Copenhagen Architecture Biennial Sets 2027 Dates, "Elements" Theme

The second Copenhagen Architecture Biennial will run from September 9 to October 15, 2027, under the theme "Elements." The announcement follows the inaugural 2025 edition, which had called on visitors to Slow Down, and turns attention to the planetary forces that architecture has long tried to master.

The organization traces its roots to the CAFx yearly festival, founded in 2014 and renamed Copenhagen Architecture Forum in 2024 to lead new projects in architecture and urbanism — including the shift from festival to biennial.

What does "Elements" question?

The curatorial premise attacks one of modernity's most persistent promises: unlimited technological development beyond climate, geographical, biological, and material constraints. Architecture has served as a tool for that promise, managing temperature, humidity, and contact with the environment.

The Biennial's diagnosis is blunt. In a world marked by rising temperatures, polluted air, rising sea levels, dead soils, and growing pressure on natural resources, that foundational promise has become an undesirable future. The theme asks how architecture can live, build, and plan with the elements rather than against them, in protection of human life.

The program poses three questions:

• Who is protected and who is exposed?
• What is maintained and what is allowed to fail?
• What kinds of common life might emerge: habit, happiness, ritual, and care?

"For decades, architecture has promised us mastery over heat, earth, air and water. With 'Elements', we ask what happens when we stop pretending we ever had that mastery, and start designing from dependence instead?" said Josephine Michau, part of the Curatorial Collective and Director of the Copenhagen Architecture Biennial.

"The buildings that will serve us best aren't the ones that shut the world out, they're the ones that let us feel it," Michau said.

What is on the 2027 program?

Activities will be organized around each of the four elements — fire, earth, air, and water. The program spans Copenhagen's Cultural District and more than 60 venues across the city.

Confirmed highlights include:

• Four exhibitions exploring architecture's relationship with elemental forces, held at the newly built Vandkulturhuset Papirøen by Kengo Kuma, as well as at Simian, Kunsthal Nord, and Halmtorvet 27.
• A second open call for pavilions, inviting architects, designers, and researchers to propose new public pavilions responding to the Elements theme, following the success of the inaugural edition's Slow Pavilions. Details will appear on the Biennial's website.
• The professional symposium Assemble!, focused on policy and the regulatory structures that govern how cities build, extract, and consume, building on the first edition's call for new legislation.

"With four exhibitions built around fire, earth, air and water, an open call for new public pavilions, and Assemble! returning with a sharper focus on policy, the 2027 Biennial is our most ambitious attempt yet to make the elemental legible as the very ground of architecture itself," said Josephine Michau, Founder and Chief Curator of CAFx and the Copenhagen Architecture Biennial.

Further program details — exhibiting practices, pavilion winners, Assemble! speakers, and the full public events schedule — will be announced ahead of the opening.

A city with architectural momentum

The Biennial lands in a city with an established design reputation. For the second year running, Copenhagen was named the world's most livable city in the 2026 Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Liveability Index.

According to the Danish Architecture Center, part of that urban quality-of-life progress is due to architect and urban planner Jan Gehl, whose 90th birthday DAC is celebrating with a calendar of activities and an exhibition.

Copenhagen is not alone in advancing the discipline through public programming. The Sharjah Architecture Triennial in the UAE has released the full documentary film series A Journey into Architecture Archives: Baghdad, Damascus, Tunis online. A new gathering in Valparaíso, Chile, brings together master builders to safeguard traditional trades. And the 8th Tallinn Architecture Biennale (TAB 2026) in Estonia centers its program on the question "How Much?", examining how cost, scarcity, and constraint shape architectural production.

With its 2027 edition, Copenhagen positions the elements not as a design constraint to overcome but as the ground on which architecture must learn to depend.