Manifest
Frirum - A manifesto for liberated thinking in architecture
I
At architecture school, we are pushed to think creatively and freely. We are asked to challenge what a building can be: in its form and material, in terms of sustainability, and in the ways we live and inhabit spaces together. The school is a frirum — a space of freedom where we are allowed to push boundaries in order to discover them.
Then we enter practice. There are schedules, budgets and clients, and there are good reasons for all of them. But gradually, habit takes over. We solve the problem the way we solved the last one. Revit encourages us to choose from a library rather than draw. Economics ensures that whatever cannot be measured is the first thing to be cut. It happens because there is no time, money or energy for anything else.
But architects do not stop thinking when they leave school. They lose their frirum — the space in which thought can unfold freely.
II
A great deal is written about architecture, but rarely in a creative way. The project description must convince a client or a jury. The research paper must pass peer review. Both have their purpose, and I have tried my hand at both. But neither makes room for the kind of text that thinks aloud, gets things wrong or never reaches a conclusion.
The texts that do exist are scattered across opinion pieces on Byrummonitor, professional journals, catalogues and graduation projects that are rarely read beyond the examiners' room, as well as social media, where text has become a caption. Those who have written an essay about architecture have few frirum in which to publish it. Those who want to read one must search for it.
Of course, it was not always this way. From 1926 to 1928, Poul Henningsen and others published Kritisk Revy, a small, polemical journal in which architects wrote about what was being built as if it were a matter of personal concern — which, one hopes, it still is. It lasted three years, but it demonstrated that when you have a frirum, you can write about architecture with both conviction and humour.
III
When Michel de Montaigne withdrew from the court in Bordeaux in 1571, he settled comfortably in the tower of his family estate and began writing the texts he called essais. The word means, translated from French, “attempt” or “trial”. In On Solitude, he writes that one must have a back room of one's own, entirely one's own and entirely free, in which to establish one's true freedom.
Montaigne wrote alone, but he published his essays. This is the dual nature of the essay. It is a personal frirum, a place to think without being held accountable for a finished conclusion. And it is a text that is shared, acquiring its full meaning only when someone else reads it. An essay is a back room with the door left ajar.
IV
In his essay Translations from Drawing to Building (1986), Robin Evans showed that architects rarely work directly with buildings, but rather with drawings of them, and that something always changes in the translation. Text is another kind of translation of architecture. It can hold what finished drawings or models cannot show: doubt, memory and time.
In Revit, a door is called a family. You select it from a library, and the software already knows how tall it is and which way it opens. When a drawing becomes a database, architecture can easily become a selection from a catalogue. Writing has no library to pick from. You have to find the words yourself.
In the 1960s, Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood designed the Fun Palace for East London: a structure of cranes and movable elements that its users could transform themselves. An architectural frirum. It was never built. And yet it still exists, because it has been drawn, described and discussed for more than sixty years. Architecture can live without being built, but it cannot live without being thought about or described.
V
Georges Perec begins Species of Spaces with the page, the blank sheet, as the first space. Italo Calvino built fifty-five cities out of words in Invisible Cities. Jørn Utzon articulated the idea of the platform in a short text accompanied by sketches, and it has lived on paper as much as in concrete ever since.
Architecture is what gets built, but it also exists in what is thought, drawn and written. A text can be an architectural work in its own right, rather than merely a description of one. This is what we mean by architecture in writing.
VI
Michel Foucault called places that exist within society but follow their own rules other spaces. Frirum is such a space. Here, habit, the library and the budget no longer apply. Here, you can share creative ideas and new perspectives, criticise what is being built and praise what deserves it. You can write about what is unfinished, and you are allowed to be wrong. You can write poems, draw, build models and take photographs, as long as they engage with architecture. And you can push things too far, just as you can at school.
Montaigne had his tower. Frirum is a back room for architecture, built of words and shared with others.
Frederik Wulf Munk
Architect, MAA
Editor-in-Chief, Frirum
Aarhus, Architecture Day 2026
References
Poul Henningsen (ed.), Kritisk Revy (1926–28). Michel de Montaigne, Essais (1580). Robin Evans, “Translations from Drawing to Building”, AA Files 12 (1986). Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood, Fun Palace (1961–). Georges Perec, Espèces d'espaces (1974). Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972). Jørn Utzon, “Platforms and Plateaus”, Zodiac 10 (1962). Michel Foucault, “Des espaces autres” (1967).