More with Less

The Farrell Centre, Newcastle, UK, presents its inaugural exhibition, More with Less: Reimagining Architecture for a Changing World, opening on February 11, 2023. In the new, light-filled galleries, four architectural practices and collaborators—Dress for the Weather, McCloy + Muchemwa, Office S&M and the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment at Newcastle University—have created installations that challenge the ways we conceive, make and experience architecture in response to the seismic challenges of the climate emergency.

Sustainability is now part of the thinking behind nearly every building project, but this is not enough. We need to find new ways to dramatically reduce the built environment’s carbon-footprint without compromising—and, indeed, actually extending—architecture’s potential to bring about vital social, cultural, and technological transformation. Where Mies van der Rohe’s maxim “less is more’ defined architecture in the middle part of the twentieth century, today we must find ways of doing ‘more with less.”

The starting point for Glasgow studio Dress for the Weather’s installation is insulation: a crucial material, which, though hidden from sight, has a major role in making new and existing buildings more energy efficient. For More with Less, they have created a series of environments to enable visitors to explore insulation’s thermal and experiential performance, offering a poetic yet practical illustration of the possibilities of this mundane yet transformative material.

McCloy + Muchemwa present A place at the table which explores our relationship to nature and architecture’s role in mediating it. The installation sees a dramatic swathe of landscape emerge from a meeting table around which visitors are invited to sit and converse. By giving nature a literal place at the table, this installation encourages us to see architecture and nature, not as opposed, as they so often seem to be, but as part of the same world we inhabit.

In their installation Luxurious Thrift, Office S&M propose that to create comfortable buildings, we need to grow to love uncomfortable architecture. A series of interventions within the gallery add a veneer to the standard features of a room, such as doors, walls and windows, questioning the assumptions that govern how we think about and use architectural spaces. The project offers a playfully provocative vision of how energy efficiency adaptations to existing buildings can not only be functional but bring joy and delight.

The Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment (HBBE) at Newcastle University is creating The Living Room—a soft, cosy, snug internal space with thick sculpted walls grown from fungal mycelium, sawdust and wool. This innovative technique uses organic, locally available waste materials and microbial processes to radically reduce the environmental impact of construction, while asking fundamental questions about the nature of architectural forms, structures and materials, and the underlying the relationship between built and natural environments.

Together, the four installations in More with Less offer visions for architecture that are open, experimental, inclusive and, above all, optimistic, celebrating architecture’s potential to help us adapt in a rapidly changing world.

The exhibition has been developed through a process of collaborative dialogue between the architects, exhibition curators, Farrell Centre director, Owen Hopkins, and assistant curator, Lorna Burn, together with Newcastle-based fabricators Raskl, and Glasgow-based graphic designers Studio Ilka.

About the Farrell Centre
The Farrell Centre—a new centre for architecture and cities in Newcastle, UK—will open to the public on Saturday February 11, 2023. Instigated by renowned architect-planner Sir Terry Farrell, and forming part of Newcastle University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, the Farrell Centre is located in a four-storey Victorian building in central Newcastle, which has been transformed in a 4.6 million GBP building project. The centre’s mission is to widen the debate around the crucial roles that architecture and planning play in the contemporary world ways that are engaging, innovative and challenging.

The Farrell Centre will be admission free and combines a public gallery, research hub, and community space, offering a variety of experiences for visitors of all ages. The centre’s programme will be wide-ranging and inclusive: temporary exhibitions, public talks and debates, workshops and activities for schools, young people, community groups, events for built environment professionals, as well as publications, podcasts and other digital projects.