This year the theme of the seminar is to discuss what kind of cultural climate change is needed to ensure environmental sustainability far into the future.
The SAFA seminar Arkkitehtipäivä is the major event of Finnish Association of Architects’, gathering some 250 to 400 Finnish architects and architect students annually. This year the seminar will be held on Friday April 17th in Oulu, which is the European Capital of Culture 2026.
The theme of the seminar is “cultural climate change”, which is also the theme of the European Capital of Culture. What kind of cultural climate change is needed to ensure environmental sustainability far into the future? How do we change practices and attitudes so that shared values are also reflected in practical implementation and can be justified economically?
The Annual Seminar of SAFA Architects highlights solutions in architecture and urban design towards cultural climate change. We need alternative ways to design cities and buildings in the midst of accelerating change. For example, participation and community, thoughtful use of materials and flexible design can create positive and lasting change.
The keynote speakers are architects Martin Laursen (ADEPT) and Fabian A. Wagner (Buero Wagner).
Martin Laursen is Founding Partner of ADEPT, a Copenhagen / Hamburg based architecture community designing sustainable buildings and green cities with a focus on the human scale.
Through ADEPT he practices a holistic and collaborative approach to developing meaningful and highly contextual design solutions across scales from urban and strategic planning to building architecture, landscapes and public space.
The aim of each project at ADEPT is to push users, clients, profession and the world around us towards a deeper responsibility for the limited global resources and finding answers to the social challenges of our time.
The talk explores how urban planning & architecture can support and generate cultural climate change by creating environments that strengthen community resilience, cultural identity, and ecological responsibility. The presentation explores strategies and case examples from ADEPT’s urban projects showing how cities can be transformed through inclusive design, adaptive public spaces, placemaking, and long-term cultural thinking.
Born in Munich in 1981, Fabian A. Wagner studied architecture in Munich and Chicago. After professional experience in Rotterdam and Hong Kong, he founded his own practice in 2013. His work focuses on projects between urban and rural contexts.
He received the Rome Prize of the German Academy Villa Massimo in 2022 and has been Professor of Building Construction and Adaptive Reuse at Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences since 2023.
In a time when digitalization is leading to the increasing dematerialization of architecture, this talk attempts to reestablish a connection to materiality. By understanding the specific properties, limitations, and potentials of materials, they can serve as a starting point for construction and design. Using selected project examples, the lecture attempts to show how primary materials shape and guide construction and design, and how a focus on deliberately chosen, limited materials is not a loss, but rather a mark of quality.
Prices incl. VAT 25.5%.
All tickets include the seminar, Drinks & Mingle and the reception by City of Oulu. The keynotes are in English, the rest of the seminar is in Finnish.