CAFx: The Latest Architecture and News

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The first edition of the Copenhagen Architecture Biennial opened on September 18 and will run until October 19, under the theme "Slow Down." Organized by CAFx (Copenhagen Architecture Forum), the new platform evolves from the city's previous annual festival into a broader international biennial for architectural dialogue and exchange. Led by Josephine Michau, the event seeks to create space for reflection on architecture's role in shaping societies and the environment. The chosen theme, Slow Down, invites participants to reconsider the pace of transformation in the built environment in response to global pressures such as rapid urbanization, resource consumption, and climate change.

During the opening days, ArchDaily announced the 2025 Next Practices Awards, and throughout the month, the Biennial presents more than 250 events, ranging from exhibitions and talks to performances and guided tours. Highlights include contributions from Danish practices such as Adept with Fast City/Slow Architecture and Lendager with Living Lab, alongside international participants like Atelier Bow-Wow and Rem Koolhaas.

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In January 2023, Copenhagen Architecture Festival carried out a film and architecture workshop in collaboration with Barleti University and Tirana Architecture Triennale, exploring inclusivity in Albania’s capital city. In this interview, professor Saimir Kristo shares his thoughts about his booming city and the potential of film to narrate its true character.

Data Feminism, as conceptualized by D’Ignazio & Klein (2020), introduces intersectional feminism in data science and invites us to examine power relations and dynamics of oppression that are built into data infrastructures that underpin society today.

ArchDaily and Copenhagen Architecture Festival (CAFx) interviewed project partner Michael Alexander Ulfstjerne from Emergency Architecture & Human Rights (EAHR) on film, architecture and inclusive design.

Videos

Multifarious experiences of cities are brought forward in Copenhagen Architecture Festival (CAFx)’s impressive Film Mosaic—from life-affirming experiences of cities as potential, if not real, spaces of play, dance, social exchange and community-building, to claustrophobic experiences of trapped, suffocating life. To the authors of this short reflection essay, a series of films depicting the latter kind, have made a powerful impact. Filmmakers from countries as diverse as Azerbaijan, Georgia, Canada, Uruguay, Tunisia, United Kingdom and Spain offer artistic expressions of how persons in today’s urban life may be unable to thrive, to differentiate themselves, to find rootedness, calmness, sanity or safety.

Architects are called upon to build society’s greatest structures. We marvel at the museums, performing arts centers and spaces of worship that dot the globe and represent the peculiarities of the world’s many cultures. Yet, at the core of the roles and responsibilities of the architect lies a calling for a far more elemental human need: shelter.

This doesn’t imply that architects are always involved in the creation of all the forms that shelter takes. However, a deep understanding of how people dwell provides an appreciation of the diversity, resilience, alacrity of the human race. The Human Shelter, a documentary about what people value or “need” in their lives, ties into a fundamental quality that any architect would be foolish not to cultivate: the ability to listen and perceive what makes people feel at home.

This year's Copenhagen Architecture Festival (CAFx) offered a wide range of activities, from film screenings to exhibitions on the future of social housing. The festival's fourth edition took place over 11 days and featured more than 150 architectural events in Copenhagen, Aarhus, and Aalborg.

Festival Director Josephine Michau explained that since its first edition, the intention behind CAFx was to bring many local agents together in order to build new dialogues around architecture. As a society, how do we identify with architecture? What values do we ascribe to it? These questions were part of this edition's overarching theme: "Architecture as identity."