At the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, The Architect’s Studio – Tatiana Bilbao Estudio is the third installment in a series of monographic architecture exhibitions that explore globalization, sustainability, and social challenges. With drawings, collages, models, and materials, the exhibition reveals the philosophies and processes of the Mexico City-based architecture team.

Tatiana Bilbao was born in Mexico City and studied architecture at Universidad Iberoamericana before working in federal departments of housing and urban development in Mexico City. She founded her eponymous studio in 2004, bringing together a multidisciplinary staff of architects, academics, and model makers whose projects are human-focused and site-sensitive rather than defined by a trademark architectural style.

The studio’s projects have included private residences and social housing projects, museums and educational buildings, public parks and urban master plans, and a 117-kilometer pilgrimage route. Collaborations as wide-ranging as the group’s portfolio support their commitment to multidisciplinary perspectives. For the Jardín Botánico in Culiacán, Mexico, the studio engaged 35 artists for site-specific works and small pavilions, and the Taller de Operaciones Ambientales (TOA) for environmental and landscape projects.

While digital tools are standard in architecture practices, Tatiana Bilbao Estudio designs and presents projects by hand, with drawings, collages, and material models. Bilbao describes that these techniques represent personal commitment, the physical world, and the human ability to communicate without machinery. Materials from previous and current projects comprise the exhibition at Louisiana.

The exhibition follows three themes of LANDSCAPES, CURIOSITIES, and PLACES, giving insight into Bilbao’s process through the materials that precede final architectural works. In LANDSCAPES, Bilbao has selected works from Louisiana’s collection and from the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City to explicate what she calls the “registration” of the site, considering the environmental conditions and cultures of the places where she works.

Sustainability is increasingly a mandate in architecture, but the word is not one that the studio uses to label its work. Bilbao describes that “sustainability” may qualify a type of architecture, but that for her, it should be embedded in every project. She has said, “When you come from a country where many people have very few economic resources, you are used to not wasting them.” Bilbao also says that everyone has a right to beauty, and the studio uses proceeds from some of its high-end commissions to fund projects such as public housing.

The Architect’s Studio – Tatiana Bilbao Estudio is on view at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art through April 5, 2020.

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In Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Ólafur Elíasson has transformed the museum’s South Wing into a rocky river landscape with a site-specific installation combining nature, architecture, and art.

Louisiana, along the Øresund about 25 miles north of Copenhagen, is renowned for its collection of modern and contemporary art as well as for its campus of Danish modernist architecture. The complex of glass-walled pavilions and low-profile buildings fits elegantly into the natural landscape, incorporating sculpture gardens and views onto the sea.

For his site-specific installation at Louisiana, Ólafur Elíasson has filled the museum’s South Wing with 180 tons of Icelandic rocks to create a naturalistic terrain, complete with a river of running water.

Louisiana is deferential to its Øresund landscape, but also obscures it with buildings and gardens. Elíasson’s installation suggests the dirt and rocks that were there before, and still are, underneath the museum’s floors. Visitors step across rocks and the small river that flows through the galleries, and the indoors and outdoors become reversed so that the building contains a landscape rather than the inverse. It is land art, on some scale, and is simultaneously representational and real.

Riverbed opened on August 20 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and runs through April 1, 2015. http://en.louisiana.dk/exhibition/olafur-eliasson

Ólafur Elíasson’s works since the early 1990s have frequently joined science, technology, and art for large-scale installations that immerse visitors into singular haptic experiences of natural elements.

In 2003, Elíasson created The Weather Project in the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern as part of the prestigious and popular Unilever Series. A large circular disk emitted orange light through a haze of mist, and a huge mirror covered the ceiling of the hall to reflect the light as well as the relatively small figures of visitors below. Some two million people visited the installation over six months to bask in the artificial sun.

With a commission by the Public Art Fund and simultaneous exhibitions at MoMA and MoMA PS1 in 2008, Elíasson installed New York City Waterfalls with four towers of scaffolds and pipes along the East River. The towers, from 90 to 120 feet in height, took up water from the river and let it cascade back as an obviously mechanical version of a natural phenomenon.

In 2011, Elíasson’s Your Rainbow Panorama was installed on top of the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Aarhus, Denmark. The work is a 490-foot circular corridor made of glass in every color of the spectrum. As visitors walk through the structure, they experience views across the city in a transition of colors depending on their location. It is illuminated from within at night, and provides constantly changing sensory experiences.

Ólafur Elíasson’s installations extend aesthetics to replicate the sublime qualities of nature. Perhaps owing to his upbringing in Denmark and Iceland, where there are stunning landscapes and particular relationships light, Elíasson’s recent works have even become ecological. One of them – Little Sun – is actually a humanitarian project to provide lights to the 1.2 billion people in the world who have no access to electricity. www.littlesun.com

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