COPENHAGEN

At the Copenhagen Architecture Biennial CAFx 2025, RIFT – Regenerative Ideas for Tomorrow presented a month long exhibition and a roundtable program at Værksted for Arkitektur, hosted by Rønnow Leth & Gori. The exhibition set out to map the current landscape of biogenic architecture across the Nordic region, offering a collective snapshot of emerging materials, practices, and imaginaries.

The exhibition was structured around six large-scale visual collages representing Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. Through text and image, each collage traced a trajectory from historical building traditions to present-day experiments and future material potentials. Local landscapes, reference projects, and raw resources were interwoven to situate architecture within its ecological and cultural contexts.

Complementing this cartography was a physical display of biogenic materials and products—both those already in use and those still in experimental stages. Straw, hemp, reed, seaweed, mycelium, and other plant- and mineral-based matter were presented as a tactile archive of possibilities, foregrounding the sensory and atmospheric qualities of regenerative materials.

A poetic, fact-infused manifesto—utopian in tone yet grounded in material realities—was written and published for the occasion. Available for visitors to take with them, it functioned as a portable reflection on how architecture might evolve when aligned with living systems.

The accompanying roundtable conversation activated RIFT’s methodology The Dialogue, bringing together architects, artists, and designers from across the Nordics to share situated perspectives on regenerative practice. Short presentations by Lúdika (Iceland), Collaboratorio (Finland), Jenny Nordberg (Sweden), and Alberte Holmø Bojesen (Denmark) formed the basis for an expanded collective discussion with the RIFT team and invited Nordic scouts, including Lennart Dose (Denmark) and Johan-Martin Christiansen (Faroe Islands).

The conversation unfolded as an open forum for exchanging experiences, challenges, and visions—asking how biogenic materials might be developed and scaled within planetary boundaries, and how architecture can move from extractive paradigms toward regenerative cultures. Multilingual and cross-disciplinary, the dialogue emphasized the Nordic region as a shared yet heterogeneous field of experimentation.

Together, exhibition and conversation positioned mapping as an act of gathering: assembling fragments of knowledge, practice, and imagination into a growing network. RIFT’s presence at CAFx framed the Nordics not as a fixed territory, but as an evolving laboratory for regenerative building cultures rooted in place, material, and collaboration.