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.
Introductions
Workshop Day 1
Copenhagen Tour
Rest
Workshop Day 2
Workshop Day 3
Workshop Day 4
Workshop Day 5
Reviews
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.
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.
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.
1435 Copenhagen
- Andrew Tuck in conversation with Jeremy Till and Tatjana Schneider, Architecture Is Climate, 2025
- Mould, Architecture Is Climate, 2025
- Ahali Conversations with Can Altay, Episode 8: Fritz Haeg, 2020
- Rebecca Harrell Tickell and Josh Tickell, Common Ground, 2023
- Alex Pritz, The Territory, 2022
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013
- David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, 2007
- Richard Powers, The Overstory, 2018
- Hélène Frichot, Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture, 2019
- Manu Kapur, Productive Failure, 2024
- Ed. Laurie Cluitmans, On the Necessity of Gardening: An ABC of Art, Botany and Cultivation, 2021
- Reiner de Graaf, Architecture Against Architecture: A Manifesto, 2026
- Arthur Brehmer, Die Welt in 100 Jahren, 1910
- Karl Blossfeldt, The Alphabet of Plants, 1997