MAST: Architecture on water

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0:30us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

0:55Welcome to the documentary and this episode of In the Studio from the BBC World Service. I'm on the harbourside in Copenhagen, Denmark's capital, surrounded by boats and boatyards and workshops and the studio of a very innovative architecture practice called MAST. Perhaps architecture is not the immediate word that comes to mind because what happens here is all about designing and making structures that float, so a bit like marine engineering and shipbuilding. I'm Jonathan Glancy, and like other architecture critics around the world, I've long been interested in how design and engineering can come together in a firm like Mast to help solve some of the urban and environmental problems we face today.

1:45In the studio, the two architects who founded Mast move easily between speaking Danish and English. Marshal Bletcher is originally from Australia, where he spent time living on a houseboat, and Magnus Marburg is a Dane who also has a strong connection to the sea. I grew up on an old sailing ship, which my parents built, So through that sort of childhood, I always had craftsmanship very close to heart. And that's also why I decided to pursue this mix of my passion for sailing with architecture. Magnus, it's a lovely name, MAST, because of the shipping implications of that. But it means something as well, M-A-S-T?

2:26Yeah, me and Marshall, we came up with the idea of making a maritime architecture studio. So we made our own abbreviation of that into MAST. Mast is one of the only design studios in the world which focuses entirely on the water, how we can use the water as an alternative to the land, how we can use this amazing resource to improve our cities. And we saw an opportunity, especially in Copenhagen, where the harbour is developing so rapidly, and there's so much pressure from sea level rise and urban flooding and a lack of buildable land. The studio looks out over the southern reaches of the Copenhagen harbour.

3:03It's an airy, light-filled room full of models of completed projects, floating buildings of all sorts, plus plans and drawings for new schemes. Of course, boats and buildings do have an affinity, especially when designed in terms of form following function and an efficient use of space. This way, both are a pleasure to use and to look at. Over here is a model of one of our early projects. It's a floating island which moved around the harbour and provided a sort of new type of space in Copenhagen. Here we have a converted ship. This is a ferry from the 1940s, a timber ferry, which used to be used for transporting people and cars between the different islands in southern Denmark, which we've converted to a large house.

3:50We also have a project in Milan, which is a redevelopment of an old quarry, which has since become a lake. But perhaps most exciting is the master scheme for a whole new floating community in a disused dock in Rotterdam, accessible by boat or by a network of bridges and walkways. Rotterdam will be one of the largest floating communities in the world. It will include around 100 apartments, a mix of low-cost and standard apartments, as well as some commercial premises and commercial harbour. And that's really woven into the bike network, but also creates a new opportunity for people to connect to the city using boats.

4:30That also includes a proposal for a large amount of floating wetlands, which can help actually remove nutrients from the water and clean the water, hopefully to a point in a few years where you could swim in the centre of Rotterdam. We're sitting on the first floor of a community workshop and office space, and downstairs the boat builders have their workshop and shipyard, and we work very close together. So we're really happy to be here where there's still an active shipbuilding community where we can do experiments and build things. And if you look out the window, you can see right up the harbour to the centre of Copenhagen.

5:05But here in the foreground, we have the shipbuilding area. We have a large water area where we actually bring the floating buildings to us. One of the nice benefits of building floating buildings is that the building site comes to you. As you can see outside our own door here, one of our big projects are being built at the moment. So it's super nice, of course, to be able to go down there and look at the project and the progress every day and talk about whatever needs to be decided on site. So you can see here the roof of a new community center, which we're developing together with the shipbuilders.

5:37Let me just open the door.

5:42This is an entirely timber structure, which is going to sit in front of this new community in the center of Copenhagen, and it's going to provide community hall and rental apartments and also kayak rental and access to the water for people who live there. So this is a large wooden framed building built entirely from Douglas fir and local timber. We also have floating out the front of the office a small floating garden. So that's a bit of an experiment and that's going to be the first of its kind in Copenhagen. It's a floating garden with plants that have evolved along the coastline of Denmark.

6:18So they can tolerate some salt. So plants can actually, their roots will actually grow into the water. It will develop a sort of beach ecosystem on the water and provide space for ducks and birds right in the centre of the city. This community centre is substantial, much bigger than the average house. I'm happy to see the workers on the roof secured by safety harnesses. There's no compromise on the comfort of master buildings. the stacked bales of insulation ensure no one would be cold in this building. And as you can feel, it's totally stable. You can't even feel the movements of the sea. So this is a concrete pontoon with a styrofoam core, which gives this extreme stability so that you won't really notice.

7:04But it's super easy to move, for instance. We were flipping it around the other day. It's a two-person job, basically. So that's the fantastic thing about having it on water. It's the mobility. It seems to be quite a remarkable thing for architects to have their actual building projects, the things they're actually building right outside their studio. Yeah, definitely. We feel very grateful for that. And it's sort of like a playground for us also where we can go down to the shipyard and experiment. That's a big part of our practice also is to try to challenge the ways that people see the harbour and what can happen in the harbour.

7:38There's a whole mix of people who we work with on this project. We have a team of shipbuilders called Ponds. We build a lot of our projects here in Denmark with them. When we're doing projects overseas, we work with other contractor teams. But here in Denmark, we have this luxury of having a team of shipbuilders next door. We're looking out across from the new floating building here into a harbour, which is what you hope. It's full of boats and boathouses and activity going on with people actually building buildings based on boats. It's just a terrific, all-integral place, a view of the world that's very special.

8:17Certainly from an architectural point of view, it's utterly unusual. So this place where we're lucky enough to have a studio right on the water in an active shipbuilding area, surrounded by floating houses and houseboats and boathouses and shipping, this is a constant source of inspiration for us. We can see that people who live here really love it. We're both hoping to live here in the coming years, and we want to give other people the opportunity to live in a place like this as well. So Marshall, we're standing in this new building here for Copenhagen. It's built to a very high standard for many reasons.

8:50It has to meet local regulations and it's your own desire to do things extremely well, which you are. But would this be too expensive to do in a very poor part of the world? The simple answer is no. I mean, there's nothing intrinsically expensive about building a floating building. And you can see that there are many, many communities in poorer parts of the world which have traditional vernacular floating buildings. So the simplest versions in places like Vietnam or Lake Makoko in Lagos, there's extremely affordable ways of building on water, and we think it is applicable globally. We're one of the first companies to basically take the practice of architecture and apply it to the water.

9:31So in the past, it's been people developing their own floating buildings, often in a sort of haphazard way. we can help take technologies which have been developed for the shipping industry for example and create much more secure and sustainable floating buildings including in this poor parts of the world so we are working in places like thailand where we're building some floating accommodation on a jungle lake where we're using much simpler technologies in that case we're using recycled plastic flotation rather than concrete pontoons for example and we can build at a competitive price to a building on land.

10:07So there is nothing intrinsically more expensive about building on water. In some cases, it can actually be more affordable. For example, in Rotterdam, we can build houses in a shipyard, which is much more efficient than building on site with all of the mess and the transportation, and move the buildings to their eventual final location.

10:32Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott.

11:05So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

11:16You're listening to the BBC World Service. I'm Jonathan Glancy and this is In the Studio with architecture firm Mars. You touched on this idea of traditionally that houses built in the water or by the water are associated with poor places and poverty. And I wonder if there's a big, still worldwide, there's still a big need for a change in that perception. Yeah, there's a long history of floating communities all around the world. And often it was people who couldn't live on land who were building those communities. in the west coast of America, there's a long history of lumberjacks and fishing communities building low-cost floating houses since they were not able to invest in property.

12:00So for a large part of the 19th century, people were living in these makeshift communities where they didn't have proper sanitation. In the 20th century, these places were seen as slums, and most of these communities, especially in America, were removed as part of the slum clearances of the 50s and 60s. And now, interestingly, the few communities which survived in places like Seattle rapidly gentrified and now are some of the most desirable places to live in these cities. There's a long and mostly forgotten history of people living on floating buildings all around the world going back actually thousands of years.

12:35The earliest example we've come across is in the south of Iran and Iraq where people have been living on floating reedbed islands for around 5 ,000 years. They're actually the descendants of the Sumerians who continue to live on these wetland areas at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. So before starting Mass, I actually visited the south of Iran to try and find examples of people living in this way. Unfortunately, Saddam Hussein damned the Tigris, and this wetland, which used to be the second largest in the world, is now incredibly reduced. But there are some small pockets of people in the south of Iran living on these floating islands.

13:12And you can see the same in places like Mexico. There used to be floating islands in Lake Titicaca. There used to be floating communities in Southeast Asia, people living on boats in the Bay of Hong Kong. In Scotland, people lived on stilt houses. In Switzerland, people lived on lakes and stilt houses. But we see a new set of reasons for returning to this long-forgotten way of living. We think that a combination of a lack of buildable land, the increased risk of urban flooding and sea level rise, and a desire to live closer to nature and the natural elements, a really good set of reasons for bringing this forgotten way of living back in cities all around the world.

13:52To what extent does this type of building, the floating building, depend on climate, in the sense of weather particularly? So if you're in Copenhagen, I guess the weather here is not extreme. You have windy days and some rainstorms, but it's not that tough in the great global scheme of things, is it? So are the houses, do they need to be in these more secure climatic areas of the world? Floating buildings, in theory, can be built anywhere. I mean, we have floating oil rigs in the North Sea, which are in some of the most extreme weather you can imagine. There are obvious examples all around the world of floating communities in places which are exposed to hurricanes.

14:35There are floating houses and stilt houses in the tropics in Southeast Asia, in Florida. So these technologies have been proven in the past. We've just largely forgotten about this history. I think I'd rather be on a floating building during inclement weather or a hurricane than on a building on land. These buildings are adaptable and they move up and down with water. and as long as they're anchored in place correctly, they should be just as safe, if not safer, than a building on land. For instance, during the tsunamis, the boats were actually doing better than the land side houses because the boats were actually just going up with the tides when it's coming in and then going down again.

15:16Here in Copenhagen, the local authority has invested heavily in redirecting stormwater and sewage away from the harbour so that water quality has improved dramatically. Oh, nice. What a nice way to spend the morning. It means that people in this city look at the harbour in a completely different way. Rather than the waterfront being regarded as the dirty backyard of Copenhagen, it's now the prime focus for living and recreation. Marshall, we're pottering out in the boat into the harbour. What can we see that you'd like to show us? So we're just emerging from the sort of narrow boat harbour at the front of our office onto a more open part of the harbour in quite a newly developed part of Copenhagen.

16:00It's a former industrial area which has become housing predominantly. If we go a little further, some of our projects will start to pop up on the side of the harbour. We've done a few saunas and swimming areas. So are they private saunas or public? We've actually done a mix. saunas since corona have become incredibly popular i think also following the trend of people going to bars and less it's a sort of healthy alternative as a way to socialize and spend time with friends so there's a massive demand and we've built actually the first public saunas on the harbor together with the municipality of copenhagen we've built two of them which are open to everybody and then we've also worked with businesses to launch a series of more commercial soreness.

16:44And this area here is also quite interesting. We find it's sort of the more like informal settlements that we have left here in Copenhagen harbour. It's sort of boat sheds that are starting to be inhabited and it's creating this really great atmosphere here in the harbour. We're just passing a floating raft with a tent on it. So since the harbour water has become clean people are finding inventive ways of using the harbour. There's a lot of homemade rafts drifting up and down on nice summer days. In this case, it looks like someone's sleeping on a floating raft made of old beer barrels and scrap wood.

17:21That's probably a person with a nice home somewhere who's just chosen to spend a few days drifting down the canal. Do you need a special license to do that? No, in Denmark, we have quite an unusual situation. You don't need a license for any ships under 10 meters. I think we can see here an example of what we want to avoid. So this is a building from the early 2000s, I believe, and they've built a large concrete revetment around the building with a small one and a half meter wide walkway. And it really doesn't create much of a connection between the life in the buildings and the street and the water.

17:58So we're really focused on going away from this older model of a solid boundary or revetment between the border and the land and creating something more interesting. Over here you can actually see what I talked about, the example of having these houseboats laid out in front of the new developments, which gives a great dynamic to the place, I believe. In 2002, a large harbour bath was developed in the centre of Copenhagen, and many saw this as the first swimming facility in the harbour, but it's actually going back to a very old tradition. If you go back already to the early 1800s or even the late 1700s, there was, I think, around a dozen swimming facilities up and down the harbour in Copenhagen.

18:40At that time, most people didn't have bathrooms in their apartments, and swimming was seen as a healthy thing to do, especially when there was outbreaks of tuberculosis. So there was large communal bathhouses on the harbour where people would swim in the harbour water. But gradually, as industry developed, the water quality was depleted, and by the 1940s, the last harbour bath was shut. And this is yours, presumably, yeah? Yes, this is one of our small saunas. In this case, we haven't combined it with a swimming zone because there is an existing swimming zone next to it. And this sauna is built from CLT, cross-laminated timber, and clad in untreated timber, so it will turn light grey as it ages UV light and water.

19:23So it's quite a simple structure, a small public sauna. It has a change room and a sauna with space for around 15 people. It's become really popular, especially in winter, when there's not so much to do in Copenhagen. It's a way to get out and socialise. Oh, look at this. This is a very nice thing, isn't it? So this is a public building. Anyone can use this? This is from a sauna association, but the requirements from the harbour authorities here is that they have to have public access so anybody can become a member of the sauna association. But there is greater sauna association around it to sort of maintain it and to make sure that it's always nice and clean for the people who use it.

20:05Yeah, it's a very stylish little building and it just belongs to the harbour, which is very different from some of the big new modern apartment blocks, which could be anywhere really, whilst this does belong here in Copenhagen. So if we were to continue boating up through the centre of Copenhagen, we'd come across a few other projects that we've developed. We've also built a number of projects on land alongside the harbour, including a sauna club, and we are working on a number of other swimming facilities, as well as floating houses and houseboats. The canals that fan off the main waterway are lined with modern apartment buildings set right into the water.

20:45Not perhaps such a good idea, given rising sea levels. I think this is also a great example of how we are in the cities and in the planning not really prepared for what is to come in regards to rising sea levels. So this development here in Sluzeholmen was built in 2005, and it was built with a securement of 2 meters and 20 centimeters. And shortly after, in 2013, we had a storm flood event here in Copenhagen, where the water was up to 185, so actually something like 20 centimeters below the wooden floors of these buildings in here. So it just shows a little bit of how we haven't really started to thinking in the long term, and we're still building all along the coasts without any real planning for the longer-term use of these places.

21:32We have to start really thinking more with the water instead of thinking that these hard edges can save us because actually it is a solution that has an expiry date now that the rising sea levels are coming up quite rapidly if you look at the big perspective. The race of global sea level rise is accelerating. In 2023, the global average sea rise level set a new record high, nearly four inches above 1993 levels. Globally, eight of the world's largest ten cities are near a coast. And of course, sea level rise plays a role in flooding, in shoreline erosion and hazards from storms. Denmark is a very low-lying country.

22:14But still, all around Denmark, we are seeing these big land reclamation projects or big development projects in the very risky areas of the coast, in very low-lying areas. I think the temptation of going down, building close to the water, even knowing that in 50 years or 100 years this will be a flooded area, it's so great so that no developer or no municipality can at this moment at least say no to that. So given rising sea levels, we believe that floating architecture will actually be a beneficial alternative to land reclamation because of this function of its following the tides, but also eventually the rising sea levels.

22:51Here in Copenhagen, work has just begun on one of the largest land reclamation projects in the world and the largest in Europe. It will be an entirely new suburb built in what is now open water. And we think that in that case, floating buildings could be a really viable alternative. It would require far less earthworks. It would be much quicker to implement and could be economically comparable. There's a potential in the future to build much larger floating communities and create independent floating houses which are entirely self-sufficient. Technology has gotten to such a point that you can actually process waste on board using anaerobic digesters, for example.

23:31You can generate your own electricity, you can store electricity, and you can even clean and filter water and reuse it. So by severing this connection, you have a much more flexible floating house. you can place them in positions which were previously impossible and we think that's a really interesting potential for floating buildings. Marshall, many of the great cities of the world are basically harbour cities that's why they were created and yet you don't see them like that when you visit them. Is this the chance, as it were, to try and turn back cities into what they really were and ought to be?

24:06The great cities are great harbour cities. Yeah, that's something we talk a lot about at Mars. the harbour used to be the main interface between a city and the rest of the world. Goods and people and information all used to flow freely between harbours and rivers into the centre of cities. This has largely disappeared and been replaced by a hard edge. If you look at a city like Copenhagen or New York, this has been reduced to a concrete quayside in most places, and we've forgotten about the important role that harbours used to play in cities. But it's in the workshop that mass architectural ideas become reality.