If architecture is conceived of as an art form, then it cannot just be a solution to a given problem but must examine fundamental questions within the discipline, across time and space. The work in this exhibition, located in the Third Floor Hallway Gallery, is situated at the intersection of ideas and material conditions of different times and building cultures. Historic architectures are always relevant to understanding contemporary architectural practice and offer critical distance from mainstream agendas. Artistic practice in architecture is not concerned with innovation but with the reinvention of problems.

This exhibition presents work by architects, researchers, and teachers at the Institute of Architecture and Culture at the Royal Danish Academy, a school with a long tradition of connecting artistic research and pedagogy. The work of its faculty is thus closely related to teaching—it explores the ambiguous relationship between method and artistic practice, and between teaching and learning. Artistic research produces work in its own right, but it also represents a pedagogical vehicle for establishing architecture as a discourse and a reflective practice. To that end, the work presented here raises methodological and pedagogical questions, and examines conditions for creative collaborations and communities. Its authors commit to the fundamental academic virtues of problematization and critique.

Their work navigates the diverse and open-ended toolbox of architectural techniques across the new and the old, and the analogue and the digital. It is not preoccupied with technology as the primary driver of architectural invention but treats new technologies as a natural extension of the workshop. Too strong an emphasis on technology potentially belongs to a mindset characteristic of modernity: a new world for a clean slate. To the architects in this exhibition, architecture is messy, and its trajectories are established in the pursuit of problems. 

This 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, where many of these projects were first shown.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Anne Romme AR'05, an Associate Professor at the Institute of Architecture and Culture, will be on hand for Gallery Remarks on the evening of Tuesday, September 13 at 6:30 pm. For more details, please click here.

Open to students, faculty, and staff.