Paraply X OBEL

We are proud to support Paraply across three cycles, with the first already completed, and two more to come. Paraply is an architecture workshop in Copenhagen, where 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 materials collected from a building in transition or demise.

Each workshop leader conducts an independent course within the program and offers participants different modes of working, thinking, and building. What unites their approaches is an insistence on learning through making. Rather than treating design as a detached or abstract activity, all three workshops emphasise material engagement and spatial testing at a one-to-one scale. Timber is lifted, fabrics are hung, bricks are stacked—not as final gestures but as provisional moves within an ongoing exploration. Doing becomes a form of thinking, and every act of construction is a conversation with context.

Continuing Paraply’s pedagogical format, each course is structured around core themes, site-specific questions, and collaborative processes. Participants are encouraged to work without hierarchy to test ideas in real-time and to see mistakes as part of the work. The aim is not to perfect a design, but to rehearse ways of building that are attentive, regenerative, and open to change.

Paraply connects practitioners and participants from around the world to consider architecture not only as a technical or artistic pursuit, but as a situated, shared, and evolving practice.

The Summer School is an initiative run by the association, Paraply.
Board of Directos: Emil Hveplund, Valentin Abend, Rebecca Stenz, Jakob Ravn Abildgaard, Samuel Causse and Tobias Rasmussen.