A series of porticoes of varying thicknesses runs through the spaces of Aedes Architecture Forum in Berlin, crossing from inside to outside and back again. Built from charred dark timber, the structure behaves like a loggia — a passage to move through rather than an object to look at — winding between gallery and courtyard, by turns concealing and revealing places to sit and pause, among plants and books.
This is Open, the installation through which the Rome-based studio Labics examines the notion of limit in architecture.
The Exhibition
On view at Aedes from 4 July to 19 August 2026, with its opening on the evening of Friday 3 July, Open arises from Labics being awarded the title AW Architect of the Year 2026 — the prize that the German magazine AW Architektur & Wohnen has conferred since 2012 on architects who bring new impulses to architecture and the city.
Based in Hamburg and active for nearly seventy years, AW is among the most authoritative German architecture and design magazines. The award has previously gone to studios such as MVRDV, BIG, Snøhetta, Kéré Architecture, Tatiana Bilbao, Sou Fujimoto, Christoph Ingenhoven, and Jeanne Gang — each, like Labics now, celebrated with an exhibition at Aedes. Labics is the first Italian studio to join this list.
The venue is no incidental matter. Founded in Berlin in 1980, Aedes Architecture Forum is one of the historic institutions of European architectural debate, and over the decades it has never ceased to engage with Italian design culture, from Aldo Rossi to the present.
The Theme
Architecture has always been about defining limits: between exterior and interior, public and private, natural and artificial. Open reverses their meaning. The installation, in the architects’ own words, sets out to question the limit as a separating frontier in favour of its opposite — “the limit as a welcoming space, a space that connects.”
When the boundary thickens until it becomes habitable, it ceases to divide and turns into “an element of mediation between itself and the world”: a threshold between the public dimension of the city and the private dimension of architecture, one that sets relationships in motion and enriches the collective realm.
For Labics, this is also a civic position — restoring to architecture its role in shaping the city and public space, as “the heart of the civitas,” at a moment when the individual sphere seems to prevail over the common one. It is the same line of inquiry the studio set out in its book The Architecture of Public Space, published by Park Books in 2023.
The installation is grounded in Labics’ research into Italian piazzas and boundary spaces, and it echoes the studio’s recent built work: from the restoration of Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara to the redevelopment of the Central Pavilion at the Giardini of the Venice Biennale, completed in 2026.
Both attest to a single disposition: reading and rewriting buildings dense with history without subjugating or betraying them, working through loggias, porticoes, and thresholds that bring inside and outside back into relation.
Architecture and limit
Architecture has always been about the definition and construction of limits: between exterior and interior, public and private, natural and artificial. The form this limit has assumed over time reflects the climatic, social, and political conditions of the context in which it was conceived, as well as the cultural context of the period in which it was built.
Leaving aside historical or philological issues, the concept of limit, as in physics and mathematics, raises a question related to its extension: it can be a two-dimensional surface or, through thickening, it can take on the three-dimensional connotation of a space.
In the history of architecture, even the most recent, the first condition is certainly the most widespread, articulated in many and varied forms and geometries. Cases in which the dimension of the limit expands, dilates, to the point of almost blurring its image and opening its form, are certainly rarer.
Transforming the boundary from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, regardless of geometry or nature, thus brings about a shift in the meaning of architecture, linked to the openness of the figure, which transforms from a self-contained object into an open and traversable structure; a structure that, by virtue of the expansion of its boundary, merges with the natural space outside itself.
The shift in meaning also implies a shift in the very concept of boundary: if it is habitable, it is no longer a separating frontier but a welcoming space; if the boundary becomes open and porous, it becomes a place that connects different conditions — exterior and interior, public and private, natural and artificial; finally, if the boundary is capable of accommodating life, it becomes an element of mediation between itself and the world.
Maria Claudia Clemente and
Francesco Isidori (Labics)
