Ancient Future: Bridging Bhutanese Tradition and Innovation

“The 'Ancient Future' exhibition is about how tradition can evolve without being lost. One of the most striking moments in the process has been seeing a piece of wood carved by hand placed next to one carved by machine. You can tell the difference - but it’s not about one replacing the other. It’s about how they can support each other. Machine intelligence allows craft to be scaled, but the artistry and the ideas remain rooted in human hands. The artworks created by local Bhutanese artists reflect the past, present, and future of Bhutan. They show how spirituality, embedded in architecture, carries stories forward and keeps heritage alive within contemporary urban development. This is the synergy we are exploring: by working with machines, we can make architecture more human. Rather than separating heritage and modernity, 'Ancient Future' looks at how the two can grow side by side.”

“Our installation for the Biennale Architettura 2025 embodies the oxymoron of 'Ancient Future' through a live collaboration between a Bhutanese woodcarver and a robotic milling arm. Rooted in our work for the Gelephu International Airport, the piece explores how ancestral craft and advanced technology can co-author architecture. Rather than replacing tradition, machine intelligence becomes its partner - bridging past and future, intuition and algorithm, and ritual and precision. This is not a clash but a convergence, where the traditional adornment of the airport's mass timber superstructure is simultaneously old school and cutting-edge - heritage and aspiration. The installation reflects the bifurcated explorations that are drawing us in seemingly opposite directions at the same time - deeper into the past and further into the future - and how those two opposing paths may lead us to the same place. The future, paradoxically, may only be truly visionary when it remembers the past.”