Home    Editions    About    Apply

2023100 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?




Allan WexlerWhat 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.  

Assistant: Jakob Ravn Abildgaard
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
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 ChevrouletD 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. 


Assistant: Rebecca Stenz
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
MacIver-Ek Chevroulet is a trans-disciplinary architecture practice based between Zurich, Neuchâtel and Lausanne. Their work questions conventional construction methods, seeking to reduce material use, expand the potential of re-use and develop an architecture that welcomes its environment rather than separating from it. In parallel, they co-founded the collective la–clique, which investigates alternative forms of practice through horizontal hierarchies and group intelligence. In 2021, the practice was awarded the Swiss Art Award for Architecture. 

Anna MacIver-Ek studied architecture at Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio and ETH Zurich. She is currently Associate Professor at ENSA Paris-Est and Professor of Architecture and Design at Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH), having previously served as Interim Professor of Urban Architecture at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and teaching assistant at ETH Zurich. She gained experience at architecten de vylder vinck taillieu before co-founding MacIver-Ek Chevroulet and la–clique in 2020.

Axel Chevrolet studied architecture at EPFL, Royal Danish Academy of Arts in Copenhagen and obtained his masters from ETH Zurich, where he was awarded the ETH Medaille. He is currently Professor of Architecture and Design at Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH), having previously served as Interim Professor of Urban Architecture at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and teaching assistant at EPFL. He gained experience at Herzog & deMeuron, Bovenbouw architectuur and Camponovo Baumgartner before co-founding MacIver-Ek Chevroulet and la–clique in 2020. 




PARABASEAfter 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.

Assistant: Tobias Rasmussen
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
PARABASE is an entity registered by Carla Ferrando and Pablo Garrido Arnaiz in 2023, after working for offices such as Herzog & de Meuron, Foster & Partners, Diener & Diener, and Miller & Maranta.

PARABASE combines the development and construction of architectural projects with research and teaching. They have previously taught in Mendrisio and Bern in Switzerland, have been visiting professors at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, at the ETH Zürich, and are currently visiting professors at the TU Wien. They have been workshop leaders at the Porto Academy 2025 and have been invited to participate in juries and lecturers at various institutions, among others: ETH Zurich, AAM Mendrisio, EPFL Lausanne, Harvard GSD, Cornell AAP, TU München, and TU Wien. PARABASE's work has received diverse international awards and their work has been selected for the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale and the 4th Lisbon Triennale.

PARABASE is currently developing projects of various scales internationally.




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


LocationThe 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.


Bibliography

1. Ed. Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger, As Found, The Discovery of the Ordinary, 2001
   
2. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 2011
   
3. 12th International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo, Todo dia/Everyday, 2019
   
4. Alexander Brodsky, Vodka Pavilion, 2003
   
5. Raymond Williams, Culture is Ordinary, 1958
   
6. Alexandra Lucas Coelho, Indigenous populations are better prepared than us for future catastrophes, 2019
   
7. Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, The Future We Choose, 2021
   
8. Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, 2020
   
9. Ed. Ilka and Andreas Ruby, The Materials Book, 2020
   
10. Material Cultures, Material Cultures, 2022
    
11. William McDonough, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, 2002
    
12. Re:arc institute Revision(s), Architectures of Planetary Wellbeing, 2023
    
13. Barnabas Calder, Architecture from Prehistory to Climate Emergency, 2022
    
14. Keller Easterling, Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World, 2021
    
15. Keller Easterling, The Action is the Form, 2011
    
16. Edited by Benjamin H. Bratton, Nicolay Boyadjiev and Nick Axel, The New Normal, 2020
    
17. Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 2008
18. Valentin Abend and Jakob Ravn Abildgaard, Sweep The Floor, Magasin for Bygningskunst og Kultur, 2023

Paraply, www.paraplyschool.com, paraplyschool(at)gmail.com, @paraply. © 2026, Paraply School. All rights reserved. Photography by Samuel Causse.