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PROJECT
TREES, TIME, ARCHITECTURE!
with/for Buero Kofink Schels
Curatorial Direction: Ferdinand Ludwig, Kristina Pujkilović
Graphic Design: strobo B M
images by Sebastian Schels / Nikolai Marcinowski
The exhibition “Trees, Time, Architecture! – Design in Constant Transformation” (March 13 – September 14, 2025) explored the relationship between architecture and trees: How can buildings grow with rather than against nature? Curated by Ferdinand Ludwig and Kristina Pujkilović, it presents historical and contemporary examples showing how living tree structures and “building on trees” can offer aesthetic inspiration while pointing toward a more sustainable built environment. The exhibition highlighted how grown structures in the research field „Baubotanik“ can serve as functional building materials.
Our ambition was that the exhibition architecture itself embodies these themes. Therefore, its design relied exclusively on circular industrial products from the timber industry and Baubotanik prefession, all of which reenter material cycles after the exhibition’s end. This approach not only reduced the exhibition architecture’s direct emissions and challenged the vast industrial system behind the “tree as commodity,” but also created striking contrasts between the galvanized steel elements and the warm, organic wooden exhibits.
Our outdoor installation “Baumlager” extended this discourse into public space. In a high-bay warehouse setup, 22 living hornbeams stood as symbols of the slow timescale of tree growth—spanning decades or centuries—set against the urgency of today’s ecological and social crises. To raise the question of whether trees should appear not simply as raw materials but as living, evolving organisms, a transparent, comprehensible artificial system kept them alive: hoses feeding exposed roots, tension straps stabilizing the trunks, and grow lights enabling photosynthesis.
Visitors were confronted with how society treats trees as mere resources, often ignoring their ecological, climatic, and temporal significance.