“New Materials, New Meanings?” ■ Kim Lenschow ■ Lecture

On September 24 at 19:00, we invite you to the reading room of the National Institute of Architecture in Kaunas for a lecture and conversation with architect Kim Lenschow, founder of the Copenhagen-based practice Office Kim Lenschow. After graduating from the Royal Danish Academy in 2014, he co-founded Lenschow & Pihlmann together with Søren Thirup Pihlmann, and today continues his work through a practice under his own name.

In Kim Lenschow’s architecture, materiality is not merely a question of construction or finish. In his work, it becomes a way to speak about place, time, production processes, the layers of a building, and our relationship with the environment. Key themes in the practice include the transformation of existing buildings, a poetic approach to reuse, the potential of existing materials, and construction with a smaller ecological footprint.

In the lecture “New Materials, New Meanings?”, Lenschow will speak about material expression in architecture and the meanings created through it. He will consider why it is important today to rethink what materials mean in architecture, and how such an understanding can change the way we build. The lecture will address new material experiments, their cultural value, technical qualities, and the possibility of creating a different architectural relationship with resources.

These themes will unfold through the practice’s recent works and research: from experiments with by-products of wood processing to a small summer house in a forest setting and the interior of a café in Copenhagen. In these projects, materials, structures, technical systems, and reused elements become not a hidden part of the building, but visible architectural content.

Lenschow’s buildings emerge from experiments at 1:1 scale – from joints and furniture to entire buildings – seeking to give ordinary, sometimes even banal materials a new life, aesthetic value, and the possibility of being used again. In 2024, the Danish Arts Foundation awarded his practice, highlighting precisely this radical approach to architecture, grounded in materiality and time.

Kim Lenschow. kimlenschow.com

2024 09 24. 19:00.

National Institute of Architecture. Kęstučio g. 19-3, Kaunas.