Bang–Romme is a collaborative artistic research practice by architects Jacob Sebastian Bang and Anne Romme. The collaboration began with a curiosity about each other’s ways of thinking and working, and a desire to challenge our individual methods through joint experiments.
The island is our recurring subject and working method. As a clearly defined yet inherently relational territory, it allows us to investigate boundaries between land and water, construction and erosion, intention and contingency. The island can be understood as an object, a landscape, an ecosystem or a concentrated model of society.
Our work develops through drawing, model making, reliefs, installations and speculative writing. Digital fabrication is combined with traditional craft, and each work passes repeatedly between tools, materials and the two of us. Nothing is treated as sacred: we give each other permission to alter, erase or destroy what the other has made. This requires trust, generosity and sustained production. The aim is not destruction itself, but transformations that neither of us could have produced alone.
The works are not proposals for particular sites or complete architectural solutions. They are prototypes for thinking about future landscapes and forms of inhabitation in a changing climate. Without a fixed scale or program, an island may suggest an organism, a piece of infrastructure, a settlement or an entire world.
Within these imagined territories, architecture encompasses more than buildings. It includes energy and food production, movement and exchange, work and leisure, care and conflict, birth and death. Through artistic research, we explore how architecture might remain precise while allowing space for uncertainty, transformation and forms of life that cannot be fully anticipated.
Jacob Sebastian Bang is Associate Professor and Head of Program Helhed og Del at the Royal Danish Academy, School of Architecture. He is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the Society of Artists. Alongside his academic work, he maintains an artistic practice spanning painting, drawing, model-making, and graphic techniques. His research focuses on architecture and representation, with a particular interest in artistic methodologies.
Anne Romme is Head of the Institute of Architecture at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). She is the founder of Finder Sted at the Royal Academy, and was Head of Program from 2014 – 24. She research is focused on critical and experimental projects. Her work ranges from alternative housing strategies and architectural pedagogy to digital fabrication and the development of building systems based on plate-shell structures.