Savage Beauty, British Pavilion 2027
—
Venice Biennale
, IT
KBN worked with VDYA and NVBL on the proposed British Pavilion for the 2027 Venice Biennale.
— Venice Biennale , IT
Savage Beauty: Grounds for Extraction translates the legacies of colonial extraction into a spatial and material experience organized around ritual, labour, and collective making. Rather than illustrating history, the pavilion stages its consequences, examining how extractive systems continue to shape movement, material value, and everyday social practices.
The pavilion is structured through two interdependent spaces. The primary room operates as a performative environment for live Orang Asli weaving practices, where a large woven mat is suspended overhead and incrementally produced. As the mat grows, it exceeds its intended architectural limits, positioning collective labour as an active spatial force. A secondary tea room forms an intimate counterpoint, where tea is shared communally atop a table fabricated from tin and metal to foreground informal, lived social exchange.
Lac Megantic
—Quebec, CA
Nestled in between
the picturesque landscape of Lac-Megantic a quaint guesthouse that
acts as an extension to the family’s main dwellings. The
design intent is to fully utilize the seasonal changes by integrating
nature into the built environment. —Quebec, CA
The guesthouse emerges from the hard landscape, slowly defining a transition between nature and architecture. The roof terrace above the guest house acts as a welcomed extension from the main dwelling to the lake creating a seamless transition from one home to the other.
The Garden House
—Chandigarh, IN
The Garden House is
designed as a series of small outdoor frames actively interlacing
with the interior’s, generating an intricate series of internal and
external spaces. —Chandigarh, IN
The house becomes a play where the walls are constantly folding between public and private. The design focuses on using screens of different opacities to help curate the various degrees of privacy. Constantly unfolding itself, and the journey takes the user through a labyrinth between the inhabited rooms and nature.
The house is used as a popular stage for different conditions: inside/outside, lit/dark, private/public, hidden/revealed, quite/noisy.
BKK House
—Bangkok, TH
The Architecture
establish a relationship with nature through the elements of light
and shadow, sounds, materiality and landscape blurring boundaries
between public/private and internal/external. —Bangkok, TH
Achieved through the careful curation of materials such as glass, timber and concrete, dissolving those into lights, translucencies, reflections, refractions and textures. The main focus was to define a home that breaks away from a traditional understanding of a series of separated and isolated rooms but to create a series of open transitional spaces through the use of tectonic elements.
We are after a house that is unconstrained by tradition, but rather is activated by the symbiotic relationship that tradition and modernism have to offer to each other.
An Embedded Dwelling
—Burgel, DE
The architecture is developed using traditional design methods of Northern Germany through the application of Tectonic components such as pitch roof, plaster, wood, glass and clear relationship with green elements. This allows a strong relationship with the site to be established.
The design aims to simultaneously create a seamless relationship with the surrounding, but to also establish a “grammar” that represents its inhabitants.
In order to do this, a list of traditional architectural elements was collected and manipulated based on what would best represent the identity and personality of its final user.
Coexistence
—Château de la Mothe-Chandeniers, FR
Nowadays we often find ourselves thinking how living within nature would mean. As architects we often relate our thoughts to a platonic retreat, typically located in a context that is systematically and programmatically different to the urban context we live in.
Design architecture within nature has always been challenging. Canonic elements of architecture don’t make us relevant here, ephemeral yet untouchable conditions are driving forces instead.
Our aim is to put forward an architectural proposal that treasures the core values around nature and generates spaces that celebrate it.
Sara Hildén Art Museum
—Tampere, FI
with twelvefortyone.co.uk
Everything often starts from a very simple gesture that eventually turns into something magical, sophisticated.
The ability of every form of art is to play with our imagination, taking us through an unexpected journey. Masses, matters, contrasts, colors, these are often the tools to play with, finding balances, proportions. The way to experience them is the prelude to something surprising, or better yet, unknown. Architecture often finds itself to relate to the same principles. Gestures define spaces, moves depict movements, materials create atmospheres, thresholds allow for a subconscious sound perception.
Experiencing it should do the rest.