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2026Ground



The architectural act is fundamentally predicated on an assumption of stability. We lay foundations by treating the earth as a passive substrate engineered to receive the weight of our intentions. Yet what supports us is never inert. The ground is a metabolic register of forces and unseen labor.

Within spatial practices, the production of the built environment remains tethered to a linear timeline. Material is extracted and assembled into a resolved entity. This illusion of completeness obscures the continuous reality of a site. To reconsider the ground is to confront the result-oriented obsession of the industry. It requires shifting our attention to a state of permanent latency where space is understood as an ongoing condition of maintenance. In the care of these environments, the labor itself vanishes into the substrate. "You only notice the work when it ceases to be done."

For the 2026 edition of Paraply, we look away from the vertical ambition of the object and turn to the horizontal conditions that sustain it. This inquiry locates the everyday in the fissures. It is the micro-ecology establishing itself in pavement cracks, the overlooked perimeter of a street tree, or the edges of agricultural peripheries. Time in this context resists the project schedule and operates instead through gradual accumulation.

By engaging with these marginalized territories, practicing urban mining and tracing the strata beneath our feet, we invite a shift in posture. The workshop proposes a methodology of sensing. It repositions the practitioner away from the authorship of a finished form and toward active participation within an already unfolding field.

Ana Mendieta, Imagen de Yagul, 1973



LANZA AtelierAbove, below, team high, team low… Team LANZA at Paraply started the workshop by rapidly forming containers from large rolls of paper, and constructing and organising micro architectures from sands from three regions on Earth. They then brought the body into space following reference videos by Ana Mendieta, created their own films, and later traced the positions of their bodies onto the same large rolls of paper.

Yesterday, they opened a dialogue with the ground, carefully cutting out its upper-most skin and starting a conversation with what was found below, creating interventions that were equal in imprint above ground than below it. Team high and team low continued their prompt of reaching the highest and lowest point around the site by using only found materials, resulting in the erection of a column, and measuring the depth of the canal.
Assistant: Jakob Ravn Abildgaard
Eva Nauta
Carolina Bongiorno
Carolina Miñana
Indra Enkhmunkh
Tatu Batiashvili
Surya Cannon
Evgenia Kiskini
Yasemin Sayin
Elsa Caroline Oswald
Jacob MacDougall
Jill Daeseleire
Lucrezia Sézanne-Beard
Maeve Collins
Charles-Alexis Ruzette
Fabian Avis
Sophie Aldibs
Viona Bejtullahu
King Clarin
Annabelle Lichtl
Emil Klaar
LANZA Atelier was founded in 2015 by Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo in Mexico City. Their practice spans architecture, drawing, research, and publishing, guided by a single leitmotiv: to find and contribute to the beauty of the world.

The studio has exhibited at SF MOMA, the São Paulo Architecture Biennial, and the Lisbon Triennial, and has lectured at Columbia GSAPP, ETSA Madrid, and Syracuse University. They are recipients of the Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York, and most recently have designed the 2026 Serpentine Pavilion in London.

Isabel Abascal studied at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, the Technische Universität Berlin, and the Vastu Shilpa Foundation in Ahmedabad. She served as executive director of LIGA and co-edited Exposed Architecture (Park Books). Her research into spaces for birth has received grants from the Mexican Fund for the Arts and the Spanish Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda.

Alessandro Arienzo studied at the Universidad Iberoamericana. He extends his practice into drawing and publishing through the ongoing Housetypes book series. His work has entered the permanent collections of SF MOMA and the Denver Art Museum.

Alessandro Arienzo and Isabel Abascal (Image by Pia Riverola)




Oscar TuazonIs the tree the first column? A tree is a complete architecture with a roof (canopy), a column (trunk), an envelope (bark), and a foundation (roots). A tree is shelter. Vandana Shiva speaks of the tree’s function as cleaning the air and water. It is life-giving and life-protecting. The industrial norm, however, is to look at the tree as product to be extracted. This workshop stands with the tree and we become tree huggers, friends of tree, inhabitants of tree.

We open our vision to the circles and cycles of tree, both in form and system. The site is tree. And our interventions are for tree. Sixteen orchard ladders. A circular bench. A surface to lay in and watch tree.

Is a building always the answer? Do buildings need to be Gore-Tex’d with layers of plastic film and stuffed foam inside the walls? Is permanence possible? The workshop shows us how to look at found matter as a friend, and approach the tree with its wisdom and intelligence systems beyond what we can measure and dissect.
Assistant: Anna Gerstoft
Eka Khomeriki
Augusta Dydensborg
Aly Akers
Carla  Van den Berg
Alice King
Justyna Pawelczak
Patrick Ostrowsky
Hyojeong Song
Alexandra Stephan
Britta Lydia Theresia Theune
Joke Rosenberger
Adam Berton
Lauren Geisler
David McGonigal
Matyas Török
Paloma de Pouplana Mira
Lisa Yi Chen
Oscar Tuazon is an artist whose practice moves between minimalism, conceptualism, and architecture. Working with concrete, steel, glass, timber, and found objects, he constructs large-scale installations in which structure and process are inseparable. Informed by minimalist strategies yet resistant to formal purity, his work foregrounds the means of its own making: the joint, the load, the repair.

A sculptural installation is homologous to a house, something continuously built, maintained, and inhabited. This equivalence between construction and occupation is central to his predominantly site-specific practice, which frequently invites direct physical engagement. His concern is with presence and relationality rather than object autonomy.

He is currently developing Cedar Spring Water School, a permanent public artwork in the rural American West conceived in the tradition of Land Art. Sited where water sources that have sustained communities for millennia face acute ecological risk, the project engages with the politics of water, its extraction, control, and significance for native communities, functioning as both a site of public access and a framework for environmental awareness.

Oscar Tuazon



Atienza Maure Observations of entropy took center stage in Atienza Maure’s workshop at Paraply. What is permanence in architecture? How is time made visible in the built environment? What are the elemental occurrences in the world around us that produce regular reactions?

Modern architecture often thinks of the building as permanent, or at least “complete” with white renders and pristine edges. The reality is one of age and time and patina. Alonso challenged the participants to spend time with moments of entropy in which two systems are in dialogue: corrosion on metal, lichen on stone, the traces of rainwater on brick…

The participants were challenged to make devices that enhance and emphasize these moments, standing as functional and sculptural bodies in the environment around us.
Assistant: Rebecca Stenz
Support: Ida Bitter
Sophia Strabo
Alanis Štrukelj
Farishtay Zehra Zaidi
Mayokun Janet Alao
Charlotte Erny
Hanna Hoffmann
Dagmar Aline von der Ahe Garriga 
Sophia Carmody
Teodora Yordanova
Clay Moon
Shay Miller 
Lauritz Wiehl
Meret Renold
Arthur Hichert
Ruben Winter
Madeline Miclea 
Atienza Maure is an architectural practice founded in 2018 by Alonso Atienza Sánchez and Miguel Ángel Maure Blesa. Both trained at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (ETSAM) with an academic year at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

The practice works across new construction and rehabilitation at all scales. Their architecture proceeds from an eclectic and hedonistic continuity with tradition and local context, brought into dialogue with the possibilities of contemporary construction. History and technique are not opposed but compounded, each project an act of attentive reading of place, programme, and material culture.

Alonso Atienza Sánchez and Miguel Ángel Maure Blesa




Guest lectures by Justine Bell from Djernes & Bell, artist Lea Porsager, Amalie Holm from gruppe aja, and Goncalo André Pires from Studio Sotnas.



Location Modelbygningen
Philip De Langes Allé 9A
1435 Copenhagen
The workshop will take place in a former naval building where ship models were built, known as Modelbygningen. The building is currently being used by a program at the Royal Danish Academy as an educational space. Adjacent to the building is a garden and a bunker, and the building sits 100 m from the harbour.



Bibliography
  1. Andrew Tuck in conversation with Jeremy Till and Tatjana Schneider, Architecture Is Climate, 2025
  2. Mould, Architecture Is Climate, 2025
  3. Ahali Conversations with Can Altay, Episode 8: Fritz Haeg, 2020
  4. Rebecca Harrell Tickell and Josh Tickell, Common Ground, 2023
  5. Alex Pritz, The Territory, 2022
  6. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013
  7. David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, 2007
  8. Richard Powers, The Overstory, 2018
  9. Hélène Frichot, Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture, 2019
  10. Manu Kapur, Productive Failure, 2024
  11. Ed. Laurie Cluitmans, On the Necessity of Gardening: An ABC of Art, Botany and Cultivation, 2021
  12. Reiner de Graaf, Architecture Against Architecture: A Manifesto, 2026
  13. Arthur Brehmer, Die Welt in 100 Jahren, 1910
  14. Karl Blossfeldt, The Alphabet of Plants, 1997
  15. Josef Frank, Accidentism, Form 54, 1958 (Book 2016)
  16. Becoming: Architectures for a Planet in Transition, 2026
  17. Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison, Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary, 2007
  18. Ted Rau, Collective Power: Patterns for a Self-Organized Future, 2023



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