More with Less: Reimagining Architecture for a Changing World
20 April – 10 September 2023
More with Less is a manifesto for architecture in an age marked by crisis – one that demands urgent and far-reaching action. Architecture offers vast potential for change, from the scale of a single building or neighbourhood to that of a city, even the planet. But to be able to help, architecture itself needs to change fundamentally, or it risks deepening the crisis it aims to help resolve.
At the root of architecture’s problems is the inescapable fact that the built environment is currently responsible for a large proportion of humanity’s carbon emissions, while playing a major role in entrenching the divisions between the human and natural worlds which underly so many aspects of the present crisis.
For architecture to get its house in order, it is essential to use fewer carbon intensive materials in new buildings and to shift the focus to retrofitting existing ones to increase their energy efficiency. But this alone is not enough. To tackle the crisis fully, we must also find ways to unlock architecture’s potential to build a world that’s more open, more inclusive and more sustainable. In fact, achieving the former is simply not possible without doing the latter.
This is the brief we have put to four architects for this exhibition. In response, each of them has created an installation that poses ideas for how architecture might be rethought, remade, and reimagined in response to our rapidly changing world. The four installations do not claim to have all the answers. Instead, they show that architecture’s potential lies not just in its ability to change the physical world, but to transform how we see and think about it.
Featured Architects
Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment
Dress for the Weather
Office S+M
McCloy + Muchemwa
Credits
Exhibition curators: Owen Hopkins and Lorna Burn
Public programme: Abi Mitchell
Exhibition fabrication: Raskl
Graphic design Studio Ilka
Installation photography: Jill Tate