22 April – 10 September 2023
An exhibition offering compelling new visions for architecture in the face of the climate emergency.
For our inaugural exhibition, we’ve asked four architectural practices and collaborators – Dress for the Weather, McCloy + Muchemwa, Office S&M and the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment (a joint initiative between Newcastle and Northumbria Universities) – to create installations that challenge the ways we conceive, make and experience architecture in response to the seismic challenges of the climate emergency. Sustainability is now part of the thinking behind nearly every building project,
but this is not enough. We need to find new ways to dramatically reduce the built environment’s carbon-footprint without compromising – and, indeed, actually extending – architecture’s potential to bring about vital social, cultural, and technological transformation. Where Mies van der Rohe’s maxim “less is more” defined architecture in the middle part of the twentieth century, today we must find ways of doing “more with less.”
Together, the four installations offer visions for architecture that are open, experimental, inclusive and, above all, optimistic, celebrating architecture’s potential to help us adapt in a rapidly changing world.
Date
22 April – 10 September 2023
Location
The Sir Terry Farrell Building
Eldon Place
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RD United Kingdom
Cost
Free
The Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment
The Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment (a joint initiative between Newcastle and Northumbria Universities) is creating ‘The Living Room’ – a soft, cosy, snug internal space with thick sculpted walls. The structure itself is grown from fungal mycelium, sawdust, and wool. This innovative technique uses organic, locally available waste materials and microbial processes to radically reduce the environmental impact of construction, while asking us to reconsider the relationship between the built and natural environments.
Dress for the Weather
The starting point for Glasgow studio Dress for the Weather’s installation is insulation: a crucial material, which, though hidden from sight, has a major role in making new and existing buildings more energy efficient. For More with Less, the team have created a series of environments to enable visitors to explore insulation’s thermal and experiential qualities, highlighting the possibilities of this mundane yet transformative material.
McCloy + Muchemwa
McCloy + Muchemwa present ‘A place at the table’ – exploring our relationship to nature and architecture’s role in mediating it. The installation sees a dramatic swathe of landscape emerge from a meeting table around which visitors are invited to sit and converse. By giving nature a literal place at the table, this installation encourages us to see architecture and nature as part of the same world we inhabit.
Office S&M
In their installation ‘Luxurious Thrift’, Office S&M propose that to create comfortable buildings, we need to grow to love uncomfortable architecture. A series of interventions within the gallery will add a veneer to ordinary elements, such as doors and windows, questioning the assumptions that govern how we think about and use architectural spaces. The project offers a vivid illustration of how energy efficiency adaptations to existing buildings can not only be functional but bring joy and delight.
Credits
Curators
Owen Hopkins
Lorna Burn
Fabrication
Raskl
Graphic design
Studio Ilka
Office S&M, Luxurious Thrift (collage), 2022. Courtesy of Office S&M
Installation photos by Jill Tate