Mind Your Behaviour
How Architecture Shapes Behaviour

© Adam Mørk

How can architectural surroundings affect your behaviour?

Architecture can get people talking together. Architecture can calm children in the classroom. Architecture can make passive people more active. Architecture can shape corporate culture. Architecture can encourage people to find new paths, discover new aspects of their city – and of themselves. In short, architecture can shape your behaviour.

Mind Your Behaviour opens February 12 at the Danish Architecture Centre. It will be on display until May 13 2010.

Mind Your Behaviour invites you to step in behind the scenes at one of the largest and most successful architectural companies in Denmark, 3XN, known for prestigious projects such as: Ørestad College, the new Denmark’s Aquarium, ‘The Blue Planet’, Saxo Bank’s award-winning head offices and the Danish Embassy in Berlin.

The exhibition is based on 3XNs most recent and remarkable projects, and provides an insight into the thoughts, visions and processes that lie behind 3XNs architecture. 3XN has carved out a unique position for itself within Danish architecture and is a strong presence internationally – thanks to the studio’s spectacular buildings, a firm focus on innovation and not least the important position given to human behaviour.

Mind Your Behaviour focuses on and challenges the concept of behaviour as expressed in seven themes directly associated with the design universe of its architectural practice. These themes of ‘Cultural Behaviour’, ‘Learning Behaviour’, ‘Human Behaviour’, ‘Social Behaviour’, ‘Public Behaviour’, ‘Building Behaviour’, and ‘Responsible Behaviour’, place focus on that which happens when architecture shapes behaviour and indeed when architecture through its own behaviour shapes our lives and relationships.

© Adam Mørk

Behaviour Introduction

Building Behaviour
We all want to be original and authentic. We turn up our noses at copied goods and hope one day to invent a new wheel. What’s innovative is good, what’s familiar is boring. How can we be original, yet simultaneously adapt to the familiar?

Cultural Behaviour
The world is shrinking. Globalization means that we no longer have one TV channel but 50; the internet gives us access to vast volumes of knowledge and low price travel has made the whole world familiar. How can we use each other’s differences to expand our world again?

Human Behaviour
Everybody remembers a first; the first day at school, the first trip to New York, their first love. We thirst after new experiences, yet time after time we still seem to choose the same old paths. What makes people choose new paths?

Learning Behaviour
Most of us attended a school where we were taught to put up our hand and to sit quietly in our seats. Today, the same classrooms need to accommodate very different teaching methods. Can a building in itself aid the education process?

Public Behaviour
Many people no longer see themselves as ‘urban dwellers’, but instead see themselves as belonging to a particular neighborhood. Despite so many examples in the past, many new urban developments still seem empty and soulless. How do you lay out an urban environment for people?

Responsible Behaviour
The materials of the future are already available to us. They can help us find the answers for many of the challenges that the world faces in the future. Should the materials we know limit architecture, or should we develop materials that meet our needs?

Social Behaviour
Man is born a social creature. We seem to be inspired with good ideas and learn better in the company of others. We spend our school years studying and absorbing knowledge with our peers. Should interaction cease when working life begins?

© Adam Mørk

© Adam Mørk