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Approach
Explore our three-legged approach to making architecture more approachable, exciting and sustainable.
Exhibitions & Public Programme
Learning & Education
Policy & Advocacy

Exhibitions & Public Programme

H27

At Halmtorvet 27 we present exhibitions that explore and investigate the expanded field of architecture with architects, artists and scholars. Since 2014 we have done more than 12! How can we live with other species, what can we learn from nomadic life, how can using local materials and vernacular methods inform the built future, and how can we reimagine the architecture of democracy? We do exhibitions that challenge your imagination and present ideas for a better built future. Explore them here

Film Club

Every month we screen films that give you portraits of the most important architects, films that challenge the medium to let you travel to buildings around the world, and situate your body completely within the material. Since our launch we have screened world premieres and curated programs with capacities like Juhani Pallasmaa, Anupama Kundoo, Jan Gehl, Dorte Mandrup, Ane Cortzen, Bjarke Ingels, Dan Stubbergaard and more. See our current screenings here

Copenhagen Architecture Forum Podcast

Throughout the year we turn live events and important conversations into podcasts connecting Halmtorvet 27 and Copenhagen to the broader world of architecture. From activists working against demolition, to scientists studying how spiders build, and a manifesto reading club. Listen to them all here.

Words and Cities

The major problems of the 21st century will be solved and created in cities: more than 50% of the world’s population lives there, and this share is expected to reach 85% by 2100. At the same time, inherited modern ideas about the city increasingly feel worn out; we no longer yearn for the metropolis’s shock, excitement, spectacle and anonymity. We long for new narratives, fantasies and imaginaries. With Words and Cities we ask the most exciting Danish writers to dream freely about the cities of the future. Read the texts here.

Learning & Education

We Co-Create Our City

Children and young people are the future citizens, decision-makers, builders, advisors, and architects. We see it as a democratic task to help them understand the exciting, complex, and opportunity-filled field of architecture and urban planning. How we build has significant impact on our everyday lives, societies and planetary balances.

In our educational programmes, photography, drawing, model building, workshops, city walks, and group discussions become a way for the children to explore their local areas from an architectural perspective, letting them build and reimagine their schools in completely new ways and as homes for other species. In the end, the children get the opportunity to share their findings in exhibitions featuring models, short films, and the children's own photographs.

We believe in giving the children hands-on experiences and a space to explore their creativity, while also showing them how they can present and voice their own opinions. Together we explore questions such as: What is public space? Has the city always been as it is today? How can you transform a place you don't like into a favorite spot? If someone has a physical disability, does it change their ability to use the city? How can we support biodiversity through architecture?

Summer Schools & Workshops: Film & Architecture

Since 2014, we have done a series of Summer Schools and Workshops using the medium of film to investigate new approaches to architecture. We have hosted our own Summer Schools with themes such as Landscape as Character: Rural Noir, Inclusive Design, and Social Integration. And we have developed, consulted on, and facilitated workshops with institutions like BINA from Belgrade, MAXXI in Rome, Oslo Architecture Triennale, Architecture at The Edge in Galway, Tirana Biennale, Tbilisi Biennale, Pink Armenia from Yerevan, and Queer Art Festival in Baku.

The school programmes and workshops have connected students, professionals, and the broader culture across geographical regions and in between disciplines.

Architectural Evening Schools

Learning has no age. Across our evening schools, professionals and the broader public alike can get new and novel perspectives on architecture and planning. The evening schools provide a way for ordinary citizens to qualify and strengthen their ability to take part in conversations about the future of our shared cities.

In 2024’s Learning Urban Planning, we embarked on a journey from the first sensory encounters with the city’s spaces and buildings to working with municipal, master, and local plans, with the director of the Danish Urban Planning Lab and former city architect of Copenhagen, Tina Saaby, and a host of guest lecturers.

The city is buzzing with life, yet we often overlook everything but the human. In 2025, we presented Living With Other Species, a six-part evening school—with talks, film screenings, and city walks—exploring how to plan and live alongside other species in the cities of the future. Moving across scales, from regional planning to the secret lives of bats, ants, and microbes, we shifted our gaze to imagine new forms of interspecies cohabitation.

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Policy & Advocacy

Dear Lord Mayor

In 2019, we invited a broad array of voices from the field of architecture to write letters to the mayor of Copenhagen. We wanted to turn the good intentions from the C40 climate summit—held in Copenhagen in the autumn of that year—into concrete action.Back then, it was still believed that the city could be CO₂-neutral by 2025, and the message was clear: action was needed immediately. Among the letter writers were capacities like Dan Stubbergaard, Anders Lendager, Lene Dammand Lund, dominique + serena, Kenneth Balfelt, Ellen Braae, Lars Autrup, and more. Read them here.

2025 is long gone, and CO₂-neutrality is still far away. That is why we are reviving Dear Lord Mayor, inviting back the letter writers from the first iteration and a string of new voices. The aim of Dear Lord Mayor is clear: to engage the field of architecture in holding the Copenhagen Municipality accountable, showing the political force of architecture, and providing a space for strengthening the connection between politics and architectural thinking.

See collection

Assemble! - Europe’s New Conference on Architectural Politics

The goal of the 2025 Assemble! conference - which hosted close to two hundred participants - was clear: To create a building sector that operates within planetary boundaries and ensures a thriving future for both people and planet. Over two days during the inaugural Copenhagen Architecture Biennial architects, poets, engineers, activists, economists, advertising advisors, developers, legal experts, and practitioners were brought together to rethink the regulations, ownership models, and design processes that quietly define our cities.

Assemble! was a structural experiment, a policy rehearsal, and a launchpad for bold ideas to become real-world action. It took participants from drafting up inspiring new legislation, to testing its implications, and to creating sustainable, engaging narratives that capture the public imagination—while inspiring change across the sector. On stage were international capacities from across the sector: From an opening speech from Katherine Richardson - a leading thinker on questions of planetary boundaries - to innovative law proposals by Kate Orff, Indy Johar and Anders Lendager.

Assemble! is a platform for a sustained rethinking of the legislation governing the field of architecture. In the months after the conference we hosted Post Assemble! a four-part evening school where the legislative proposals were mapped using network theory, drawing connections between the central actors and networks of the building sector and the effects they have on the biosphere. In 2027 Assemble! will be back for its second iteration.

Visit Assemble!

Commission on Circularity

Commission on Circularity was our first exploration into the intimate connection between architecture and law. Over six events tied to the exhibition of the same name, a series of prominent Danish architects proposed new circular legislation, creating a temporary space for exploring law as a site of design. Here, the methods of architecture was reconsidered, and the fabric of governance rewoven with the ethos of circularity and the expertise of architectural practice, giving rise to a new legal lexicon for shaping a new societal architecture.

The legislative proposals were made by: Justine Bell (Djernes & Bell), Anders Lendager (Lendager Group), Søren Nielsen (Vandkunsten), Anna Marie Exner (Anna Mette Exner Arkitektur), Sinus Lynge (Effekt), Pil Thielst (Lundgaard & Tranberg). All proposals available to read and are discussed in a podcast series of the same name.

Visit Assemble!
Upcoming Events
View all
Exhibition
16 Mar
17 Apr
Tales of a Nomadic City
In 1958, there were five hundred people in Nouakchott. Today, more than a million inhabit the rapidly growing capital of Mauritania. This VR-exhibition, co-created with Nouakchott youth, artists, poets, and scholars, weaves personal stories, archives, and immersive sound to portray the city’s complex history and ongoing urban transformation.
CAFx Copenhagen Architecture Forum
Tales of a Nomadic City
Conversation
15 Apr
15 Apr
Panel Discussion: Behind “Tales of a Nomadic City”
Join us for a panel discussion delving deeper into the research, ideas and knowledge behind Tales of a Nomadic City.
CAFx Copenhagen Architecture Forum
Panel Discussion: Behind “Tales of a Nomadic City”
Workshop
16 Apr
16 Apr
Inventing Democratic Invitations — Approaches to Democratic Youth Engagement
Join us for a day of workshops and talks with local and international speakers - exploring how practices of making can be part of policy-making-processes and asking how citizens’ assemblies can act as democratic rupture that gives meaning to agencies otherwise overheard and shift attention from discursive to material and spatial practices?
CAFx Copenhagen Architecture Forum
Inventing Democratic Invitations — Approaches to Democratic Youth Engagement
CAFx - Copenhagen Architecture Forum
Halmtorvet 27
1700 København V

E. info@cafx.dk
CVR: 43054066
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