Paraply is the architecture summer school hosted in collaboration with the Student Association at the Royal Danish Academy of Architecture in Copenhagen. Prominent architects, artists and designers are invited to guide a group of architects in education and training through hands-on 1:1 spatial interventions, using only abandoned and waste material collected from a building in transition or demise.
The workshop exists to integrate climate consciousness with practical adaptivity and design alchemy. Participants arrive with no prior knowledge about the materials they will have access to, or what the outcome of their projects will be. The intention is to encourage doing as a way of thinking by sketching in space at full scale –feeling the weight of timber, the stacking of bricks, and the hanging nature of fabrics, as methods for exploration. Mistakes and failures are essential design tools, considered as initial iterations and useful information.
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The workshop begins with an opening exhibition, displaying the “waste” material that has been accumulated in anticipation of the workshop. Opening talks introduce the core themes and topics, before the participants are divided into groups, where they jump into analog creative exercises and become familiar with each other. There is a day for observing “The Everyday” in Copenhagen, and a day for reading and media assigned by each workshop leader, before starting the core workshop days. The group structure is inclusive and non-hierarchical, with the workshop leaders working closely with participants, shoulder to shoulder.