Danish Architecture Center: Aware exhibition
September 2024
The city of Copenhagen was named by UNESCO-UIA (intl. Union of Architects) World Capital of Architecture for the 2023-2026 period. A World Capital of Architecture becomes a global forum at the forefront of discussions on contemporary urban planning and architectural issues. In Copenhagen a big congress was held in 2023.
Danish Architecture Centre DAC calls itself the epicentre of architecture culture. DAC shares knowledge about sustainable development / architecture through exhibitions, tours, guides and events. One of DAC's 2024 main exhibitions was ‘Aware – Architecture and Senses’. Design and architecture office 3NX GXN built six installations to experience architecture, to challenge the visitor to consider the relationship between spatial atmospheres and human emotions. The exhibition is an experiment, says the organizer. The concern is:
“We bring ourselves into architecture, filling space with atmosphere – but architecture has an agency of its own. Space can suggest you to do things: jump or shout, move fast or slow, be active or rest, make you alert or relaxed, keep to the side, or take center stage.”, and “At home, at work, at school, we are almost always present within architecture. Aware asks you to consider the questions buried beneath the surface: what emotional effect does architecture have on you and your everyday quality of life?”
“Behavioural design should not be confused with social engineering. The spaces we design, and this exhibition in particular, are about all of us and our experience with our immediate environment, how shapes, colours, textures, and materials make us feel” remarks Susan Jayne Thams Carruth of the architecture and design office.
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The installations of the Aware exhibition impact the visitor, arouse emotions, stimulate curiosity. The topic of architecture experience deserves more attention and the Aware exhibition promotes this theme.
After visiting the Aware exhibitions, I was left with some questions. To what extent can an exhibition like Aware simulate real world architecture experience. The installations are from 3NX GXN practice, but in a very different spatial context and in a dark exhibition setting. The experience of space is essential in architecture experience. In Aware, the spatial component is limited. The dark setting makes Aware more dramatic. It does show the effect of colour, but is away from the real world.
As an experiment the exhibition is a positive first step. Aware has been made from a designers / architect’s point of view (who wants to impact behaviour and wellbeing). However, what users / visitors of architecture experience is a big unknown. Architects and designers have personal and professional observations of user experiences, but there is almost no serious empirical research on architecture experience.1) Architects seem to collect personal information for design ideas and develop viewpoints and concepts. They don't develop systematic evidence of users and visitors architecture experience. Collecting evidence of architecture experience is mostly anecdotal and it needs to be more systematic. That is not easy because experience is a broad concept, it is personal and varies among cultures and empirical research is quite complex.
A step DAC could undertake is organising a self-managed architecture visit for visitors / participants and ask them to share their experiences. Observational studies and questionnaire research could accompany such initiative. The visit could be the DAC building itself as architecture experience, or next door, to Det Kongelige Bibliotek (the Royal Library). Researching people’s experiences in these spaces seems doable and it will be interesting for visitors of DAC.
1) I did research for a congress paper called 'Reframing modern architecture as cultural city tourism experience', for X Congreso Internacional Científico-Profesional de Turismo Cultural (CITC 2024), 22-23 Feb., Córdoba (Spain) and found that empirical evidence regarding architecture experience is minimal (paper not published as yet).