Overview

The Architekturmuseum der TUM (Architecture Museum of the Technical University of Munich) is presenting CONVIVIUM: Food Systems at the Limit, a major exhibition exploring the spatial, architectural, and territorial dimensions of global food production. The exhibition opens on April 23, 2026, and runs through October 18, 2026, at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Germany. It belongs to the fields of architecture, landscape, urban design, and environmental research.

Focus

The exhibition examines how the global food system operates as a spatial and infrastructural network, and how it is approaching multiple simultaneous limits: ecological, climatic, political, and economic. It investigates the built environments of food production, from high-tech Dutch greenhouses and industrial dairy farms to aquaculture facilities, grain silos, and the contested territorial landscapes of soy production and deforestation.

For those tracking how architecture engages with agriculture and urban food systems, ArchUp’s coverage of agritecture and the integration of food production into urban environments provides a useful frame for understanding the spatial stakes of what CONVIVIUM puts on display.

Program

The exhibition is structured across twelve thematic chapters, each addressing a distinct aspect of contemporary food production. Topics include climate-controlled greenhouse technology in the Netherlands, the global salmon and tomato industry, industrial dairy farming, Bavarian carp aquaculture, the territorial footprint of animal feed production, the destruction of Ukrainian grain infrastructure by war, and the degradation of agricultural soils.

Alongside the main exhibition, the programme includes a two-day international symposium at the Vorhoelzer Forum at TUM on April 23 and 24, 2026, curator-led tours, and a public kitchen installation called Sommerküche CONVIVIUM in the outdoor area of the Pinakothek der Moderne. The exhibition also features a multimedia installation by Hungarian artist Daniel Szalai examining the role of breeding bulls as carriers of genetic information, and a graphic essay tracing the opaque supply chains of soy production to Europe.

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive publication and was developed in conjunction with a series of master projects and seminars at TUM’s Chair of History of Architecture and Curatorial Practice. Those interested in how agricultural waste intersects with building materials and spatial design will find a relevant counterpoint in ArchUp’s analysis of recycling agricultural waste into building materials, which maps the boundary between food systems and construction practice.

“Hardly any country on earth can feed its population entirely from its own resources anymore.”

The curators are Andjelka Badnjar and Andres Lepik, with cocurators Victor Muñoz Sanz and Sofia Nannini contributing to the segment on animal production. For context on how architecture and agriculture converge at the urban scale, ArchUp’s documentation of Stefano Boeri Architetti’s vertical farm project at Bright Food in Shanghai offers a built example of the spatial and ecological tensions the exhibition addresses.

Audience

The exhibition is open to the general public. It is relevant to architects, landscape architects, urban designers, environmental researchers, students, and anyone engaged with the relationship between spatial design and food systems.

Event Details

✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight

CONVIVIUM is a rare example of an architecture museum exhibition that takes on a subject most design institutions treat as peripheral: the spatial infrastructure of food. By mapping dairy farms, greenhouse complexes, slaughterhouses, grain corridors, and soy territories as architectural and territorial objects, the exhibition makes a case that the built environment of food production is both one of the largest spatial systems on earth and one of the least examined by the architecture profession. The twelve-chapter structure is ambitious and risks becoming encyclopedic rather than analytical, but the thematic range is necessary given how interconnected the failures of the food system are. What is most significant here is the curatorial framing: food infrastructure is not presented as a separate domain from architecture but as a direct extension of it, subject to the same questions of spatial justice, ecological consequence, and design responsibility. Whether the profession will absorb that argument beyond the exhibition walls is a different question entirely.

Closing Note

The exhibition runs for six months and is supported by an extensive network of academic institutions and research partners. Its duration and depth position it as a significant contribution to current debates about architecture’s relationship to ecological systems and resource territories.