‘Make Sense’ is the name of the exhibition about the Swedish architecture firm White Arkitekter with a double meaning: the architects want their work to be understood as sensual and meaningful. It can be seen at the Architekturgalerie München until May 19. Among other things, it is about Nordic light, sustainable materials and, last but not least, people in space.
The new building in Växjö is a hybrid of station concourse and town hall (Image: Tegmark)
The new building in Växjö is a hybrid of station concourse and town hall (Image: Tegmark)
Hasle harbor bath in Bornholm Denmark (Photo: Signe Find Larsen)
Exhibition opening at theArchitekturgalerie München (Photo: Saskia Wehler)
White Arkitekter boss in front of the picture gallery of her 900 employees (Photo: Saskia Wehler)
Every visitor receives a spruce sapling. (Photo: Saskia Wehler)
The light moods of the north
White Arkiteker is one of Europe’s largest architecture firms with over 900 employees. Founded in 1951 by Sid White, the Swedish office has been working on international projects for more than six decades, always with the same basic philosophy: that good architecture can improve society. As most of the office’s employees also have shares in the company, their way of working is characterized by a particularly strong sense of initiative.
Their range of work covers many areas such as urban planning, landscape design, residential and office buildings, schools, commercial buildings, hospitals and sports and leisure facilities. The team is just as diverse: architects work side by side with anthropologists, urban planners alongside artists, sustainability experts together with researchers.
In addition to the curiosity that drives them and their democratic way of working, the Swedes are particularly fond of light: Dark in winter, hardly any night in summer – for White Arkitekter, daylight in Scandinvia is an important sustainable resource that needs to be utilized.
They write: “To capture the Nordic light, we carefully envelop it in our architecture. Walls and roofs become protective hands that do not waste a drop of light, while windows and openings shape the incidence of light. The nuances of light are as infinite as those of the changing weather… There is the luxury of four seasons; daylight changes every hour, week, month, year. Daylight is true wealth that must be protected by architecture.”
In keeping with this, the design of the exhibition rooms in the architecture gallery also awakens the senses. The first room embodies the aurora borealis, which turns a bluish purple on cold winter nights, followed by the warm colors of daylight in the second part of the exhibition. In the last room, the close relationship to nature and the forest is made clear in green light colors. Wood has become one of the most important materials for White Arkitekter due to the large amount of forest in Scandinavia and as a renewable resource.
So we can learn from the Scandinavians: close interdisciplinary collaboration as a collective promotes forward-looking approaches and generates sustainable projects that “make sense”.
The exhibition can be seen at the Architekturgalerie München until May 19, 2017. Further information can be found at: