enough to be specific. 

Text excerpted from Notes on Various Things of Different Sizes–A Grid of (no) Ideas. AA, September, 2019 (edited August, 2022).

Anders Abraham, PhD, (1964-2020) was a professor and head of the master’s program in Art and Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy until 2020. Abraham was educated at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York and was a scholar-in-residence at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Abraham was cofounder of the artistic research biennial Works+Words in Copenhagen. His work was included in numerous exhibitions in Denmark and abroad, including at the Danish Architecture Center, Copenhagen; The Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture, Oslo; and the Venice Biennale of Architecture. His selected publications include A New Nature: 9 Architectural Conditions between Liquid and Solid (2015), and Byen, rummet og det faelles (2019).

The 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale (TAB), co-curated by Cooper Union Professor Lydia Kallipoliti, has recently announced The Future Food Deal, an open call that invites students and recent graduates to contribute their design proposals to a compendium of cookbooks and manuals for sustainable food futures. 
 
The open call is one component of the work to be explored in the Tallinn Architecture Biennale at large, whose theme “Edible, Or the Architecture of Metabolism” deals with the relationship between architecture and the metabolic relationships that produce fuel, waste and nutrients. Professor Kallipoliti’s seminar at the Cooper Union during the spring 2020 semester offers a glimpse into the types of issues, work, and research that will correlate with the biennale exhibition that opens on September 7th, 2022, in Estonia. Ranging from the architecture of food systems, to new building materials made of edible materials, to geopolitical questions related to circular economies, TAB offers a range of responses to the spatial and existential connections between architecture and food that surface in different scales: from the stomach to the territory and the ways in which we process mentally the journey of the edible arriving to our table. TAB explores how architecture can use its expressive capacity to investigate and act upon metabolic relationships, digestion, and the generation of resources. 

The Future Food Deal open call is an opportunity for students to imagine new futures that deal explicitly with how architecture can produce food and also be eaten away. Given that the global food system in its entirety is the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and our collective need for food continues to grow significantly in response to urbanization, questions about our food systems demand the attention of spatial practitioners. People become increasingly alienated from their sources of provisions, fostering a paradigm that reinforces carbon dependencies. Architectural thinking is thus positioned with the opportunity to imagine future scenarios that respond to this ever-growing gap between eater and eaten.

With a focus on the urban and architectural implications of food systems (production, distribution, consumption, decomposition) and the urgency for productivity in cities, the Future Food Deal open call aims to present alternative futures that explore the principles of kinship, interspecies alliances, circularity, and localization, and to ask what new rituals, practices and architectures can emerge from the networks of food production, consumption distribution, and decay. The open call’s curatorial team seeks a diverse range of projects developed in the form of cookbooks and manuals that will constitute new guidelines of food-driven and food-oriented projects within design disciplines. Students from the Cooper Union, and spatial practitioners at large, are encouraged to submit their work.

The full submission details for the open call are available on the 2022 TAB website (https://2022.tab.ee/futurefooddeal/). Please also visit the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale website (https://2022.tab.ee/about/) to explore the full roster of events and exhibitions that are slated to open this fall.
 
The Future Food Deal open call is organized by the curatorial team of the upcoming Tallinn Architecture Biennale (TAB) “Edible, Or, The Architecture of Metabolism” opening in September 2022. TAB 2022 is curated by Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou in collaboration with assistant curator Sonia Sobrino Ralston.