Inside Out, Downside Up by Slaatto Morsbøl – All photos are by Maja Flink.

Architecture. At the inaugural Copenhagen Architecture Biennial, the theme Slow Down invites architects and visitors alike to question the speed of contemporary construction. How can we build with more care, intention, and awareness? Within this reflection, Copenhagen-based studio Slaatto Morsbøl, founded by Thelma Slaattoo and Cecilie Morsbøl, presents Inside Out, Downside Up — a tactile, sensory pavilion that celebrates slowness through the act of salvaging and reimagining materials.

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Made from reclaimed bricks, timber, and ventilation pipes, Inside Out, Downside Up stands on Søren Kierkegaards Plads, between the city’s historic brick warehouses and its modern glass-and-steel facades. The structure feels both familiar and quietly radical — a meditation on how material reuse can become an architectural language of its own.

“A single principle guides the design: each material is cut in half, exposing what is normally hidden,” explain Slaattoo and Morsbøl. “Ventilation pipes from dismantled systems form the roof, used perforated bricks are split to reveal their cores and traditional thatching reed is suspended with its flowering ends visible. The materials are not insulated from the environment but respond to it, with the aim of creating a space that engages the senses at the scale of sound, shadow, scent, and touch.”

Variation replaces uniformity: weathered textures and tonal shifts invite visitors to move slowly, to look closer, to touch differently. A narrow entry passage draws the body close to the walls before the space opens toward the canal — a spatial choreography that echoes the pavilion’s central idea.

The pavilion’s defining feature — its grooved brick façade — evolved from the founders’ early experience as brick cleaners. There, they discovered the overlooked beauty of perforated bricks dismissed as waste. In Inside Out, Downside Up, these reused bricks are cut, cleaned, and carefully slotted into timber frames by hand, transforming the discarded into the precious.

In Inside Out, Downside Up, slowness becomes not only a design ethos but a lived experience — an architectural pause where perception, material, and time align.

All photos are by Maja Flink, courtesy of the Copenhagen Architecture Biennial 2025.