Our Urban Living Room
The Danish firm Cobe is currently one of the most renowned protagonists of a new generation of architects. Using innovative methods, the team led by Dan Stubbergaard explores diverse potentials of the urban and promotes them through remarkable projects. Cobe sees the city as an extended living room, in which private and public spaces can be connected in experimental ways – making liveability a central theme of their work. The exhibition Our Urban Living Room presents a selection of realized projects in Copenhagen from the past thirteen years, including the urban space Karen Blixens Plads, the residential highrise The Silo and the Frederiksvej Kindergarten. Using models, images, texts, drawings and films, the expansive wooden installation also tells a story about Copenhagen's architectural development and how these changes affect the everyday lives of people and their social interactions.
Over the past 30 years, Copenhagen has undergone major changes – from a post-industrial city to a liveable city, establishing itself as an experimental metropolis for sustainable urban development and pioneering architecture.
‘Our city is our home, and that quality is what underpins the success of Copenhagen today. The more we care for it – as architects, but more importantly as Copenhageners ourselves – the better we will treat it. The better it is designed, the more people will want to live well in our city and take pride in it. This is not a matter of beauty, elegance or wealth, but a story of social liveability and urban democracy,’ says Dan Stubbergaard, architect and founder of Cobe.
Our Urban Living Room is dedicated to the architectural practice of Cobe. Designed both as an architectural intervention and an exhibition, it invites visitors to step into an expansive wooden bookcase – visitors are able to browse through built projects by means of models, images, texts and drawings.
The bookcase forms the setting for showcasing seven themes. These include, among others, the transformation of industrial buildings, architecture for children and what Copenhagen could look like in the future. By creating an exhibition that invites play and interaction, visitors partake in defining the urban living room – learning from Copenhagen, right here at Aedes in Berlin.
Together with the Danish Architecture Centre (DAC), Our Urban Living Room was first exhibited in Copenhagen in 2016, and later at the urban information centre Laituri, in Helsinki in 2018. The current edition of the exhibition in Berlin was developed by Cobe in cooperation with Aedes Architecture Forum.