Discover the
Slow Pavilions Winners
With each their take on an architecturally sophisticated pavilion in recycled and reusable materials, they set out to imagine what a great deceleration of the global system might look, feel, and sound like on a local scale.
The architecture of the 21st century will be an architecture of the slow. For it’s really not about whether we slow down, nor if we need to. It’s about how slowness will arrive. The pavilions give the Biennials theme physical form in the Cultural District of Copenhagen, and will act as symbols and hubs for the first Copenhagen Architecture Biennial.
Inside Out, Downside Up by Slaatto Morsbøl
Inside Out, Downside Up is a pavilion built mainly from reused materials, offering a spatial response to the biennale theme Slow Down through a tactile and sensorial architectural experience. Located at Søren Kierkegaard Plads, the pavilion reflects the characteristics of its immediate context — a site marked by the contrast between historic brick warehouses and modern metal and glass buildings, all framing an expansive cobblestone-paved plaza beside the canal.
The project understands slowness as a physical and emotional recalibration — a return to awareness through the senses. The pavilion invites visitors to slow down not just through its atmosphere, but through its very making.
Slaatto Morsbøl (Thelma Slaatto, NO, and Cecilie Morsbøl, DK) is a young architectural duo based in Copenhagen, with an education from the Royal Danish Academy.
Barn Again by Tom Svilans & THISS Studio
Proposes a reimagining of the traditional Norwegian barn through the expressive reconfiguration of reclaimed timber elements. The pavilion addresses slowness from three different perspectives: by providing a place of pause in the middle of the city; by deferring and elongating the material value chain; and through the tectonic overlay of timber hand and machine-craft.
Timber is salvaged from a disused barn—weathered wood that has already lived a life—and strategically reconfigured into a sheltered cocoon in the plaza at Gammel Strand, where its traditional architectural language is contrasted with new joinery and precise machine incisions.
Barn Again is a collaboration between: Tom Svilans, an award-winning architectural designer and researcher based in Copenhagen, Denmark. THISS Studio, an award-winning London-based architecture practice founded by Tamsin Hanke and Sash Scott. As well as Bollinger+Grohmann & Winther A/S.
“ The selected pavilions articulate a most current and forward-looking architectural agency, situated within the broader transition toward circular building ”
“ Together, they offer a bold vision for how architecture can respond to our changing world ”
