How can we live with water in a changing world?

Jakarta, Houston, Manila, and Istanbul are just a few of the major cities worldwide that face the risk of flooding as sea levels continue to rise. Rising sea levels and extreme weather events compel us to rethink how we build and live.

As we confront these challenges, the need for innovative approaches becomes increasingly clear. A new exhibition named “Water is Coming” at Danish Architecture Center (DAC) in Copenhagen explores, conveys, and debates the complex relationship between water, humans, and our changing world. It zooms in on how city planners and a strong architectural tradition can help us face present and future challenges.

Denmark is a small lowland country with a coastline of 7,300 kilometres. Surrounded by water, Denmark, like all other nations, faces a global challenge that demands both immediate and long-term solutions at regional and local levels. If we are to develop and adapt our landscapes, cities, buildings, and homes to a rapidly changing world, we must radicalise our thinking, adopt flexible approaches, and engage in new forms of collaboration.

These questions are particularly pertinent in this exhibition. How do we adapt our coastlines and buildings? How do we prioritize and strategically plan where to build and live? How can we act individually and collectively? How can we ensure that we live in better balance with nature and improve biodiversity in the long term?

“Water is Coming” allows visitors to explore visions, historical perspectives, and current knowledge actively. To experience installations, visualisations, models, and live projections that demonstrate how urban planners, landscape architects, architects, and engineers worldwide, from countries like the Netherlands, Greenland and Denmark to cities such as Copenhagen, Venice, Hamburg and New Orleans, in collaboration with researchers and other disciplines, are inventing new solutions for the changing world of water caused by climate change.

As visitors engage with these themes, the poetic and vibrant scenography, mirroring the fluid nature of water, is designed to inspire visitors to reflect and actively participate in shaping the conversation about the role of water in our future world.

The exhibition also offers an opportunity to revisit the Danish contribution “Coastal Imaginaries” to the Architecture Biennale in Venice 2023 curated by Josephine Michau, including the scenographic diorama “Mermaid Bay” by Christian Friedlander and the vision project “Copenhagen Islands” by Schønherr Landscape Architects.

Experience how we can live with water from 7 October 2024 to 23 March, 2025.

Danish Architecture Center (DAC)
Bryghuspladsen 10,1473 Copenhagen
Opening hours: 10am to 6pm daily, Mondays and Thursdays until 9pm.

www.dac.dk

Danish Architecture Center (DAC) is an international cultural attraction for anyone who wants to experience and understand how architecture and design create the framework for our lives. DAC is based in the heart of Copenhagen, by the inner harbour, in the spectacular building BLOX.