Architecture is co: an ethnography of architectural presentations and representations in Copenhagen release_qha5dc3tpzeqtbdzfqdt7wvztm

by Dominik Hoehn, Apollo-University Of Cambridge Repository, Maryon McDonald

Published by Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository.

2022  

Abstract

This dissertation explores some of the ways in which architecture and design were practised in the Danish capital of Copenhagen at the end of the 2010s. In 2018, a building called BLOX was opened on Copenhagen's harbour front after more than a decade-long period of design, planning and construction. Most of the fieldwork for this thesis took place in and around this new building complex. Supported by the Danish government and by a private foundation, BLOX was to become the meeting point for 'Denmark's world of architecture, design and new ideas', housing the Danish Architecture Centre and other organisations. Establishing BLOXHUB, the name of a new co-working space inside BLOX, was one key decision through which the ambition to 'co-create' was to be realised. 'The future is co', as the director of BLOXHUB put it. Both BLOX and BLOXHUB figure centrally in the thesis chapters. The Danish word for design is form-givning, literally meaning 'giving form'. Architecture is a professional practice and a discipline, usually practised in architectural studios and schools. But it is also given many other forms and practised in other places. This dissertation explores some of these other forms of the architectural and examines the workings of architecture under co-working logics. The chapters move from the BLOX building itself to BLOXHUB and to other organisations and places in and outside BLOX. The architects and other professionals that form part of the BLOXHUB community (as they call themselves) enact architecture through a variety of everyday practices that include producing oral and written outputs that animate, define and explain their work and views. Architecture is often described as a business now and, in the context of BLOX, its aim is expressed in the rhetoric of producing 'solutions'; this is conceptualised as a necessity but also as an opportunity to address 'global challenges'. Economics and the language of business have become a shared language across professions. This has resulted in additional perceived pres [...]
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