2024
2024
The work presented here was undertaken during the studio founder's tenure at CAF×.
The project operated on two fronts. The first assembled an archive: world-leading researchers, artists, curators, and designers were invited to contribute objects, models, cartographies, concepts, and narratives that made the material economies of architecture visible — the mountains translated into gravel, the forests into clay pits, the villages into sand mines that lie behind the built environment. Their contributions were organised into twenty-one Files, grouped in sets of five under a colour-coded index — yellow, red, green, blue — each File carrying a tag with its number, its group colour, and its place in the index. Where a File's material extended beyond what a single box could hold — an object, a fragment of raw material, a sample — it was tagged individually, so that everything on display, however dispersed across the space, remained legible as belonging to its group. The second front was legislative: over the course of the exhibition, five prominent Danish architects were invited to propose new circular legislation during a series of public hearings, treating law as a site of design.
Commission on Circularity's argument ran through both halves of the project: that the building and construction sectors, responsible for 39% of global carbon emissions and 40% of global waste, operate a zero-sum extraction economy in which the habitability of some places is bought at the cost of others. Against this, the project proposed two responses at once — an archive that renders the hidden material economy visible, and a legislative exercise that treats architectural expertise as a resource for shaping the laws that govern it, rather than only the buildings themselves.
CAF×'s role extended through the full arc of the project. The selection and framing of the archive's contents was a curatorial process. The exhibition's visual identity and the archival system were conceived in house, personally directed by the studio founder, with graphic designer Kaiu Meiner brought on as an external collaborator to help realise the base templates, working under the studio founder's direction as her main point of contact; the full set of archive material, tags, and layouts was then developed in house from that foundation. The physical structures that held the exhibition — the boxes, the modular scaffolding-and-plywood furniture — were designed alongside this, with tables and structures made specifically for the exhibition and intended to be kept and reused afterward, as they later were. The window's steel framework and chairs, in turn, were carried over from an earlier CAF× exhibition, Coastal Imaginaries. The exhibition's flexible display panels were repurposed from the building's own suspended ceiling tiles, part of Pihlmann Architects and Archival Studies' 2021 transformation of Halmtorvet 27, reconfigured for this show's specific layout.
Justine Bell of Djernes & Bell opened the hearings with a proposal for a legal duty to preserve existing buildings in Denmark. Søren Nielsen of Vandkunsten followed with a proposal for a temporary moratorium on new construction, reviewed by a panel including Lars Autrup, director of the Danish Architects' Association, Annemarie Munk Riis of the Danish Green Building Council, and law professor and former University of Copenhagen rector Linda Nielsen. Anders Lendager of Lendager Group proposed a framework for material ownership across the construction industry. Sinus Lynge of EFFEKT proposed new CO₂ limits for construction, reviewed by Camilla van Deurs of the Nordic Office of Architecture, formerly Copenhagen's City Architect, alongside Munk Riis. Pil Thielst of Lundgaard & Tranberg closed the series with a proposal to guarantee 30% of Danish land as protected nature, reviewed by architect and urban planning consultant Holger Bisgaard. Each hearing paired its proposer with a panel of economic, legal, and political experts and a public audience, in the same space that held the archive; the sessions were recorded and released as a podcast series, extending the programme beyond the run of the exhibition itself.
CAF× also handled the marketing and audience outreach for the exhibition and its hearing series, alongside communications more broadly — the website, press, newsletter, and social media — and the editorial curation of the CAF× Journal's Commission on Circularity collection.
Commission on Circularity was supported by Dreyers Fond, Realdania, Statens Kunstfond, and the Municipality of Copenhagen.
More images forthcoming.
Creative Direction
Curation
Exhibition Design
Environmental Graphics
Brand & Identity Systems
Naming
Copywriting & Editing
PR & Communications
Marketing
Campaigns
Print & Digital Design
Project Management
Event Management & Coordination
Team:
Valeria Granillo, Søren Nørkjær Bang, Josephine Michau, Alexandra Wedderkopp Emelianov, Xenia Hitz, Kaiu Meiner.
With the contribution of:
Global Extraction Observatory, Amelyn Ng, Marija Maric & Francelle Cane, Nina Canell, Countdown 2030, Ang Li, Materia Prima, Metasitu, Beauty of Oil, Jonathan Foote, Ecology of Stone, Lendager Group, Margarida Waco, and Students from the Royal Danish Academy.
With the participation of:
Justine Bell from Djernes & Bell, Søren Nielsen Vandkunsten, Anders Lendager from Lendager Group, Sinus Lynge from EFFEKT, Pil Thielst from Lundgaard & Tranberg.