Urbanization has long been like a stubborn sprinter, driving the economy, increasing production, and streamlining processes at an ever-accelerating pace. As we look to the future, we face a major challenge: to break free from this acceleration and instead imagine what happens if we slow down. What would happen if everything moved slower instead of faster?
Together with CAFx, we have invited 24 creators to the group exhibition Slow Down. Through an open call, we sought projects and works in which aspects of time are central—projects that highlight how deeply speed has gripped our lives. This exhibition presents works that document and question how speed has become the norm, as well as those that encourage reflection and offer new perspectives. Using both concrete methods and speculative ideas, the exhibition explores what architectural slowness could mean in our time and invites new ways of understanding, building, and being in the world.
The exhibition showcases projects that do not view our living environments merely as isolated places for linear development, but rather as parts of larger systems—ecological, geological, and social—where alternative perceptions of time are possible.
Slow Down not only highlights slowness as a solution—it also examines the hold that speed has on our lives. Through installations, models, films, and texts, we encounter proposals that challenge the status quo and present alternative ways of living, building, and thinking. The exhibition poses the question: What happens to us, our architecture, and our environments when we slow down? Can a conscious deceleration create space for deeper connections to time, nature, and society?
I installationer, modeller, filmer och texter möter vi förslag som vill utmana det invanda och visa på alternativa sätt att leva, bygga och tänka. Utställningen ställer frågan: Vad händer med oss, vår arkitektur och våra livsmiljöer när vi saktar ner? Kan en medveten inbromsning ge utrymme för djupare kopplingar till tid, natur och samhälle?
The exhibition is a collaboration between CAFx and Form/Design Center and is divided into two parts. To experience the full story, visitors are encouraged to slow down, take their time, and move through both time and space..
Exhibitors at Form/Design center:
- Boundoury Estate Community Maintenance Club
- CENTRALA, Celestial Architecture
- Dark Matter Lab, Cascading Effects – Implementing M0 (BUILDING STOP) Policy,
- E. B Itso, The Blue Room
- Elin Brissman, Utan titel
- Iwar Agger, All these useless things
- KOGL, Primordium
- Polymorf, The Idle Tile
- Runa Johanneson mfl. “Time as a tool for injustice”
- Stefan Uhlinder,”BIO”
- Tonia Carless, “House Flow”
Exhibitors at Cafx:
- Kristiane Fenger and Panuela Aasted (Stadia), De døde sjæles land
- Celestial Architecture (Małgorzata Kuciewicz, Simone De Iacobis) CENTRALA
- David Garcia Slow Habitation
- Pavels Hedström Pocket Temple-1 (PT-1)
- E. B Itso The Blue Room
- Pablo Castillo Luna, A Permeable Atlas
- Debbie Chen, Intermediary Softness
- Jana Pressler, Glassy Visions
- Tonda Budszus, Debris Cinema
- Studio Tideland + Emma Helene Rishøj
- Occluded Depths: An Assemblage of Externalities Caused by Marine Sand Mining
- Studio ACTE Te Koop op afbraak – To Sale Before Demolition.
- Dark Matter Lab Cascading Effects – Implementing M0 (BUILDING STOP) Policy
- Lauge Floris Show Me the Budget
About CAFX
Copenhagen Architecture Festival (CAFx) has evolved into the Copenhagen Architecture Biennale, a new platform for ideas and action in architecture and spatial design. Founded in 2024 by CAFx, the biennale is led by Josephine Michau and replaces the former annual festival. It brings together both the public and professionals through programming such as film screenings, lectures, and events, with a focus on architecture's role in social change.
About SLOW DOWN
Slow Down is the theme of the 2025 biennale and explores architecture’s potential to slow down today’s fast-paced, overheated societal development. It is a response to decades of accelerated growth, consumption, and environmental degradation. The theme calls for reflection, long-term thinking, repair, and care—in both how we build and how we live. Instead of “move fast and break things,” a new mantra is proposed: “move slow and mend systems”—an invitation to reevaluate time, value, and progress in service of architecture.
About Arkitekturdagen
During the annual Architecture Day, professionals in landscape architecture, urban planning, building, and interior design gather to reexamine the rules, design processes, and norms that shape our living environments. The day is not only aimed at architects but also other professionals in the built environment and an interested public.
About OAS
Open Architecture Studio, OAS, invites architects and curious Malmö residents to visit architectural studios across the city and engage with ongoing projects and processes. These days offer an opportunity for a broader conversation about architecture, centered on dialogue, process, and outcomes.