Bjarke Ingels (Part 1)

30:50But the physicality of it has a bandwidth that is very different from the abstraction of the 3D. And also, you have to build it physically. So you start understanding. You learn through building. Exactly. At the end of the day, you have to build the building with materials that have to come together. Then you start making maybe a markup where you do like a corner of the building. In full scale. In full scale with the real materials. And you can also build it with materials that are close to. Because it might have looked great on the renderings. But now that you are here, it clearly isn't that good.

31:25Something was different. So in that sense, I think as human beings, we tend to overestimate our capacity to imagine. And I think human imagination is incredible. But the bandwidth of each new perspective speaks to you in a new way. You learn new things that then can uncover problems you hadn't foreseen. But also those problems can reveal whole new ideas that you had never thought of. Because I think part of arriving at something that is both rich and kind of holistic and consistent. And the reason is that you have a strong, simple idea that is somehow the fantasy you want to turn into reality.

32:11And once that simple idea starts budding up against all the parameters of reality, including all the good reasons why it shouldn't be like that. And there will be good reasons to not do it like that. And there's often good reasons why no one has done that before. By remaining faithful to the simplicity of what you're trying to do, you might force some of the constituent parts to really have to stretch themselves to make the simplicity of the big idea possible and to preserve it and strengthen it. And therefore you might actually end up with all of these little surprises that are not there as added complications.

32:58No, they're there as necessary solutions to make this simple new idea possible. Like in a way, the surprises, the sculptural qualities, the interesting new things are not there as piling on more. But they're there to really make that simple idea possible in all of its simplicity that. Strangely by trying to keep it very simple and faithful to the to the Jureka idea, you end up discovering all kinds of cool things that are necessary bridges between the ordinary and the extraordinary that you're trying to do. And then again, it takes some of the burden of the designer and the architect that you don't have to keep coming up with more and more things.

33:49You just need to resolve what you already set out to do. And that's going to be already super interesting.

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35:35Do the best solutions tend to be simple? Actually, I would say what we strive towards is actually complexity. But complexity not as complication, but in computer code, they have a beautiful definition of complexity that I subscribe to, which is complexity is the capacity to transmit the maximum amount of information with the minimum amount of data. The equivalent in poetry would be to transmit the maximum amount of expression or meaning with the minimum amount of words. In music, the maximum amount of feeling with the minimum amount of key strokes. And I think in architecture, the maximum amount of experience with the minimum amount of moves.

36:30So in that sense, you can say that definition of complexity is not one of reduction, but is almost you try to maximize how much you can say with how few words, how much you can enable with how few bricks. Complexity is a higher form of simplicity. One where the simplicity actually does as much as possible. It's almost like condensing impact into an economy of means. It's also funny, like I like to remind people that both the word ecology and economy come from the Greek word oricus, ancient Greek, which means house. Because economy is the management of the household. Ecology is the study of where you live.

37:23So in that sense, this idea of economy of means that you choose your means wisely to maximize the possibility for the unfolding of human life with just the amount of effort necessary to make that happen. What are some of your favorite buildings in the world? One simple one. And I think that's because I think fundamentally in architecture, you can also very often get bogged down by practicality. And I think when you're designing a building, you have the possibility to make the world more like your dreams. And you should take that possibility serious. Like anyway, if we're not trying to realize someone's dream, then maybe we're wasting our time.

38:17Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. And in that sense, a building like the Sydney Opera, I think, it's very special for a lot of reasons. It has become the signifier of an entire continent. It is definitely a very kind of modern, almost like futuristic building, even though it's from the 60s. It looks like shells. Yes, series of shells. It's just kind of series of white ceramic shells in the port of Sydney, an opera house and a philharmonic concert hall, resting on a giant accessible podium of steps. And it evokes pagodas, it evokes Gothic arches, it evokes all of these kind of timeless ancient forms without replicating any of them.

39:10It's a public building for you could say, in some people's minds, and a lead to the institution, philharmonic music and opera, a lot of people might not feel welcome, but the whole building is a giant landscape of steps that are accessible to the public upon which these two pavilions rest. And the back of houses are somehow hidden underneath those steps, and the steps themselves is a public space, a destination, in the port of Sydney. So it's a public building that has a generousness and a sense of invitation that goes way beyond ticket holders, and it produced an iconicity capable of signifying Australia to the rest of the world, to the extent where it might be one of the most recognized buildings in the world.

39:58But at the same time, it feels strangely familiar in many different parts of the world. So I think it does a lot of what I believe that architecture can do, that it's inviting, it's unifying, it's inclusive, but it's also outstanding and confident and striking at the same time. It also feels like a modern church in a way. It has church -like proportions. Absolutely, and then it is saturated. It wants to step closer. It's saturated with these very rational, tectonic choices, where it's made out of pretension -concrete elements, like notoriously they were having a hard time solving how to build it also, because you're an Utsum, the architect.

40:49He had a profound belief that in what he called the additive, it's almost like this kind of emergent idea that he said, you should always be able to make almost any expression out of a series of mass -produced modular elements. So he wanted to make it out of modules instead of just making super complex formwork and casting the whole thing. Like the Eames house. Exactly, modularity, but you can say in the Eames house, a very beautiful house, and I think also when you see some Utsum houses at that scale, they are very rational and orthogonal. But when you see the city opera, it has all these organic forms.

41:27Then it was hard to solve it, and then one day he was sitting, it's one of these mythological stories. He was sitting with an orange, and he was peeling the orange, and he was beginning to cut pieces out of the orange peel, and they became these shells. And he just realized if you can take it from the surface of a sphere, you can break it down into modules, repeated modules, and it ended up being made out of these post -tension concrete modules that come together to form the arches. So all of the geometry of the shapes is the same. It's always a piece of a sphere. It's always the piece of a surface of a sphere.

42:00And it's just different fragments of the sphere that are put together to form these arches. So that's why it also ends up having this kind of feeling that there's an underlying logic, because there actually is. And when you look inside the shelf, you can see all of these circular ornaments, and these kind of little steps. And that's actually the tectonics of where you had to, once you put all the elements together, you had to run steel cables together, and then you had to pull to create the post -tension by pulling it together. They become one element structurally. But that produced these, what looks like ornaments, but it's actually the tectonics of mounting the mechanisms to pull these cables.

42:42So somehow, every single practicality, every single technicality, ends up being resolved in a way that expresses itself as some kind of inigmatic decorative beauty. And then obviously things like the Disney Hall in Los Angeles would never exist without the Sydney Opera House first. No, no, exactly. The whole idea that a building could be so abstractly expressive was incredibly unique at the time. Then there's different buildings that have contributed different things. Another interesting building is the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies Fanarol. From the World Expo in Barcelona, I think it was like 1929, sort of late 20s.

43:28At a time where everything looked like old, kind of, mansions, little palaces. He makes a building purely out of rectangles, no ornaments, but then very thoughtfully sourced pieces of stone. There's an onyx, there's a green marble, there's travertine. And by sourcing the stone and book -ending the organic patterns of the stone, you end up with another kind of ornament, but it's the natural ornament of sedimentation or the marbling. And you just take agitation out of this kind of decorative arts and more into a much more pure orchestration of space. And again, like this idea of expanding your perception of the world suddenly, you see the stone as almost like a god's own art piece in its own right.

44:21Look at this. So that's another almost completely opposite example of how a single piece of architecture can open new doors. Because I think ultimately that's what we all dream about. I think artists' architects, part of what you dream about is that the field of architecture is a collective project that everybody is constantly trying to formulate and reformulate. And of course, it's constantly injected with invitation for innovation, because life evolves the way we live, the way we work, the way we are constantly evolving. And each time life evolves, the way we use to accommodate it may not fit any longer.

45:08And if you are attentive, open your eyes and your ears to observe how people live and how life evolves, you might find real reasons to do things differently. And once you really pinpoint an unaccommodated new way of doing things, and you get to sort of create the framework for that, then you might actually open a door that unleashes a whole new avenue of exploration. And that kind of innovation can come from where we are living or working or but it can also come from new technical possibilities. Like a lot of Le Corbusier's work, like this significant Swiss architect, one of the grandfathers of modernism together with the Mies -Fennel, was because he just embraced the potential of steel reinforced concrete.

45:59So now that you could make long spans with steel reinforced concrete, you could make the facade free, you could make the plan free. Like suddenly he identified all these freedoms that came with these new technological possibilities. And because of those freedoms, we didn't have to repeat what year was this? Like there was a big movement again, like around the same time as the Mies -Fennel, in the beginning of the 20th centuries, the 20s, the 30s, the 40s. And he practiced all the way up until the late 60s. But back then, this new technology provided new freedoms. And in a way, it took a lot of will to say, we don't have to keep doing this bizarre notion of architecture and the way rooms are always defined by walls because we needed the walls to carry the beams.

46:59Now you could have thin columns and a steel slab, and the plan could be completely free. So why don't we take advantage of that? We don't need vertical windows because we don't need pieces of wall in between. We can have a horizontal window that spans all across the entire facade. Why don't we see what that gives us? So sometimes this idea of taking away the rules that used to make sense. But now there's a new freedom. Why don't we see what happens if we accept these rules? We don't need those rules anymore. We can actually try something new.

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49:05Is there ever a case where it goes in the other direction where we realize there's an old way of doing something that actually has value and we bring back some old techniques and old ideas? All the time, because it is a constant vibration in a way. An oscillation between taking out nonsense that no longer makes any sense. And also, like, rediscovering, hey, we took out a little bit too much. And I would say like a classic example that everybody will recognize is again, back to these housing projects, because, you know, there was this understanding that it's really about the house. You want sunlight in the morning.

49:51You want sunlight in the evening. You want cross -ventilations. You make apartments that face east and west. And you stack them high in a linear and, you know, 12, 18 floors, whatever. And then you put the next one so far away that you get sunlight all the way down to the ground floor, the first one. So you end up with these kind of dominoes that just repeated like a rubber stamp across a side plant. But it doesn't say anything about life between the buildings. It doesn't say anything about the diversity of the household. It doesn't say anything about programmatic diversity that you want a living street with different kind of shops and cafes.

50:30And also doesn't say anything about shelter from the wind or it's only about sunlight and views. So you end up with these kind of dead monoprocratic neighborhoods that become sort of unsafe or orange. It sounds like designing a prison. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's because it's prioritizing a single parameter at the expense of all other parameters. And you can say maybe at the time we weren't so aware of the social fabric of the city. And at the time we were aware that some of the medieval towns, the apartments got very dark and maybe humid in the beginning of the 20th century. There was also like different kinds of epidemics, maybe tuberculosis, maybe sort of other kinds of diseases.

51:10That we were beginning to feel that these kind of dark, humid, dense inner cities were not very good for life. And we thought like we need daylight and air and view. But then suddenly we started realizing that the charm of the meandering narrow streets and the social fabric of walking through that street and you know the green grocer and you know the butcher and you know. So each time we make these experiments, we maybe over emphasize a new parameter. It sometimes happens at the expense of some of the other parameters. And that's why again, this idea of complexity that you want to find the simplest possible answer to the.

51:48Most complex possible question. Can you think of any of the products that you've built that after they were built, you realized more about them once they existed. I mean, I have to say like first of all, you always learn a ton. That's also why we once we've built confidence about something we start making bigger and bigger models. And I think I mean, sometimes I sound like a broken record because it's really my job to remind the teams that even though we think we already know what we're doing. We should make an even bigger model now because it's going to yeah, but we already know it and also we don't have the time of money for it.

52:31But like yeah, but we somehow have to do it because it's going to reveal things that we can't see now and once you start building. Something suddenly a whole new experience, but like, but I'm just like a very simple example is that we just finished our own studio space in on the tip of a pier in the port of Copenhagen. We came from a Cosberg factory where they used to make bottle caps and suddenly we had to be on a small footprint, but on seven different levels. And we decided to build a building so that each floor is only half or two thirds. So it's always fully open to the floor above and the floor below.

53:11So you can move through the entire building actually when you enter you can serve on a diagonal you can see all the way up to the penthouse. And each floor is also also connected to the outside. So that there's always a terrace and that terrace is always connected to the terrace above and the terrace below. So you can almost walk around the whole building on the outside and also bounce between the floors and the inside. So you can go from floor to floor inside or outside. Exactly. So it's almost like undoing the vertical segregation that often comes with a multi -story workspace. And as a result, you say it looks like a series of shoe boxes stacked up in twisted different.

53:51Yeah, because then we designed it like a last thing we did like often when you have a floor plan. Yeah. Even if you have the whole floor plan, you put the core in the middle and the core is where you have the elevator, the stairs, the bathrooms, all the necessities. And you put them in the middle because maybe they don't need daylight. So then you can have like nice office space around it. But it means that even if you have the whole floor, you have to hunt chase around the core like in a donut to find your colleagues. Right. So in this case, we almost entirely eliminated the core and only we have a thick wall to the north where the elevator and the last stair sets together with the meeting rooms and everything.

54:29So so it becomes very open. And then the last thing is that the facade is then made out of these giant walls that are. Like let's say a 14 feet high and 60 feet long where like a typical building would have like window wall, window wall, window wall. Here you have 60 feet of opening and 60 feet of wall. So you actually have great pin up space, which the architect like and then you have panoramic views. And one of the things that we noticed when we started building the building is that as you move up through the building. These panoramic 60 foot wide 14 foot tall windows become like cinematic frames.

55:18And because we are at the tip of the P in the middle of the city, one frame, you see only water, especially when you're on a level higher looking like down. You see just the texture of the surface of the water. One frame, you see only sky. One frame, you look out of the port and you see only an array of windmills and the horizon. One frame, you see the inner city of Copenhagen. One frame, you see the historical warehouse across the street. One frame, you see only the container port. And at five o 'clock maybe in one frame, you see only the fairbout that goes to Sweden. So the whole journey, the experience of being in the house is that even though it's one building, it's as if it's located on 10 different locations in the city.

56:04And each frame is so radically different, almost like a gersky art piece of just looking at a different aspect of the world. Of course now I take incredible credit from it and I at least get a lot of pleasure out of it. But that we hadn't really considered understood what was going to happen. That's so cool. It's a great surprise. It becomes also because it's an architecture office and it becomes really a way of looking at the city moving through the building. So that's a total gift. Incredible. I love that story. I can't wait to see the building. No, no, you must come. It's a gorgeous spot. How did you learn to be an architect?

56:44I ended up in architecture by accident. Since I was a little child, I was always very much into drawing. When I was like five or six, I could draw with perspective. So I got a lot of positive feedback from my drawings and it became a big part of my identity. So I loved graphic novels. I have two siblings. My big sister was a great musician. I had piano lessons for five years. It never really materialized into anything. My little brother was obsessed with maths and sports and games. Which never really interested me too much. So I had my space was drawing. So I thought I was going to be a cartoonist or a graphic novelist.

57:35But then after high school, there was no cartoon academy. An architecture was part of the art academy. The world is the academy of fine arts. So they had painting, sculpture and architecture. So it felt like the closest thing I could find that had to do with drawings. And because education is free and then, Mike, I always thought, you know, I might as well do it for a year or two. Because I would say until then, until 18, I had mostly drawn, you know, of course, like people and animals and vehicles in action. So I thought let's spend some years getting good at drawing the background, like the buildings and the landscapes.

58:15And I realized I never thought much about buildings. And the art academy was such a free school. It was such a liberal art school that there was hardly any curriculum. It was very practical, like, studio. I was longing for, like, deeper meaning, maybe. So I ended up in the library essentially just pulling books out of the shelves. Trying to find something that spoke to me. And if I would find something that spoke to me, I would find more of that, the work of that architect. I would read interviews, look for the footnotes in those interviews to see who was being referenced. And I started almost like reverse engineering a curriculum.

59:08So you could almost call it like serial monogamy that I would fall in love with the work of an architect or an architect. I would dig as deep as I could within that, uh, over that body of work until I would say almost like every time I would arrive at a point where there were certain fundamental assumptions. Or like you call it like axiomatic assumptions. That once you questioned those assumptions. It all a little bit fell apart because like most architects. I somehow governed by a style. And most styles are somehow a list of things you cannot do and a list of things you have to do limited. I kind of stray jacket.

1:00:11Yeah. And if you start questioning that straight jacket, then the whole thing falls apart because then it isn't much more than its consistency. And I would say gradually, but it took me on this kind of journey. Do you remember any of the architects from that journey that spoke to you at first? Yeah, I mean, it's pretty random list, but like, just as an example, like a Dutch architect at some point spoke to me, a guy called Ben Fenbergl and Cowellin Boss, his wife was a philosopher. He had worked for Sahadit and Sancia Rukhela Tava in the past. So then I explored them. Then Sahadit, of course, there was like some references to the supremacists, like various kinds of artists, but also references to some of the organic architects like Jörn Utsun.

1:01:13It was always one of my favorites. Alva Alto was somehow one of his predecessors as well. And Sahadit, apart from her references to some of these kind of organic masters, she had been part of the office for Metropolitan Architecture, together with Remkohlhas. And that's how I found Remkohlhas, who I then later went to work for. And by reading Remkohlhas' books, one of them being in Delirious New York, I actually discovered Le Corbusier because there's a chapter where Le Corbusier comes to New York. And also Salvador Deli, there's a chapter where Salvadori comes to New York. So I then ironically discovered Le Corbusier, one of the great masters of modernism through the body of work of Remkohlhas.

1:02:08And I ended up discovering Delirious New York, of course, I knew of observer, but like the theories of surrealism. So it was like this kind of detective story or like a meandering kind of research, like almost like passing the pattern on. And all self -directed. All self -directed. Because I would say when I started at the Art Academy, I found the vacuum of teaching, frustrating. In my fourth year I went to study in Barcelona. And there I found much more input. But because we were like Erasmus students, we didn't have to like submit to the same regime because like my friends, my fellow Spanish students were constantly working for the next exam.

1:02:58I never got any grades in my study. And I enjoyed so much of the input and I would say in my fourth year I was 22. It all somehow clicked. And when I then returned to the Art Academy afterwards, now I could really use that freedom and I found it incredible. And you got input at the right time. Just luckily that you had three years, we were self -directed, you were hungry for information, you were following leads. And then you went to Barcelona, didn't got caught more specifically. But because you already had this background, it was probably nice to get some structure on top of it. It's an Italian and there was more like an over abundance of potential input that I was now in a way hungry for and ready to like acquire in a way.

1:03:52Then after that, me and four friends did an open competition while all in Barcelona, a German, a sweet and three dames. We did this kind of open competition. We got selected for the second stage. We got the equivalent of 70 ,000 euros, which in 1996, 1997 in Barcelona was like I couldn't even count that much money. So we could semi -drop out of school, we created our own studio down there and we did the second stage, fought like maniacs between the Gela and thankfully didn't win the second stage. Because we would have been unprepared for it and I would have gotten stuck and that's it up. But in a way I came back to the out academy with a maturity and an autonomy that I was ready to occupy the space of freedom that was there for me.

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1:06:33Tell me about Rem Coolhouse. How did you come to work for him? I would say unlike all the other architects that were somehow governed by the consistency and limitations of a style. What I found in Rem Coolhouse, he had a more journalistic approach to architecture. He's one of the best writers I think I've ever read. Delivered to New York as an incredible book about creativity. What's the name of the book? It's called Delirious New York. It's written in the late 70s when the architecture was obsessed with semiotics and semi -strips. The semiotics postmodernism was very into science and symbols.

1:07:23The neo -rationalists of Italy and Germany were into the archetypical building types as a counter -reaction to modernism and the freedoms that came with modernism. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown had written a learning from Las Vegas, talking about this kind of new... The Strip with big signs and big neon signs, but without the build masks of the historical city, more like parking lots and warehouses and casinos. Suddenly, Rem Coolhouse goes to New York and no one was interested in New York at the time and gets the idea to be the ghost writer for New York. The short idea is that in the beginning of the 20th century, you had all of these incredible intellectual movements including surrealism in Europe.

1:08:19There was a surrealist manifesto by Henri Beton. An ideology and a manifesto is a great statement of ideology and conjecture without any evidence to back it up because it's... It's all kinds of ideas without evidence. At the same time, across the Atlantic, Manhattan was happening, this kind of explosion of skyscrapers and build density, elevator, steel structures, like soaring to the sky, a mountain of evidence without a single ideology explaining it. So, Henri said, a ghost writer is often celebrities are too narcissistic or too distracted to be able to write their own memoirs or to see any patterns in their trajectory.

1:09:08So, the ghost writer somehow helps them with that. Since no one wrote the manifesto for Manhattan, he would be the ghost writer for Manhattan and write the manifesto for Manhattanism. Was he in love with Manhattan? It's an absolute love letter to Manhattan. An absolute love letter to an architecture that at that moment was not very appreciated. And it somehow inspired by the Dalai and the surrealists, they had a method called the Paranoid Critical, where you somehow use the crutches of... When you know some of these Salvadoran paintings, you see these weird blobs that come out of the backs of people that are supported by these kind of wise -shaped crutches, that kind of amorphous paranoia sustained by the crutches of criticality.

1:10:04That diagram is also the diagram of incitocast concrete that you build a skeleton of wood and you pour an amorphous liquid into it. And once it hardens, you remove all the wood and the form stands, unsurained by the wooden skeleton. So in that sense, he was creating all the these slightly far -fetched statements, but using Manhattan and the build substance of Manhattan as the evidence underpinning it. So somewhere between analysis, but almost like using analysis as a creative practice. Nonetheless, for me, it was like, I'd never thought about New York in this way, and I've never thought about the power of reason as this kind of vehicle, not just to pin yourself into a hole, but actually use reason and rigor as a way to free up possibilities and free up your thinking.

1:11:07And as such, you could really use this. And therefore, in the beginning, when I saw the work of Ramkulas and his studio, a lot of it I thought it was art or awkward or not really beautiful or not really elegant. But the more I understood was that it was the fact that it was so liberated, that was poking at me. And in a way, once you yourself became free enough or strong enough to love it, it was like the most refreshing and the most exciting and I simply had to go there and be part of this. So I went on this pilgrimage, on the second of January, right off the New Year's Eve, I'd spend the whole Christmas revamping my portfolio to be the best that it could be in my fourth year of architecture and managed to get past the receptionist and get an interview and get an internship on that journey.

1:12:02Great. How was that experience? No, it was one of the most educational experiences. Like one of the things I have to say that I learned was that I found I realized how much I could actually work. And I say this in the best possible way that if you want to, if you want to arrive at something fresh or something new, you have to pour a lot of sweat equity into it. And I had no idea how much one could actually work. And I would say my first day at work, I left 72 hours later. I also arrived at the bedline of a big competition. So and I got just sucked into that submittal to know that you have that muscle is incredible.

1:12:52And also to understand that to be able to do the things that you dream of that's calling you, it will require not always, but in moments, an effort that is Olympian. Yeah, it's not a nine to five job. And you just have to love that. Like it's part of the, if you want to arrive at things you love, you have to be able to invest that much into it when it needs to happen. And that was like a great exercise. And then another thing was I was expecting the studio. And it was like a small studio when I started, maybe like 40, 50 people. How old was remit this time? He would have been like mid 50s, mid 50s and you were 22.

1:13:43I was at this point, 23. The other thing that I was expecting, and in my mind, there was no other place. But I realized that a lot of the people that came there, they had worked for like Peter Eisenman or Richard Meyer, like all kinds of architects that I couldn't even fathom. So I was expecting this kind of homogenous group of people all thinking the same way. And I wanted to learn to think that way. But I realized that there was like absolutely no consensus. What there was was this incredible amount of ambition and energy. And then Rem, kind of as the curator, steering between all of these diverse offerings towards something that ended up somehow being meaningful.

1:14:38And it kind of gave me that realization. I was already very interested in in Darwin, but it was only later that I really understood how fundamental Charles Darwin is that. And I think one of the givens of the theory of evolution is that, and if you say like what I found in an OMA is that there was like almost like a random source of output. And then it was like by curating this abundance of output that Rem would steer the trajectory of the design. So would he give a general program a problem to solve to everyone and then everyone would throw ideas at him of ways of accomplishing that. Is that how it would work?

1:15:29It would almost be more like surgical or like acupuncture that we would start a project. I worked on the Seattle Public Library. I think one of one of the great works of Rem and of OMA. We would do an abundance of research, produce an abundance of material. And then when presented that material like Rem would like point at things. Of course, we would also suggest certain observations. And he was like, not this one, like this is really interesting. Let's look more here. Let's try to push more into this and Seattle at the time. I was home to of course Microsoft this new thing we were we were making a library in in the late 90s earlier early 2000.

1:16:14And Amazon was this new company selling books. Also out of Seattle Boeing was there. So you had like technology. You had maybe the end of the library and you had Microsoft like so he wanted like us to have an understanding of what what do these new technologies mean. And they're from the same city as we are. So he would point at things that had interest to him and then slowly out of that. Ideas would evolve and he would. So you can say the heurica moment was rarely coming from him, but the identification that this is actually the heurica moment. And he was the one who decided it was the heurica.

1:16:55It's actually like really that it was the selection as an art of creation. And when you when you think about Darwin. Yeah. The creative moment. Is never with direction because it's either the random mixing of maternal and paternal DNA. That produces various variations various offspring or random mutation that comes from virus or bad copying. So the creative movement never has direction, but it is once these offspring are unleashed into the wild. That the selection criteria, which in this case would be predator prey arms races or the ability to occupy an econish or the ability to walk into a new econish.

1:17:39So that anyway, it gives you this kind of realization that it doesn't matter where the idea comes from. What matters is why you choose to pursue it. And as you choose to pursue it, you become more and more aware of its potential. So you can say the first fish that stranded on land happened to have some kind of flippers that allowed it to sort of move it move itself around and maybe get back into the waters who could breathe again. But slowly by occupying this kind of in between soon. Natural selection started selecting for the fish that could stay longer and longer on land and eventually breathe.

1:18:22That like once you know where the party is going, you can start selecting with greater intention. So and therefore I think it in my own case that the fact that I can work with 700 people without devolving into chaos is because I love it. When I come with the brilliant idea and thankfully once in a while that happens and it's a great feeling. But it's not my job. My job is to make sure that when the brilliant idea presents itself, no matter who came with it. You say there it is. That's the one we're going to pursue. No matter who came up with it. Yeah. So it doesn't matter. It all that matters is at the best idea wins.

1:19:06Exactly. Which also allows you to live with more humility because you know it doesn't matter. Exactly. And also like once you can take that kind of pride or ego out of the equation, then you can also collaborate. Yes. And also like an architectural project will take five to ten years to complete maybe 15 in the case of the Zürger Airport. So if some person keeps talking about how they came up with this idea seven years ago when they were well fuck you. It just doesn't mean anything. But what matters is that you can create by everybody doing their part the primordial soup from where the idea will emerge.

1:20:00Right?

1:21:00And chocolate dips. Snack bars come in chocolate. Coconut white chocolate and blueberry white chocolate. Visit houseofmacademias .com slash tetra.

1:21:23How is your relationship to architecture changed over the course of your life? Of course like in the beginning I didn't get it and then by going through this kind of serial monogamy, a falling love with various architects. By being fully committed to many different approaches and like ultimately understanding their limitations. I finally arrived at some kind of certainty. I kind of youthful pragmatic utopian idealism of sorts, but I would say then it goes through a kind of ebb and flow. Sometimes you have incredible direction. You've maybe created a little opening that has revealed an incredible territory to explore and inhabit.

1:22:23And then at some point you make sauce that. And there is a kind of dry period where you are somehow tired of what you've been pursuing. And then it takes a while and sometimes it really is that you then rediscover a body of work from the past that you might have really discarded in the past, but you now see potential in it. A body work of your own or. No, no, no, I would say like just found material just found material like. Other objects that ideas the work of a lot and I would normally say and. It sounds a bit cynical, but like you know, you can never really steal from your contemporaries because that's like ripping them off.

1:23:09But if you steal from dead architects, you have historical awareness and you honor their legacy, right? So in that sense, there is this incredible material out there. Of the trajectory of certain architects from the past. Who's. Pursuit. God stole either because they took another turn and they didn't follow this any further or they died. And no one really picked it up. In that sense, your journey. Keeps allowing you to pursue trajectories that you might start. Like you go through new chapters, like you finish a chapter where you feel empty. And then you're replenished and find a new way in that's exciting.

1:24:01You're satiated there. You exhausted this. And you might actually be able to return to to that place again, but. Yes, impregnated by the other things you found, right? I think I should be or the singer whose name I often use to explain how to say my own name. I think she's actually amazing and she's been a great inspiration to me as an architect because I think she's. A person who is very left and right brain. She's incredibly good at talking about how she works. Even though she is like fearless, creative and widely experimental, she's also very. She's very talkative about what she's doing. She said when she did debut and post, she had to make one of all of her favorite kinds of music.

1:24:45So those two albums are incredibly eclectic, but she almost needed to purge to get it out of her system. So you have like an electronic music. You have a kind of a weird jassie song. You have a kind of musical show kind of thing. You have a very eclective two albums that are beautiful and great and they have a lot of Björk in them, but they're Björk plus this other thing. And then she felt finally ready to do homogenic where you only have beats and violins, nothing else. Like she could really do something that was 100 % her own creation. And I think in a similar way, I needed to somehow get a few projects out of the way that in various ways were somehow launched by certain other things that were happening at the same time.

1:25:40And then once you somehow get that out of your system, you also don't have to do everything with every project. But you get a kind of calm that this project could be about only this. And there's a thousand other things that are super interesting. And when a project could be about only this, it could be that much better. Exactly, because you can really like explore everything in this particular space. And then the next project could be completely different. So that sense, I definitely deliberately tried to renounce to the extent it's possible, because I'm not saying that we don't have or I don't have the idiosyncrasies.

1:26:19So there's certainly certain things that call me more than others. But I do try that each project should have the freedom to find its own and be only about this one thing. And a kind of consistent, consequent pursuit of that thing and not everything else. Would you say there's a spiritual dimension to your work?

1:26:47I think to the extent that I believe fundamentally architecture is about allowing the maximum unfolding of human life. It has elements of invitation, the fact that we work with material and light. It speaks to you through more channels. So it speaks to you with another language than words. Something that invites your eyes and your attention. The way it creates connections and possibilities, the way it hinders other connections and possibilities. I think it has a major non -linguistic impact on your lives. And I think it has the ability, like other forms of art, to open your awareness and your perception of the world in ways that you wouldn't have had if you hadn't encountered this piece of work.

1:27:49And it has the lasting impact that once your awareness has been awakened, you can now no longer look at the world without seeing and understanding this. So it makes your world bigger. And then maybe finally, like I heard a conversation between an Indian TV host and Satguru. And the TV host was somehow a politician. I think that he was neither spiritual nor religious. And then Satguru came with this interesting definition that he said, like religion, is when you are looking for answers and you're looking for an authority to be the answer. So you're willing to embrace and accept the answer served to you.

1:28:38Spiritual is when you are seeking. So not actually finding answers that can be the end of your search, but like the constant curiosity to keep seeking. And I think in that sense, architecture is somehow the material practice of seeking to accept that life has not arrived to a final state. It is constantly evolving. And in that search, we have as human beings acquired the ability to manipulate matter, to manipulate our environment, to be part of that quest. And that actually an interesting thing, like back to Darwin. One thing I love to describe, because I think it's true, life evolved by adapting to the surroundings.

1:29:29Until life through the acquisition of tools and technology and architecture acquired the ability to adapt the surroundings to life. So to say, in the beginning, we had to find a cave and inhabit that cave. But once we got the power to design our, like to build our own cave, we didn't have to accept the cave that we found. We could ask ourselves, what kind of a cave would we like to live in? And what does that cave look like? We didn't have to climb a tree to escape the predators. We could design our own tree and we could ask ourselves, we had to ask ourselves, what kind of a tree would we like to live in?

1:30:11And in that sense, suddenly architecture became the extension of the evolutionary trajectory, because life was no longer just shaped by its surroundings. Life acquired the power to shape its own surroundings to life. We became self -actualized through architecture. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, if you start with color, quite often we've had bands on color as understood as the application of pigment on top. So color often comes in the form of paint. And therefore it's almost like a noise that wipes out all of the texture and natural color that comes from the actual material itself. To it hides what it actually is.

1:31:14Exactly, the inherent or intrinsic color that a piece of wood has or a piece of stone or even a piece of cement, like glass itself, actually even clear glass comes with various shades depending on the iron content in the glass, etc. So very often we will have a fat work against color, except the inherent color of the actual materials, because that's a deeper, true color. But then of course, like all dogmas, sometimes you have to question them and then it's like, I bought a summer house like a few years ago when my son was two and a half years old and I realized that's why people get summer houses.

1:31:56So they can unleash their offspring in the wild. And in this case, I found this very beautiful summer house from 1918, built by Swedish immigrant workers on the north coast of the island where Copenhagen is. So it has a fetched roof and then these Swedish colors. And the Swedish traditional colors come from the copper ores and the iron ores. So it's an iron oxide yellow called Falo yellow. It's a copper byproduct called a Falo red. There's a kind of dark green, there's a kind of baby blue. But there are these traditional colors and all the woodwork, my normal instinct would have been to reveal the veins of the wood and the different shades of the wood.

1:32:40But because it all came with this material palette, I suddenly found this license to then really embrace the color. And then of course, I found ceramic, light controls and switches from this Swedish factory. And suddenly everything became about color. So like I would say with any dogmas, sometimes the opposite can also be true and to run with that for a bit can also be an imitation. So sometimes we really unleash the power of color. Also sometimes when you have no budget in some of our first projects, we were doing this very inexpensive housing. And for the corridors that gave access to the apartments, there was no money left.

1:33:26But we could specify the color of the paint and the color of the of the rob of floor. So there we just said, okay, since color pigment is the only material we have, then let's really run with it. And that's why you can take a completely neutral, efficient minimal corridor. And by making it bright red or like a rich green, it does something like the kind of surprise you get when the elevator opens. And suddenly you're surrounded by red and you go from this kind of sense of every day into some kind of sense of like a different setting or almost elevation. Like in cinema, like one way to create a setting or an emotional impact is actually when you do the color gradation, not only do you try to achieve consistency between different shots, but you also create an atmosphere or a feel of the movie by.

1:34:23And then you're grading the color and like a classic scene and Peter Greenaway in the cook the thief his wife and his lover during the restaurant she's wearing a red dress. It's like a colorful warm restaurant here and then she walks through the door into the toilets and everything is like bright white, bright white tiles and her dress is now white. So he's kind of playing with this color as an active component of a scene. And I would say in a similar way you ask about color and sound, just like our natural preference would be to play with the natural color of the material itself, the stone, the wood, the glass, the concrete and really enhance and play with that color.

1:35:05I think the same is true for acoustics actually that the standard response in also like fortified through building code and regulation is to make the acoustics of every room as dead as possible. So just to absorb the shit out of a room to the point where everything sounds like a recording studio. And a recording studio it might make sense to not have anything else come into the microphone than than the source. But I think just like the space we're in now has a certain reverberation. It's not a dead space and you know it has some timber ceiling with a lot of like traditional ornaments that will definitely disperse the sound and probably absorb quite a bit of it.

1:36:04It has a torazo floor that has a motoric impact and some surfaces were like single sheet paint glass where the sound can also travel out. But so you end up with an acoustic environment that is far from dead but it's also not a bad acoustic environment. I definitely prefer to not regulate or absorb more sound than absolutely necessary, even the fact that once you put a sofa and a chair and a few live bodies, they're going to absorb some sound as well. So I think there's a tendency to make spaces acoustically more dead than they have to. And I think the typical example is the corporate office environment with a carpeted floor and a popcorn ceiling.

1:36:51And the soul just dies the second you step in there, not least because of the acoustics. Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.

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1:38:13Tetragrammatin .com Walk me through some of your favorite projects from the beginning till now. Maybe one project that is very dear to me is a project called The Eight House or The Infinity Loop. But it's essentially like a generic city block. You know, it has some retail functions, a little bit of office, like a kindergarten, a cafe, and then it has like 500 homes. Apartments? 350 apartments, and then we turned it into 150 townhouses. And basically, so we had like a generic rectangle, a thousand feet long, at the widest, 200 feet wide, and some building regulations of maximum heights, etc. But no context because we were the first building in this new master plan.

1:39:12So there was not much to relate to apart from towards the south, a big open field in the outskirts of Copenhagen. Like a beautiful field with cows walking. And we thought like let's try to maximize the internal diversity of these generic program elements. So of course, we put all of the commercial functions, the shops and offices on the lower levels. And because retail and commercial flow plates are deeper than residential flow plates, because they're less light -sensitive, they were wider. Then on top of that, we then placed what we call townhouses, two -story rowhouses, taking advantage of the difference in depth between the commercial flow plate and the residential flow plates.

1:40:05We could make little front gardens and a small path to get to it. On top of that, we put a layer of traditional apartments slightly deeper with balconies. And then on top of that, by shifting another layer of townhouses a little bit towards the back, we could create two -story townhouses again with a garden in front and a small path to get to them. And then simply by raising and lowering the different layers, we could dip down in some of the corners, the commercial flow plates to nothing. So you could walk up on that little path. In other places, we would raise it up by these different layers that have different depths and different shifted in different directions, optimized towards views and sun.

1:40:52We created a man -made mountain path where you can walk along the townhouses from the ground floor to the penthouse and back down again. So you almost turn a city block into a mountain town where the kids that live there can, if you live on the seventh and the fifth floor, you can walk out and take your tricycle down to your friend next door like you would in a small scale community but inside a city block of 500 apartments and townhouses. And is this walkway on exterior interior? It's on the exterior. And it's connected to the ground on three corners. So you can literally walk and bicycle from the ground floor to the penthouse and back down again.

1:41:39So it somehow invited the small town public life, communal life, into the city block. And had that ever been done before? Not to this level of consistency. For sure, there's been some attempts to having like Lycopes, she was talking about a horizontal street, but you could only really get to it by taking the elevator up to it. So therefore, and it was interior, not exterior. So it was never really part of the public realm in the same way. And we finished this in 2009 when we were two -thirds into the project. The subprime economical apps happened. And our client decided to finish the project, but we had to save as much money as we could.

1:42:22But because the architecture of the project was in the bones of it, we could only like dial down some of the finishes. So in the end, it's been finished with things sheet aluminum and visible screws. But it doesn't matter because the power is in the social architecture. And as a result, it has become incredibly successful. You have families that have moved in there where, you know, a daughter and her husband and their children, and then her sister moved in. And then their parents moved in. And then they had another child. So then they moved into another apartment in the same block. And it has given rise to all kinds of community activities.

1:43:03Because people walk by each other or by school by each other, or take the baby's stroller on a stroll and see each other, it has created a kind of social fabric that would be un -attievable if the only place to meet is inside the elevator. How wide is that path that goes around the building? So the path itself is maybe it's 10 feet. It's excited like a wide sidewalk. But then of course it's open to one side. And then you have like two big corduettes. So it's in the shape of a figure eight. And then you have like where the figure eight crosses itself, you have a kind of vertical spine of some of the communal functions, like a kitchen and a space where they do yoga, with this kind of bouncing stair that connects it all.

1:43:47Like it looks a little bit like that scene from the name of the Rose, or the secret library with all these kind of stairs going across the board. But just to say it's made with the most economic means possible, it's taking all the traditional ingredients of a city block, but putting them together in an unusual way, so you actually create something extraordinary out of the ordinary. Only by arrangement, the materials aren't unusual. The only thing about it is the... Yeah, they kind of configuration, if you like. The configuration. So in addition to this journey, so for like the townhouses have the garden in front, as a kind of buffer, and then they have also views to the other side.

1:44:34And then you also have elevators and stairs on regular intervals. So you can also get to that path from the elevator and stair, but that's also how you get to the apartments. So it is literally just taking all the traditional ingredients of a very large Copenhagen block, putting it together in such a way that it produces a completely different result. We've called it architectural alchemy, or programmatic alchemy, but by taking traditional ingredients and mixing them in untraditional ways, you create, if not gold, then at least added value. So is it still a one -of -one or have others even copied it?

1:45:14I mean, I think it has inspired a lot of different projects, but it's also a lot of work to do. But it has proven to be incredibly socially successful. Then I would say another project that I... It's quite dear to me, because again, it is so blatant. It's a museum we created in a sculpture park in Norway. It just had its fifth anniversary of the other day. And you have sculpture park on both sides of this beautiful river, and there's a historical pulp mill on the land. And we could place the museum anyway we wanted, but it was suggested to place it next to the mill. But the mill itself, and especially the side of the mill that is facing the river, is so beautiful, but you can only see it from the river.

1:46:06And also, we didn't want this kind of dichotomy where you have the old and the new, like the good and the bad. So we tried to put the museum as far from the mill as we could by spanning over the river, looking back across the river at the mill. So the museum becomes the bridge that takes you from one side of the sculpture park across to the other side. It becomes part of the journey through the sculpture park. So do you say it's like a floating museum? Yeah, it's basically spanning over the river, like a beam as it is. So it's a post or just a two -end? It's resting on the two sides. It's almost 200 -foot span.

1:46:44Yeah. And it's a very small museum, so it has two main galleries, one which is a very tall gallery without any daylight as a requirement. And then another one, which is a more horizontal panoramic gallery that has the view across the river, and daylight from the sides and more modest ceiling height, but greater floor plan. Are they stacked or are they next to each other? It's basically one after the other. So the transition from one to the other is basically by rotating the space from vertical to horizontal. And as it rotates, it also rips open a window that then closes when it becomes the roof.

1:47:26So it also looks like a giant sculpture. So you can say it is a museum and a bridge and a sculpture and a sculpture park. Beautiful. And again, it's on the outside, it's made with extruded aluminum profiles that you know from warehouses. And on the inside, it's made from two by fours, white painted Norwegian timber, two by fours. When you see it, you see curves and kind of warped shapes. But when you look closer, it's just that each straight member is gently shifted creating this hyperbolic paraboloid or saddle shape to apply a geometric term to it. So essentially, it's creating an extraordinary form out of ordinary elements.

1:48:21Tell me some of the stages you went through before you got to that. It was really like we went on the visit to the site. And we saw the mill. We understood where you could place it. There was also like a little island you could get to by walking with boots and jumping from rocks. And we found that that became the fathers we could get away. We could almost achieve the most beautiful view of the mill at a distance by sort of standing on the edge. But we could feel that the best view would be, of course, in the middle of the water. I see. And then the second thing was this idea that they had the old sculpture park on one side and they were expanding it to the other side.

1:48:59And there was one bridge. And we thought like, I hate to trace my steps back. I always like to do the loop. Like when I go on a walk. I will walk through fire to not walk back the way I came. Yes. So this idea that we could turn the journey through the sculpture park into a loop by adding a second bridge. Somehow made so much sense. When did the idea to put the museum on the bridge? That was really like day one. So this museum is going to be a bridge. Wow. Right away. And then like now you know that it has to do something different. And then what is the bridge going to look like? Is it going to be an arch?

1:49:40Is it going to be a girder? And then of course once we started saying like it was relatively small. 12 ,000 square foot gallery space. And we thought like we should have two different experiences. And in the beginning we thought one is skylit and the other one is sidelit. But then as we won the competition, the curator said like I would actually prefer to have one without light and the other one with light. So let's say sidelit and unlit. And then of course in the middle you get this third space which is the twisted space. And in the end the museum is called the twist. That twisted space of course defies the traditional requirements of what would be a good gallery space.

1:50:25But that also becomes the obstacle that all the artists that have exhibited there end up coming up with something unique that takes advantage of that. The twisted space feel like on the inside. I can understand what it looks like on the outside. But the inside it really feels like you are walking in a room that literally turns 90 degrees. I see. So the floor you are walking on becomes the wall. The other wall becomes the floor. The former wall became the ceiling. So it really feels like this surreal sculptural experience where every category that you know, becomes something else. But it also meant that normally in a museum you would have painted drywall and then you would have maybe wood on the floor.

1:51:14And then you would have something else in the ceiling. In this case because the floor becomes the wall. And the wall becomes the ceiling. It all had to be the same. So we had to get the lead curator to accept that the wall was going to be white painted wood. So you would see the texture of the wood slats of the wood boards. It wouldn't be this kind of even surface they would have to be white. But it would have quite a lot of texture from all the pieces that would put together. Would you say more like the inside of a barn? More like the inside of a barn. And we ended up, of course, digging through the trenches to find all kinds of cool references.

1:51:54And actually in Copenhagen we have something called the free, which is this. Like I think at least century old, the art space where all the walls are actually white painted wood. And it's a great sort of venerable institution. So we found all the references we could find to justify this choice. But of course, each time you're doing something different, it triggers a lot of concern. Is it okay to not do exactly what we normally do? But the result really feels like effortless and beautiful. But took a lot of sweat and pain to go through. Great. In the beginning when we had come up with this idea, vertical gallery, horizontal gallery, twisted the middle.

1:52:38Then we started like how are we going to make this nice? And in the beginning we had imagined more like an Anish Kapoor, like a smooth polished stainless surface. But of course it became quite clear that the whole budget of the entire museum just in the facade. So then we had to find a tectonic way to achieve this complex sculptural shape in an inexpensive and buildable way. And I think that's where the project really found its strength once we'd won the competition. And we're really looking for different ways to materialize it. This idea of the straight members, just gently shifting that really elevated it.

1:53:22Yeah. From just an image into a tectonic, like a building. So that's an interesting idea that sometimes budgetary restrictions force you to do something more interesting. Not less interesting. And also like, actually the budgetary constraints, but it can also be gravitational constraints or climatic constraints. Like sometimes these practical obstacles, reality on one side and your dream on the other side. Once the two blend, the dream acquires more and more definition and in doing so necessitates inventions that in themselves maybe at some point really become the whole point of the project. Like the twist without that tectonic would be a much lesser building.

1:54:18When did you find that out? Yeah, but that came even further down the process. That's also why some people, in America, you have a very unproductive dichotomy between design architect and executive architect. So basically the people that come up with the concept and the vision and the image and then the people who build it. But we will always insist on being part of the project all the way to the end. And often we're not licensed in the place we're building. So we need a local executive architect, but we want to be part of the process all the way because sometimes the technical solution has to be completely aligned and in line with the spirit.

1:55:05And the agenda of the overall project. Yeah, if it's just taking whatever image and then executing it with the status quo. It's not going to be architecture. It's just going to be a built image. Has there been any of the projects that you've designed that you've been disappointed with the way they've been executed? I would say like, like sadly the answer is there's always a tremendous amount of disappointment. I wouldn't have guessed that answer. That's interesting. It's real and it's clearly accurate. I still wouldn't have guessed that. And I would say like, of course, that degree of disappointment.

1:55:46There is. And I would say the perfect building, the perfect execution is like a singularity. It's a vertical tangent that you can approach like a progressive curve. The closer you get, the steeper it gets. And you will never get there. But you can get very close. Yes, yes, yes. And you are striving. Yes. And I would say the closest I've gotten. I think at the end of the twist, we got quite close. It's not surprisingly, it's the smallest projects where we had the possibilities to get the closest, right? Does scale really make a difference? The bigger it is, the harder it is to achieve? Yes, also because it becomes more and more political.

1:56:37It becomes more and more economic. And also, like, we designed a building in New York called the Spiral. It's a thousand -foot -tall entire city block of Manhattan. And we designed the lobby, the facade, and it has terraces cascading around and hence the name. So it's like almost like a hybrid between a modern monolith and a pre -modern kind of ziggurat of New York. So I would say at the scale of the skyscraper, like, very successful. I'm very happy with it. But we didn't do any of the floors because each tenant does their own work, right? So I think we did very well. On the other hand, it's like 95 % all kinds of crazy crap that somehow needs to be able to happen inside a building like that.

1:57:23Because it's not all mine. And also we did a museum of watchmaking where our client is Udema Piki, the Swiss watchmakers. And in Switzerland, they already have very proud craftsmen traditions and high delivery of quality. And in addition to that, our clients are watchmakers. So there I would say we came very close. Yes, yes, yes. Like a clockwork. Tell me about the ski slope. And then we designed a, and I think that's another, I would probably have suggested the ski slope next. Because the ski slope in Copenhagen is actually a waste to energy power plant. So it's a very large facility that takes all of the waste of Copenhagen.

1:58:10Like once it's sorted, all of the unresoluble waste is then used as the fuel to provide the district heating and electricity of the city of Copenhagen. And it is the cleanest waste to energy power plant in the world. So the steam that comes out of the chimney is actually cleaner than the air of Copenhagen. It does still contain a certain amount of CO2, but much less than the power plant that it replaced. And all of the toxins, or most of the toxins, has been eliminated and scrubbed and filtered. So let's say this model of modern engineering that we actually don't have anything to do with on a kind of chemical level.

1:58:54Because it's not our technology that's inside. But it's also invisible. So that we thought, as we were doing the competition, how can we express what's really unique about this? You don't have to put giant science. But when people see it, they can understand that this is something really different. And we got the idea to turn the facade. It's 300 feet tall. Turn the facade into a climbing wall. Did it have to be tall? Is that the nature of the equipment that it had to be tall? Yeah, it's actually like it came with a kind of phantom layout of the machinery. And it was kind of a stepped building, like maybe four steps ending up with a certain height.

1:59:34Yes. So let's say shrink wrapping that kind of machine diagram. And then in the further process once we won the competition with this idea, we worked together with the engineers to optimize to get closer and closer to this. This kind of slope that goes from 300 feet to let's say 120 and then turns. And you end up at the base of where you started and then a vertical elevator. Can you take you to the top again? Or you can take a series of ski lifts back up. So we basically turned the facade into the tallest man made climbing wall in the world. And we turned the roof into an Alpine park, complete with pine trees and like plants and a skiable surface.

2:00:20That is we found we tested all kinds of surfaces, but we found this this kind of mat. It an Italian product from the Alps, where the grass grows through the mat. So the grass ties the mat to the ground. And then you ski down on these brushes that has an equivalent friction and grip to a groomed slope. It's green. It's green. It's grass. But it has the brushes as well that are also green in this case, but because we would chose them green. Have you skied it? I've skied it, yeah. Does it feel like you're skiing on a slope? No, it absolutely feels like a groomed slope. It's definitely not powder.

2:01:01It's Alpine skiing for sure. That's incredible. And also like we didn't have much budget for the so the entire roof park because the power plant by law was not allowed to also be operating a ski slope. So we had to fundraise the ski slope with seven individual foundations that gave at the end, I think that the total budget was a few million euros. So it was really to create this ski slope, the park on the roof. You have a ski slope, the lifts and all the vegetation. That money was raised by, I think it was like close to 10 million euros actually now that I think about. So in the end, the power plant leases its roof for free to the foundation and then the foundation paid for the creation of the park.

2:01:57And then has like an operator that is like a concessionist that runs the cafe and the lifts system and the ski rental and all that. And we've called this idea of social infrastructure that you take a lot of what makes a city function is all the infrastructure, the power plants, the waste management. But also the highway is the warehouses, the parking lots, all that stuff that we treat as if they don't really count. But in the end, they become a major part of our everyday life like this idea that. You drive on the highway, you pass like the power plants and the different like warehouses you park in an out parking structure or in a parking basement.

2:02:45And then you show up in the lobby, hey, the lobby is nice and your office is also nice. But then you park in an out parking lot in front of the supermarket and you go to the recycling facility, which is also like like some, and maybe you work in a factory that is also ugly. So we thought like what if you take the everyday places that could become a thoughtful, holistic part of your environment. Then the power plant and the waste management facility wouldn't be some I saw that blocks the views and car shadows on its neighbors, but it actually becomes the destination on a Sunday where you go to hike, enjoy the views of the city and get the thrill of skiing down, a man made mountain.

2:03:30But because we had a relatively modest budget, we took only everyday species of plants, essentially weeds that are indigenous to Denmark. So we had the lowest possible budget for the plants. And then every fall, like once the leaves are fallen, we chop down most of the bushes and the brushes and the grasses so that the new seeds get a chance. But already after two years, we had gone naturally from 60 species to 120 species, simply by seeds and birds and slowly but surely it is becoming what a mountain meadow would look like in Denmark. If we had mountains and I think it speaks a little bit to the power of architecture and form giving is that we opened it in 2019.

2:04:26My son was born in November 18, so he knows of no time when you couldn't ski on the roof of the power plant in Copenhagen. And we live on a houseboat in Copenhagen and we see the sun rising over the man made mountain of Copenhagen. And we see it sitting over the Queen's castle on the other side of the port. And I just like this idea that for him and his entire generation, they take it for granted that there's a mountain in Copenhagen and that you set a power plant is a place that turns waste into energy that you can ski on and climb the facade. Like this inviting almost utopian fiction that we came up with 10 years ago is now the world that he lives in and his entire generation.

2:05:15So if he has to come up, because when we came up with that idea, it was kind of a wild idea, almost science fiction. But when he has to come up with wild ideas for his future, that's just how it is. Just like Venice in Italy is a city where the streets are paved with water and you sail around in Gondolas. Yes. And Copenhagen is a city where you ski on the roof of the power plant that turns waste into energy. Amazing. Is it a well -loved feature in the town, would you say? Absolutely. I think it's also something that I think has captured something that is very Copenhagen. Copenhagen is a city where we care so much for the environment that even our waste and power plants is an integral part of the social infrastructure, the parks of the city.

2:06:09And I think that sense when you see the skyline of Copenhagen, the slope of the power plant is a major part of the silhouette. Tell me about the smoke rings. Yeah, like the smoke rings is also like an example that you don't always win every battle. Also, we wanted to integrate an art piece in the proposal and we thought it would be interesting to try to distill the message of this idea of turning a power plant so clean that you can ski on the roof and climb the sun. Into an art piece and we were working with a German group out of Berlin called Reality United. And out of different ideas came the idea that to play with the steam coming out of the chimney to blow smoke rings.

2:07:02And we ended up taking it incredibly far. We ended up doing a functioning prototype. A big part of the cost of operating a power plant like that is that you have a huge insurance that if you have failure, you can buy power from elsewhere to provide to the city. So if you do anything that messes. I see. And we found the solution that we could actually extract the steam separately, almost like the steam unit out of the chimney. We extract separately, compress it, funnel it up parallel to the exhaust of the chimney and around the mouth of the chimney because the chimney itself is actually a hollow space and it has two pipes that comes out that releases the steam.

2:07:47So along the perimeter, we could then release the steam we took separately, like through a series of valves. And that would create the vortex. So we ended up doing a third scale functioning prototype with amazing results. And because the vortex captures the steam and the temperature inside the turmoil of the vortex. So it actually preserves the steam longer. And that's also why smoke rings work because the smoke gets caught and trapped. And therefore it remains. So it became this kind of beautiful expression that you take something machine like. And serious. And you create something hedonistic and playful out of it.

2:08:38Like when we did it, it almost seemed like science fiction. Imagine a future so clean that. You know, a power plant like blow smoke rings and you can ski on the roof. And there is something about science fiction. It's also one of my favorite literary genres. I think. People like William Gibson and Ian and Banks. Bernard Vinge were. Brilliant creative people really. Speculating sometimes dystopianly, but sometimes utopianly. Almost like extrapolating from where we are now. Where might we go. And I think the reason that I'm so interested in science fiction is that I think it's very similar to our process is that.

2:09:21Philip K. Dick had a beautiful definition of science fiction. He said. Science fiction is not a story from the future even if it often happens in the future. And it is also not a space opera even though it often takes place in space. But science fiction is a story where the. I'm paraphrasing the plot is triggered by some form of. Invention or innovation. And it's it's often a technical. Invention. But it can be a cultural. Social. Environmental. Innovation. So it. The science fiction story ends up showing you a world like the one that you know. But by altering this one fact. It becomes the narrative expiration of the cascading consequences.

2:10:12That follows from that altered fact. So it reveals alternative outcomes that in a way reflects back upon the life that you know. And not only the writer but also the reader can speculate along these lines. And I think whenever we start a project and I talked about this idea of asking the questions looking at a different angle. I think often we try to understand how has life changed? How has technology changed? Or the way we live or the way we work changed? So we find this one altered fact. And we take the consequence of that and we explore the. Design exploration of the cascading consequences of this one altered fact.

2:10:57And in that sense, I think in the beginning you asked what is architecture. I think it and another. Answer to that question is that. Architecture is the art and science of turning fiction into fact. You can say when when we came up with the idea of of Copenh Hill. It was a pure fiction. Completely wild idea. And then we argued so hard for it. And we tried to resolve all the practicalities. Enough to win the competition. And then we spent the next decade. Solving all the problems, taking all the boxes, getting all the permits. And then making it happen. So that on the opening day and ever since.

2:11:39It was now just the reality of Copenhagen. But until then it was pure fiction. And when it started, it was just a wild idea. So this process. Of giving birth. To the future. Is what makes architecture so exciting that as human beings. We have the not only the possibility, but actually the responsibility. To make the world we live in. More and more like we wish it was.

2:12:42Thank you.