Jonathan Houser is Head of Finder Sted / Taking Place – the Bachelor’s program at the Institute of Architecture and Culture at the Royal Danish Academy.
Over the past 10 years, Jonathan has been deeply engaged with the artistic and poetic potential of absolute sustainability and humanity’s coexistence with other species. In this context, the following projects are particularly noteworthy: the realized project The Moth House (Natsværmerhuset), the second prize proposal for storm surge protection in Vejle – While We Wait for the Water (Mens Vi Venter på Vandet), and the ongoing artistic development project Infinity City, which also includes the manifesto Towards an Oceanic Architecture (Mod en oceanisk arkitektur).
Jonathan has thus worked extensively with exhibitions, including exhibiting his own works, such as The Search, which was shown at Louisiana Museum’s exhibition The Moon (Månen), as well as with written dissemination through his own practice and through his position at the Royal Danish Academy.
Through the project Miniatura, a hybrid museum built at a 1:10 scale, whose exhibitions were presented online from 2021–2023, Jonathan has worked with curation and focus on emerging artists, including collaboration with Spacegirls.
His work with museum architecture has also influenced his assignments as an architect at Lundgaard & Tranberg, where Jonathan was responsible for the winning proposal for the Museum of Danish Resistance (Frihedsmuseet) and was part of the studio’s design team for the Natural History Museum of Denmark (Statens Naturhistoriske Museum).
JONATHAN HOUSER
Biography >
Exhibition at Leth & Gori, Copenhagen, 2017
Supported by Margot og Thorvald Dreyers Fond and made at The Danish Art Workshops
Vessels is an exhibition that shows three architectural models of time and space. Three vessels, some to be understood as concrete ships for travelling, and all, as metaphorical containers of ideas about architecture.
A memorial for perished war sailors, a house for moths and a generation star ship, together form a temporal span embodying the past, the present and the future in an attempt at capturing the frailty of the moment and the vastness of eternity in the formal language of architecture. The work presented in the exhibition are all experiments in finding a poetic narrative for the art of building that is founded on ideas harvested outside the realm of architecture and the mainstream spectacle of our blogging times. Thus, a sonar image form the seabed off the coast of France becomes the proposal for a memorial that sends and echo from the past into the future, forming a wooden relief exactly modelled and transferred via digital crafting, the fading outlines of a Danish cargo ship sunken in 1944. Holometabola, the metamorphosis of moths and butterflies inside their cocoon, that completely rearranges every molecule of their organisms, from larvae to liquid to winged creatures of the night, becomes the founding principle for a temporary pavilion that re-interprets motives from the baroque period. The Circular River as imagined by Botticelli in the etchings for Dantes Divine Comedy is turned into the concept for a star ship that is destined for eternal travel through interstellar space driving the cinematic narrative of a documentary film.