To learn more about the approach behind the forthcoming edition, we spoke to Josephine Michau, the biennial’s director and a member of its curatorial collective, who proposes reconsidering our faith in technological control over our surroundings and restoring a more conscious — and pleasurable — relationship with the elements.

In 2025, the biennial invited architecture to slow its pace with Slow Down. Now, Elements questions its desire for control. How did you move from one theme to the other?

Slowing down was the first step. It made us ask what we were trying to get away from, and a lot of the answer was control.

For much of the past century, the promise was that technology would free us from the constraints of climate, geography and material limits, and architecture made that promise believable. Warm feet, dry walls, clean air, hot showers. But the promise has become unattainable, and also less desirable. So Elements is a deeper reckoning. Slow down was the methodology to get there.

Architecture protects us from the elements. At what point does that protection become a problematic attempt to control nature?

Protection is partly the job of a building, and I wouldn’t want to lose it. The problem begins when we pretend we ever had mastery of the forces instead of starting to design from the fact that we depend on them. We have sealed modern life inside a climate-controlled cocoon, and the things we pushed into the background are coming back at us heavily: the air we heated, the water we polluted, the soil we exhausted. We thought we had full control, but it turns out we don’t!

There is no outside to the elements and we start to feel it, as our systems break and the engineering mastery we thought we could rely on has proven to be helpless towards the greater forces of nature: floodings, increasing heat waves, wild fires, polluted air, contaminated and depleted soil, etc. Instead of forcing a building to exist despite its environment using massive amounts of energy to heat, cool, and power it, architecture should instead be reckoned as being deeply rooted in its dependence to its environment and thus, to be designed around the environment.

This could be by using biogenic materials, passive heat systems and on an urban scale, favour nature based solutions such as the idea of the ‘sponge city’ where natural ‘sponges’ like wetlands and permeable roads can absorb heavy rain and floodings naturally – and simultaneously replenish aquifers. A belief that is also deeply rooted in indigenous traditional ecological knowledge.

What would designing from that dependence on nature look like in practice?

Designing from dependence on nature shifts the center from an anthropocentric one to an ecological one. For the architect it means shifting from one who dominates the environment to being instead an environmental steward who acts as a collaborator who participates within an ecosystem.

This mindset transforms how we build, produce and live. We go from control, predictability and extraction of resources to resilience and ecosystem health, we go from short-term-efficiency and immediate financial return to multi-generational sustainability and a system that is self-healing. It starts with the premise that we depend on these forces, and that care can begin with contact: soil under our hands, wind on our skin, a jump in the sea. In practice, it means buildings made to be opened up, repaired and altered, and interiors allowed to shift with the seasons. It means walls that carry the afternoon’s heat into the night and materials we trace back to the mines and forests they come from.

The buildings that serve us best won’t be the ones that shut the world out. They’ll be the ones that let us feel it. We aim to demonstrate that during the Biennial with our Public Pavilions for example. Applications are now open until 10 February 2027, and once again we encourage the world to collaborate with Danish architects and researchers to fulfill the criteria, which you can find on our website.

“We go from control, predictability and extraction of resources to resilience and ecosystem health, we go from short-term-efficiency and immediate financial return to multi-generational sustainability and a system that is self-healing.”

How might this openness to the elements change our expectations of comfort?

We’ve come to expect comfort as a constant. Stable temperature, no friction, no surprises. But this climate control is a massive  driver of global warming and green inequity where privileged groups get comfort at the costs of the less privileged. Instead, we propose designing for intentional, adaptive discomfort reconnecting human bodies to seasonal and regional weather shifts to synchronize with the rhythms of nature and reconnect with our bodily intuitions. This is not necessarily connected to loss, instead it’s connected to new forms of desires.

We see it already: people are queuing outside saunas, lowering themselves into winter harbours and cooking over fire. Putting their screens away to get rain and wind in their faces instead. That tells us comfort was never only about being shielded. It can also come from contact. I’m not arguing for discomfort for its own sake, but for a wider idea of comfort, one that makes room for seasons, weather and a bit of friction. Perhaps discomfort is the wrong word, instead we should use the already established wording for this philosophy, namely post-comfort.

The biennial asks who is protected and who is left exposed. How can architecture respond to climate inequality without turning protection into a luxury?

The cocoon was never evenly shared. We have to be honest that negotiating with the elements is never neutral, only ever partial. We’re wary of two easy answers: escaping the elements through ever more opulent protection, or relying on regulation alone. We’re after a third route, the good through boundaries.

Protection shouldn’t be a privilege, so it’s partly a question of rules, which is also why our symposium-format Assemble! has a focus on regulation along inspirational practices and research that can inform it.

You also ask what we should preserve and what we can allow to disappear. What does architecture gain by accepting impermanence?

It gains a more honest relationship to time. Metal darkens, stone stains and plaster cracks, and need being cared for. A building that has been patched, altered and weathered is one people have looked after.

Accepting impermanence means designing buildings that can be repaired and transformed. It also means making deliberate choices about what we protect and what we let go, rather than leaving that to chance.

Beyond their poetic associations, how do fire, earth, air and water become tools for rethinking architecture?

They become questions a designer can act on: what to admit, what to resist, and what to store, filter, shade, drain, seal or release. Those verbs are practical. They shape how a wall holds heat, how a roof handles rain and where a building’s materials come from. The programme is built the same way.

“Accepting impermanence means designing buildings that can be repaired and transformed.”

Our four elemental exhibitions at four different institutions across Copenhagen will bring together international and Danish practices, artists and researchers to look at how architecture harnesses these forces, how it is shaped by them and most importantly how it depends on them.

Assemble! will examine policy and building codes. Which regulations most urgently need to change to support a different relationship with the elements?

Pioneers can prove what works, but only the rules can make it normal. The building sector accounts for 37% of global CO2 emissions, 30% of waste and nearly 30% of biodiversity loss, yet better practice stays the exception while policies and incentives still reward the damaging kind. Assemble! 2027 builds on last time’s call for new legislation and pushes further into planning law, building codes and industry practice, looking at the structures that govern how cities build, extract and consume.

We are bringing some of the pioneering examples together with decision makers across the value chain to inspire change. It’s not always just law, it’s also culture and lack of knowledge that slows the transition into a building sector that is more just for both people and planet. But regulation is definitely key. One place to look could be into the idea of making Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) the norm. EPR looks at materials as a service rather than a product and buildings are merely considered containers for materials storing them until used in other places. EPR creates a circular economy that incentivises the material producer and/or the property owner to extend the lives of the materials by creating better design- and material choices.

“Assemble! 2027 builds on last time’s call for new legislation and pushes further into planning law, building codes and industry practice.”

How does Elements challenge Copenhagen’s reputation as a model of sustainable urbanism?

I’d say it builds on that reputation rather than challenging it. Copenhagen has made real progress, and you can see the appetite for elemental contact here, in the saunas and the harbour baths. But a model city can still be one that manages nature, and sustainability can become another form of optimisation. Elements asks whether we can go further, from controlling and mitigating the elements to living with them, accepting friction, repair and some discomfort.

For a city that’s seen as an example, that’s the more interesting thing to test. It’s also worth mentioning that Copenhagen might be a green pioneering city globally when you look at its extensive bike infrastructure, its renewable district heating and some ambitious climate targets (climate negativity in 2035). But if you look at the ecological impact our consumption has on a global scale, we are some of the greatest sinners consuming resources equal to more than 4 planets a year. This is, among others, due to the fact that urban expansion projects often prioritise new-built instead of building with the already existing and have a short-term profit horizon, that its citizens are rich and thus have an emission-heavy lifestyle, and because our green district heating is relying on imported forest biomass from Latvia and Estonia.

Your curatorial statement mentions happiness, ritual and care. What role can pleasure and beauty play in architecture’s response to the climate crisis?

A central one, because fear doesn’t build a shared future. Climate change has made heat, water, air and soil impossible to ignore as sources of risk, but there’s also a growing longing for direct contact with them. Elements begins from that doubleness: how can the forces we fear also become sources of habit, happiness, ritual and care? When responsible architecture is also pleasurable to live in, it enriches everyday life and the common good, and people want to live that way. Beauty is part of how change spreads.

A biennial for experimenting with other ways of living

The programme will centre on four major exhibitions at different institutions across Copenhagen, where Danish and international practices, artists and researchers will address each of the elements. These will be accompanied by new public pavilions and the Assemble! symposium, scheduled for 8–10 September, which will focus on the policies and regulations that shape construction.

With activities in the cultural district and more than sixty partner venues, the biennial will bring these questions into the city. Its approach opens up a conversation about materials and legislation, but also about something as immediate as the pleasure of feeling the air on your skin or living in a building that ages well.

“Climate change has made heat, water, air and soil impossible to ignore as sources of risk, but there’s also a growing longing for direct contact with them.”

(*) Comments by Josephine Michau. Images supplied by the Copenhagen Architecture Biennial 2027.

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