Let It Become What It Needs to Be

by TAELON7 / Juergen Benson-Strohmayer

Let It Become What It Needs to Be unfolds as a spatial composition of fragments, translations, and open structures — a proposal for how architecture might emerge through resistance, care, and temporal occupation. Developed by TAELON7 / Juergen Benson-Strohmayer in dialogue with artist and activist Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi, founder of the Kumasi-based crazinisT artisT studiO, the exhibition builds on a transdisciplinary practice shaped by local building culture and subaltern spatial production. It approaches architecture not as static form, but as a situated method: dynamic, open-ended, and grounded in lived conditions.

Three interwoven zones shape the exhibition. Thresholds of Light draws from Fiatsi’s live-work studio, where layered textiles and lightweight frameworks divide space and filter light. These found techniques are reinterpreted in Vienna through suspended fabrics and tensioned geometries, forming soft architectures of transition, privacy, and exposure.

Temporal Structures presents the evolving design of the adjacent civic complex, the crazinisT artisT studiO compleX (TTOX), a phased architectural ensemble comprising Field, Kiosk, and Tower, through models, drawings, and animations.

Lines of Action documents a temporary urban intervention realized in Kumasi in April 2025, activated through gatherings and happenings. It is accompanied by archival research on queer struggles in Ghana during a period of intensifying anti-LGBT+ persecution. Within a textile installation, a recorded conversation with Fiatsi reflects on the body as resistance and architecture as a medium for liberation.

Across all zones and projects, a shared material vocabulary — tensile structures, textile, filtered light — threads through the exhibition. This language spans geographies and media, linking the civic complex, the urban intervention, and the studio environment. The result is part of an evolving method: mobile and open to future transformation, including its return to Kumasi.

TAELON7 / Juergen Benson-Strohmayer
TAELON7 is an architecture and research practice led by Juergen Benson-Strohmayer, dedicated to transforming space into a medium for liberation. Working across disciplines, geographies, and scales, the practice engages architecture as a catalyst for social and environmental transformation. Its work spans built projects, exhibitions, and long-term collaborations with communities, institutions, and artists—rethinking land use, materiality, and construction toward equitable futures. From civic and cultural interventions to research-based installations, TAELON7 explores architecture as a situated method: impact-driven, ecologically responsive, and conceptually rigorous. Based between Accra, London, and Vienna, the studio’s work has been widely recognized for its radical and contextually embedded approach.