Learning from Collaboration – Building Future Practice

Building boom

In Denmark, the building boom period from roughly 1960 to 1975 was characterised by great technological and social innovations and the industrialisation of construction. While the latter has often been subject to criticism, several researchers have pointed out that the architecture of the period was also characterised by an exceptional type of holistic thinking whereby architects, landscape architects, planners and others worked closely together. Moreover, this happened at a time when the educational landscape was changing and new social groups were entering educational programmes in architecture, landscape architecture, engineering and planning – and thus also entering professional practice in those fields.

Crossing disciplinary boundaries

The contributions of architects, landscape architects, engineers and planners have traditionally been investigated in separate streams of historical research. But how did people from these professions work together to create the built environment? What characterised their invisible collaborations across differences of profession, class, gender, generation and geography? What did it take to make a collaboration successful, and when and where did barriers and conflicts emerge? These are the questions that underpin this research project.

Future collaboration

The research project will provide invaluable knowledge about how the cities and landscapes of the period came to be. In doing so, it will create a more accurate basis for today’s many tasks regarding the repurposing or restructuring of surviving constructions from the period. We will activate this knowledge to inspire current and future generations of practitioners, who are on the lookout for more diverse and sustainable spatial practices in a context where cross-disciplinary work within construction and urban development is on the rise.

With this pilot project, which runs in 2024–2025, we will work towards establishing a larger research collaboration to investigate cross-disciplinary and diverse collaborations in construction during 1960–1975.