Local Knowledge / Collective Ressource

Local Resource / Collective Knowledge examines how architecture can engage with local communities, cultural heritage and regenerative resources through material practice. In our collaboration CITA, GXN and 3XN take as their starting point the Biennale's theme of combining multiple forms of intelligence (artificial, social, material) across three locations in Denmark, Cuba and Italy. 

Local Resource / Collective Knowledge explores how architecture can engage the dynamic ecologies that they are participate in. These ecologies are always in flux, shaped by shifting conditions and interwoven relationships. Today, climate change accelerates their transformations, introducing new uncertainties and altering material flows, habitats, and local economies. In response, locally engaged architecture offers a new perspective not only by rethinking resource practices but by embedding itself within remediating processes that restore, regenerate, and realign with local environmental dynamics.  

The project zooms in on three sites that connect local and global resources and communities of practice through the mapping and co-production of architectures informed by local ecologies. In Jutland, Matanzas, and Venice, participation in these evolving ecologies and their site-specific material flows fosters new relationships between built and natural systems. By foregrounding locality, architecture moves beyond extraction and optimisation, instead becoming an active agent in ecological adaptation and transformation. 

The exhibition features a 6m high installation comprising three panels corresponding to the three selected locations. Each of them shows prototypical cladding based on new material systems: blue biomass biopolymer composites, biocement, and palm leaf weaving. 

The prototypes are developed with local partners through a local ecological mapping and co-production process that integrates community driven ingenuity and material circularity through multiple technologies that range from heritage to hightech. These mapping and processes form part of the projects thesis and are shown through videos and 3D visualizations in the exhibition space. 

CITA’s contribution to the project stems from the international research network “Building with Blue Biomass” supported by the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science and the Eco-Metabolistic Architecture project, European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 101019693).  

Project Team 

CITA, GXN, 3XN  

Collaborators

• Università Iuav di Venezia 

• Computation in Architecture Masters programme, Royal Danish Academy Architecture, Design, Conservation 

• Havhøst 

• Vejle Fjordhave 

• Rios Intermitentes 

• Sustain.me 

• Consorzio di Tutela della Cozza di Scardovari DOP 

• Biomason 

• Rambøll 

• Red Bull    

Funded by

• Realdania 

• Statens Kunstfond 

• Knud Højgaards Fond 

• Beckett Fonden