FESTIVAL THEME

MIES DIDN’T COME HOME THAT NIGHT

OPEN26 takes place in an increasingly unpredictable world, where attention has shifted from climate, diversity, and inclusion towards rearmament and war. We are entering an era, marked by continued competition and extraction of the planet’s resources. Despite this dystopian scenario, can new models of living emerge?

HISTORY AS CATALYST

The crises we face today are not new – some of them are rooted in past and failed architectural visions. Using history as catalyst, we examine the legacy of modernism, its utopian ideas, and how it continues to shape our lives – for better and for worse.

NEW UTOPIAS

At OPEN26, we ask: Can utopia be activated as a strategic tool to address the complex, long-term challenges we face, and inform new forms of architecture? At a time when technological advances, resource scarcity, and geopolitical instability shape our collective future, what will happen if we open the drawer of hope, dreams, and utopias?

CURATED BY

Karen Kjaergaard, Aysha Amin, Ida Bjerga & Aria Gilani

Karen Kjaergaard

Aysha Amin

Ida Bjerga

Aria Gilani

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

MIES DIDN’T COME HOME THAT NIGHT

Architecture today has expanded in every direction, stretching its definition inside out. Almost unrecognizable to some, former devotees now blink with cloudy nostalgia longing for a return to the field they fell in love with: a sophisticated practice emphasizing clarity through the detail, uncompromising in its vision of a unified art intersecting form, program, and technology. Mies, are you still out there?

No answer. After the brief honeymoon of architectural modernism came the long coming to terms with its fallout. When the world started to realize that one could not draw together disparate cultures and lived realities into a cohesive globalist glue united by formal principles and open floor plans, practice and pedagogy were left grasping for straws. The search for the next Bauhaus, and the question of if it should even be found, has been diffuse and laced with confusion.

Where to from here, when one’s learned imagination conflicts with reality? Architects split their strategies. Some expand their roles in worldmaking, intervening in the most complicated contexts one can imagine to cultivate infrastructures of solidarity and moments of lightness. More find renewed meaning in shape-language, while others delve headfirst into vernacularism. Many post on the internet. Few agree on much except that utopia is further away than ever, and that we have to align on some fronts very soon or risk the profession continuing to deflate in the background as the world falls apart.

It is in this context that OPEN26 forensically investigates a crisis of faith across scales. Mies Didn’t Come Home That Night takes its starting point in the potential of utopian thinking and its complications: what good is hope, desire, and idealism in the face of chaos, conflict, and tension? The festival invites global and local architects and academics to share their reflections on a broken promise, as we try to find not only a way to wake up from the dream into the nightmare, but hold and work through both with grace and tenderness.

– Karen Kjaergaard, Aysha Amin, Ida Bjerga & Aria Gilani

NEW CURATORIAL TALENTS

The Danish Arts Foundation supports the development of emerging curatorial voices as part of the OPEN26 Architecture Festival.

This year’s co-curators, Aysha Amin, Ida Bjerga, and Aria Gilani are all either graduates or current students at the Aarhus School of Architecture, and contribute to shaping the curatorial concept and programme in close collaboration with leading curator Karen Kjaergaard.

Through OPEN, Aarhus School of Architecture explores and develops new formats for communicating architecture.

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