Exhibition on the architecture of openness

The architects Oliver Burch, Jakob Junghanss and Lukas Ryffel work together as the collective 8000.agency, which they founded in 2020 while studying at ETH Zurich. As part of the external page BSA scholarship, with which the Federation of Swiss Architects has been promoting design-related research activities since 2008, they conducted research into the “architecture of openness”.

In their investigation, the architects discovered almost forgotten residential buildings, traced the qualities of open access and presented a repertoire of spatial approaches for extending buildings with communicative threshold spaces. In a collection, they analyze 44 buildings that work with open access, from the arcade to the free-standing staircase to the open hall.

A traveling exhibition highlights a chapter of the 2024 publication “Offen erschlossen. Ansätze zum Weiterbauen”. The chapter takes an associative approach to open access. The result is a kaleidoscope of intermediate worlds: Images, plans, diagrams, quotes, texts and statements form a dense cloud of content and guide us through individual aspects of the architecture of openness.