2023 — Paraply

2023

100 Years

100 years ago, in 1923, Le Corbusier published a groundbreaking collection of essays titled Vers une architecture, advocating for (and defining) a new modern architecture for the industrial age. Its principles influenced the built environment of the everyday for better, and for worse. Today, we live with the benefits and consequences of the systems derived from its manifesto. As the climate crisis looms over our time, we are facing a new age in which radical change is not only desired, but necessary. In today’s urgent turning point, we reflect on the lessons from the last 100 years, and look ahead toward the everyday of the next 100 years. What new architecture are we advocating for (and defining) for a regenerative age?

The workshop marked the end of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in its ‘hangar’. The Seaplane Hangar H53 building was originally designed in 1921 by architect Christian Olrich. It was one of the first pre-stressed concrete structures of its size in Denmark, used for the construction of large navy seaplanes. In 2001, architect Dorte Mandrup transformed the building into an unconventional open office space with an intervention white steel structures and curtains framing work spaces. In 2011, Dorte Mandrup adapted it again to become an educational space, accommodating functions as a workshop for 300 students from the Architecture Department, used as such until August 2023.

Paraply programming happened within the building’s empty skeleton among furniture being carried out, materials in flux and entire pavilions left behind. The immediate context of the workshop echoes the theme of regeneration: A moment of renewal at the end of the building’s current life. The large interior and open floors allow participants to spread out their ideas into direct spatial experiments.

Allan Wexler

What is ordinary? What is absurd? What is intentional? What is accidental? What is a mistake? Allan Wexler brings his gentle, encouraging and impactful teaching, starting the programme with a simple instruction for each group member. “Sweep the floor.” Each movement, intuitive, playful or insecure, becomes the beginning of an idea, a narrative thread to give meaning to the mundane. Participants are prompted to dwell on an insignificant detail in the building, and asked to write a stream-of-consciousness text about it. Subjects included the joint between two panes of glass, a mark on the outside of a window and lonely bricks, among others.

Final presentations consisted of choreographies that transformed an element or space in the building. An ordinary light switch becomes electricity explained. A lonely brick is brought into awareness by using it for every action around a breakfast table. The space under the stairs becomes a theater. And a piece of plumbing that penetrates a glass pane becomes a continuous line through multiple shiny glass rooms.

Josh Ice
Cosima Seiberth
Lisa Gärtner
Anna Louise Damgaard Jensen
Sara Asta Wiherheimo
Sheng-Jung Tsai
Isabella Cederstrøm Palliotto
Anna Gerstoft
Benjamin Good
Sofia Luce Contini
Lily Thomas
Alex Freeman
Jakob Ravn Abildgaard

Allan Wexler has worked in the fields of architecture, design and fine art for forty five years. He is represented by the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City and teaches in the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons the New School for Design in New York City. Allan’s works explore human activity and the built environment. He works as an investigator using series, permutations and chance rather than searching for definitive solutions. He makes buildings, furniture, vessels and utensils as backdrops and props for everyday, ordinary human activity. The works isolate, elevate, and monumentalize our daily rituals: dining, sleeping, and bathing. And they, in turn, become mechanisms that activate ritual, ceremony and movement, turning these ordinary activities into theater.

It is by dissolving the boundaries between the fine arts and the applied arts, between furniture design, architecture and theatrical performance, between sculpture and interactive exhibition design and between the practice and the research of architecture, that new ideas and innovation flourishes.

MacIver-Ek Chevroulet

D R I F T, Fitzcarraldo II, Making the Impossible Possible – the undertaking of the MacIver-Ek Chevroulet group took many names. Das Beckwerk building was raised for the Funus Imaginarium of Claus Beck-Nielsen in 2010. It was renamed as BWERK when it was adopted by the architecture school to be used as an exhibition space. As the school of architecture moves out of the iconic Seaplane Hangar H53, the BWERK building was to be left behind with it. In the spirit of rebirth and reuse, the MacIver-Ek Chevroulet team took upon themselves the challenge to move the building to the new location of the architecture school, 700m away at the KADK campus.

The workshop began by entering the space without the key. After creating a new opening, an installation marked the beginning of the move. After days of cutting neat slices, the pieces willing to budge were slid out. The corner moved by road on scaffolding wheels. A section of the curved wall was attached to empty beer kegs, and floated over by water. Madame Nielsen opened and closed the moving procession with statements, and accompanied the pieces in their journey to their new configuration.

Rebekka Trier Kær
Gustave Rajalu
Anju Kato
Ástbjörn Haraldsson
Nathalie Larsson
Ava Hansen Quiblier
Eva Solveig Erny
Victor Stasik
Elena Valazza
Seren Arber
Victoria Hatsenko
Lisa Chorna
Sarah Kimmich
Nijat Mahamaliyev
Rebecca Stenz

MacIver-Ek Chevroulet is a trans-disciplinary architecture firm based in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. In 2021, the office was awarded the Swiss Art Award for Architecture. Through its projects, it strives for precision, as a tool to achieve an architecture sensitive to its context and generous to its users. In their search for alternative forms of practice, they co-founded the collective la–clique in 2020. Continual investigation within the profession leads them to work using different scales and mediums: from films, to installations, furniture making and teaching.

Anna MacIver-Ek studied architecture at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio and ETH Zurich. During her studies, she worked as one of the editors of trans magazine, as well as being awarded the ETH Excellence Scholarship. Since 2020, she is an assistant at ETH Zürich for Prof. Maria Conen. She gained experience at architecten de vylder vinck taillieu before co-founding MacIver-Ek Chevroulet and la–clique in 2020.

Axel Chevroulet studied architecture at the EPFL, the Royal Danish Academy of Arts in Copenhagen and obtained his Masters from the ETH Zurich, where he was awarded the ETH Medaille. He gained experience at Herzog & de Meuron, Bovenbouw architectuur and camponovo baumgartner architekten before co-founding MacIver-Ek Chevroulet and la–clique in 2020.

PARABASE

After surveying moments of adaptive construction in Christiania, the group turned to the palette of waste material in the hangar to develop spaces for partying. Music and architecture have influenced each other more than is often recognised in recent history. Two large movable speaker systems are developed, which use different frequencies to create vibrations and focal points of sound. Each speaker is a space which can be entered. Structured by air, a snake-like inflatable room creates a space for conversation inside, defining an edge to the outside.

By dismantling a pavilion by the hangar, a skeletal frame is discovered. Dissecting it results in 6 buttress-like elements, which are reconfigured to create a hexagonal shape, reforming the material with a new expression. Sliced at each corner, the angles create the gesture of an opening. The roof overhang enclosed visitors closing the view line from the chest upward, with a tall hexagonal space at the center, illuminating the ceiling of the hangar. Combined, the three spaces were inhabited at the closing ceremony, illuminating the space and hosting conversations and dancing.

Sandro Fritschi
Olivia Tofte Abelin
Flavia Vilkama
Judith Baumeister
Julie Lequeux-Audran
Anton Wolff
Nadia Surowiec
Luís Henrique Canhão Mendanha Páscoa e Tavares
Saga Montell
Sébastien Herning
Kornelia Fehnle
Pauline Gähwiler
Beth Schmidt
Tobias Rasmussen

PARABASE combines professional practice with research and teaching at the Universities of Bern and Mendrisio in Switzerland and at the Tec de Monterrey in Mexico. In addition, its partners are regularly invited to jurys and conferences at various universities in Europe and America. PARABASE’s work has received numerous awards and its work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Lisbon Triennale.

Carla Ferrando Costansa studied architecture at the ETSAV in Barcelona and at the Technical Universiteit Eindhoven. She has worked more than six years as an architect for Diener & Diener and Herzog & de Meuron in Basel. She has worked on several projects around the world, from small to large scale, and in different phases, from concept design to construction. Since 2021 she has been teaching and research assistant at the Bern University of Architecture and has been guest critic in several design studios. She is co-founder of PARABASE, an international collective operating within architecture and urbanism.

Pablo Garrido Arnaiz studied architecture at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona, ETSAB and at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, AAM. As an architect, he has worked at Foster & Partners, Miller & Maranta and Herzog & de Meuron. Since 2014 he is editor of Cartha Magazine with which he has participated in the 15th Biennale di Architettura di Venezia, the 4th Triennale de Arquitetura de Lisboa and has published a series of books with Park Books. He is currently Teaching & Research Assistant at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio and has been invited as guest critic at several Universities. He is co-founder of PARABASE, an international collective operating within architecture and urbanism.

Guest lectures by Anne Romme, Arkitekten Uden Grænser (Architects Without Borders – Denmark), Søren Pihlmann, and Nicolay Boyadjiev.

Ed. Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger, As Found, The Discovery of the Ordinary, 2001
Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 2011
12th International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo, Todo dia/Everyday, 2019
Alexander Brodsky, Vodka Pavilion, 2003
Raymond Williams, Culture is Ordinary, 1958
Alexandra Lucas Coelho, Indigenous populations are better prepared than us for future catastrophes, 2019
Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, The Future We Choose, 2021
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, 2020
Ed. Ilka and Andreas Ruby, The Materials Book, 2020
Material Cultures, Material Cultures, 2022
William McDonough, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, 2002
Re:arc institute Revision(s), Architectures of Planetary Wellbeing, 2023
Barnabas Calder, Architecture from Prehistory to Climate Emergency, 2022
Keller Easterling, Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World, 2021
Keller Easterling, The Action is the Form, 2011
Edited by Benjamin H. Bratton, Nicolay Boyadjiev and Nick Axel, The New Normal, 2020
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 2008
Valentin Abend and Jakob Ravn Abildgaard, Sweep The Floor, Magasin for Bygningskunst og Kultur, 2023

Bibliography

Image 1: Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, 1923
Image 2: Dorte Mandrup Arkitekter, Seaplane Hangar H53, 2001
Image 3: Allan Wexler, Glass / Wear, 2019
Image 4: Anna MacIver-Ek and Axel Chevroulet
Image 5: Carla Ferrando Costansa and Pablo Garrido Arnaiz