Known worldwide for its progressive approach to architecture and design, Copenhagen steps into a new era with the launch of the Copenhagen Architecture Biennial 2025. Running throughout September and October, the month-long festival transforms the Danish capital into a living stage for experimentation, civic engagement, and bold architectural ideas.
Organized by the Copenhagen Architecture Forum (CAFx), the Biennial runs from 18 September to 19 October 2025, inviting participants to reconsider the speed at which we build, consume, and inhabit our environments. Curated under the leadership of Josephine Michau, the Biennial reframes the city as a living laboratory for what its organizers call a “Great Deceleration”: a deliberate counter to the speed, waste, and short life cycles that define much of contemporary construction.
What “Slow Down” asks of architecture
The theme, “Slow Down,” responds to the pressing ecological and cultural dilemmas of overconsumption of resources, climate breakdown, and the relentless pace of urban development. Across exhibitions, talks, and site projects, contributors explore craft and reuse to become design levers for climate resilience and social care. This thematic frame runs throughout the program and its headline commissions.
The Biennial’s slowness suggests that architects, designers, and citizens can imagine different futures built on longevity, care, multispecies thinking, and material circularity over demolition and rapid replacement.
Beyond Fast-Forward Urbanism: A Shift Toward Reflection
The Biennial builds on a decade of work by CAFx, which previously ran the Copenhagen Architecture Festival. Under the leadership of Josephine Michau, curator of the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, the shift to a biennial format reflects a broader ambition to expand from a cultural festival into a global platform for architectural dialogue and systemic change.
This first edition sets out to challenge what Michau calls the “fast-forward urbanism” of recent decades. By framing the Biennial around the idea of the Great Deceleration, CAFx positions architecture as a tool to rethink pace itself in terms of speed of construction and how buildings age, adapt, and serve communities across time.
The Slow Pavilions: Barn Again & Inside Out, Downside Up
The Biennial’s most visible and tactile interventions are its two Slow Pavilions, constructed in Copenhagen’s Cultural District after an international open call. Both act as experimental structures and public gathering hubs, each offering a unique interpretation of what it means to build slowly.
Barn Again, by Tom Svilans in collaboration with THISS Studio, Bollinger+Grohmann Engineers, and Danish carpenters Winther A/S, revisits the archetype of the traditional Norwegian barn. The pavilion is made from reclaimed timber salvaged from a disused structure. By blending hand-crafted techniques with digital fabrication, Barn Again demonstrates how aged materials can be given new life while preserving cultural memory. Its expressive form invites visitors to pause, reflect, and physically inhabit the tension between past and present.
Inside Out, Downside Up, by the emerging duo Slaatto Morsbøl (Thelma Slaatto and Cecilie Morsbøl), takes a more sensory approach. Using found and reused materials, the pavilion is designed as an interactive space for contemplation, emphasizing minimal intervention. Its open and tactile qualities encourage visitors to engage with slowness not as absence, but as presence, a space for collective stillness in the heart of the city.
Together, the pavilions serve as anchors of the Biennial’s public program, becoming stages for talks, performances, and informal gatherings. They also embody the festival’s central conviction: that sustainability and aesthetic experimentation are not opposed but mutually reinforcing.
The pavilions are sited in Copenhagen’s Cultural District (Gammel Strand and Søren Kierkegaards Plads) and act as hubs for the Biennial’s public program.
Slow Down (group exhibition): two venues, many voices
Another highlight of the Biennial is the group exhibition titled Slow Down, staged across two venues: Halmtorvet 27 in Copenhagen and the Form/Design Center in Malmö, Sweden. This cross-border staging underscores the Biennial’s ambition to think regionally while acting locally.
The exhibition brings together transdisciplinary contributions at the intersection of art, architecture, and activism. Selected from hundreds of international applicants, contributors range from Dark Matter Labs and Studio Tideland with Emma Rishøj to CENTRALA, each offering a distinct take on cultural narratives tied to speed.
The works engage with concepts of shock and surge, friction and frenzy, weariness and whirl, all terms that capture the anxieties of living in accelerated societies. Yet, rather than despair, the installations propose alternatives, new material practices, spatial experiments, and conceptual interventions that imagine slower, more sustainable futures.
Program highlights: Assemble!, Open House, film, and Next Practices
The Biennial lists over 250 events, city walks, harvest gatherings, screenings, and workshops that bring the theme into civic life. A few anchors:
Assemble! (Danish Architecture Center, 18–19 Sept.) It is a two-day policy and practice laboratory: panels and proposals from Kate Orff, Indy Johar, and Anders Lendager debate legal levers, ownership models, and a potential pause in construction practice.
Open House opens doors to sites rarely seen by the public, from private homes to climate-adaptive landscapes and the Medicinal Museum.
A curated film program premieres new portraits and re-contexts classic works, while CAFx activities spotlight emerging teams via Next Practices 2025.
A Celebration of Pause and Potential
The Copenhagen Architecture Biennial 2025 arrives at a moment when architecture, and indeed all building industries, face existential challenges. Global construction remains one of the largest drivers of carbon emissions, while urban populations continue to swell. Yet amid urgency, the Biennial proposes something counterintuitive: slowness as a radical strategy.
Through its pavilions, exhibitions, policy experiments, and public programs, the Biennial makes a compelling case that deceleration is about stopping progress and redirecting it toward longer lifespans, deeper care, and regenerative practices.
As Copenhagen welcomes visitors to its streets, courtyards, and waterfronts, the Biennial offers a model for how cultural platforms can move beyond display to become engines of systemic change. Whether through the tactile warmth of reclaimed timber, the imaginative provocation of a spatial experiment, or the policy rehearsal of a two-day symposium, the festival asserts one simple truth: the future of architecture may well depend on our ability to slow down.
Copenhagen Architecture Biennial 2025 Details
Dates: 18 Sept – 19 Oct 2025.
Organizer: Copenhagen Architecture Forum (CAFx)
Theme: Slow Down—exploring the “Great Deceleration.”
Slow Pavilions: Barn Again (Gammel Strand) & Inside Out, Downside Up (Søren Kierkegaards Plads).
Group exhibition venues: Halmtorvet 27 (Cph) and Form/Design Center (Malmö).
