2023
2023
The work presented here was undertaken during the studio founder's tenure at CAF×.
The exhibition was structured in two main parts. A window section introduced five Japanese practices — Mio Tsuneyama and Fuminori Nousaku, 403architecture [dajiba], CHAr, tomito architecture, and dot architects — through photography, drawings, and video portraits developed with Studio GROSS. An interior section presented twenty further projects from the same generation, organised under six themes, from Architecture as Transformation to Material Histories.
Make Do With Now's argument was that a generation of Japanese architects who entered practice after the 2011 earthquake and Fukushima disaster had turned a marginalised position into a method: working with limited resources, found materials, and existing structures rather than clean-slate construction. The exhibition proposed this as more than a regional phenomenon — a set of approaches, from adaptive reuse to participatory design, increasingly relevant to a European architecture culture confronting its own post-growth reality.
Adapting the exhibition for Halmtorvet 27 meant working with only part of what had filled S AM's galleries in Basel, and building a Copenhagen-specific layer on top of it. CAF× directed the adaptation, coordinating closely with Yuma Shinohara, who worked on site through the process, and designed and produced the exhibition's visual material in house, based on the original identity designed by 75W (Tilmann S. Wendelstein) for the Basel presentation. The exhibition's flexible display panels draw on the building's own architecture: Halmtorvet 27 was transformed from a bank into a shared space for CAF× and Art Hub Copenhagen by Pihlmann Architects and Archival Studies in 2021, an intervention that added no new material, instead repurposing what the building already held — its suspended ceiling tiles reorganised into folding walls, moved and reconfigured differently for each exhibition, and its rear glass cages removed to expose the street-facing façade that makes CAF×'s window exhibitions possible around the clock. The exhibition's tables were built specifically for the show, combining the same steel-tube frame used across CAF×'s exhibition furniture with glass panels salvaged from the building's own former bank vault, reused as tabletops. Large-format textile panels, printed with photography of Japanese streetscapes and interiors, formed the backdrop of the window displays, while the perforated ceiling-tile panels — arranged into freestanding walls and, elsewhere, stacked as plinths for tables and screens — held the "20 Projects" section's photography and text.
A locally added third section turned to Pihlmann Architects' own working method more directly: a new film by Hampus Berndtson, made for the Danish presentation, documented the practice's transformation of Thoravej into Art Hub Copenhagen's future home, still underway at the time — working with what already exists rather than building anew, the same method behind Halmtorvet 27 itself, and a natural extension of Make Do With Now's own argument.
Make Do With Now's public programme ran for the length of the exhibition and was treated as carrying equal weight to the show itself: the opening paired introductions from CAF×'s director, Shinohara, and S AM director Andreas Ruby; Kulturnatten was built around an evening with Pihlmann Architects exploring the building's own transformation; a site visit with the architectural office LOKAL toured their renovation of Ørsteds Haver in Frederiksberg; a panel discussion examined how Japan's "generation renovation" related to its own architectural traditions; a salon session turned the exhibition's questions onto a younger generation of Danish architects; and the programme closed with a studio visit to Panum & Kappel, who presented their own circular construction principles.
CAF× also handled the marketing and audience outreach for the exhibition and its full public programme, alongside communications more broadly — the website, press, newsletter, and social media.
Make Do With Now was supported by Dreyers Fond, Realdania, Statens Kunstfond, and the Municipality of Copenhagen.
More images forthcoming.
Exhibition Design
Environmental Graphics
Brand & Identity Systems
Copywriting & Editing
PR & Communications
Marketing
Campaigns
Print & Digital Design
Project Management
Event Management & Coordination
Team:
Valeria Granillo, Yuma Shinohara, the Swiss Architecture Museum's team, Josephine Michau, Søren Nørkjær Bang, Ida Willadsen Bang Kjeldsen, Alexandra Wedderkopp Emelianov.