Collapse by Design confronts the reality that human activity is destabilising the biophysical systems that sustain life. The built environment is complicit - the climate and nature crises demand that we reimagine architecture for a rapidly changing world. With humanity exceeding vital planetary boundaries, the exhibition invites new spaces for architectural thought and action. We must intentionally design for change and uncertainty, with a moral ambition to reduce harm.
The exhibition argues built environment professions must evolve from creating objects to orchestrating networks, accelerating regenerative practices, and reducing harmful impacts on people, ecosystems and future generations. This planetary-minded practice requires architects to address broader issues like food security and material flows through living systems thinking. To drive this agenda, the program will feature citizens’ assemblies, a series of climate emergency roundtables to facilitate radical collaboration and strategic synthesis among public and professionals.
By translating complex data into tangible spatial and emotive experiences, the exhibition cultivates public literacy, builds professional agency and explores the climate and nature crisis as a cultural issue. It challenges institutions to be leaders in catalysing social tipping points and empower designers to consciously operate with a radical agenda of care.
Exhibition by Ben Berwick & Lucy Humphrey
Tin Sheds Gallery acknowledges the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, upon whose ancestral lands our exhibitions take place. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge of these lands, waterways and Country.
Top image: Carbon Pulse, Ben Berwick & Lucy Humphrey, 2026
Phone: (02) 9351 3115
Email: tin.sheds@sydney.edu.au
Address: 148 City Road, Darlington Sydney, NSW
