If documentary is to document our world as it already is
fiction is to fantasize about how it could be
In that sense, architecture is the fiction
of the real world. So turning dreams
into concrete reality with bricks and mortar. Architecture is the canvas
for the stories of our lives.
The city is never complete it has a beginning but it has no end.
It's a work in progress always waiting for new scenes to be added and new characters
to move in.
When I started studying architecture and told people what I did
the most frequently asked question was always, 'Can you tell me why
all new buildings are so boring?' People have the idea that in the past buildings
came with ornaments and decoration. Moats, drawbridges, spires and gargoyles.
Today they've been reduced to containers of space. Boring and boxy.
Somehow so many of our choices today tend to settle with reaffirming the
status quo
by replicating what's already there rather than inventing what could happen
next
I decided I want to change that in the movie Inception the architects find that
they can finally realize their wildest dreams
because they're in fact designing inside a dream. The architect Cobb
explains how he and his wife want to live in a house with a garden
but prefer to live in high-rise. In real life we would have to choose
he says but in a dream we could get it as we wanted it.
we've made a building in Copenhagen called the mountain
combining a parking structure and an apartment building by turning the
parking into a man-made mountains of cars
we can turn the stack of homes into a cascade of houses with gardens
penthouse views and big lawns. Cobb's dream home made in real life
We call this idea bigamy. That you can take multiple desirable elements that
might not fit together or even seem mutually exclusive
like the gardenn home and the high-rise and merge them together into a new genre
you don't have to remain faithful to a single idea
you can literally marry multiple ideas into promiscuous hybrids
the beauty is that architecture not only allows you to dream stuff up
It also allows you to alter the facts
you can turn pure fiction into hard fact we went on to imagine little tweaks to
the status quo that now form everyday reality in Copenhagen and beyond
the 8-house is a neighborhood of townhouses where you can walk and bicycle from the
street
to the penthouse. Turning a city block into a mediterranean mountain town
of paths and squares
The Harbor Bath brings the beach into the heart of the city
realizing the Parisian slogan of May '68
"Sous les pavés, la plage." The Court-Scraper combines the urban oasis of the
courtyard
with the extreme density of a skyscraper into a new world hybrid of the two
Copenhill is a power plant the turns waste
into electricity and that is so huge that it's gonna be the biggest
and tallest structure in all of Copenhagen. How could we transform the stereotype
of the power plant into a public amenity we thought
Denmark is cold, we have snow, but no mountains but we do have mountains of
trash
so we wrapped the plant in a continuous
envelope of a giant ski slope. This is only possible because the power plants
so clean
the smoke coming out of the chimney is completely non-toxic only steam and co2
so the top of the hill will feel fresh like mountain air
to completely alter people's perception a power plant from a dirty neighbor to a
public park
we designed the chimney to release its steam in puffs
of smoke rings the ultimate transformation from a symbol of a problem
pollution to something playful that puffs rings of steam
this sounds like science fiction but this is the world
changing potential of architecture what started off
as wildly fictional ideas ski slopes and smoke rings
is turning into everyday reality in Venice they sail in gondolas through the
streets and in Copenhagen they ski on their power plants that turn trash into
electricity
a weird dream has crystallized into concrete reality
today people flock towards immersive worlds in the virtual realm
more than a hundred million people populate minecraft where they can build
their own worlds
and inhabit them through play the real world predecessor for Minecraft
Lego has become the greatest toy company in the world
with the population of 3.7 billion
the largest ethnic group on the planet these fictional worlds
empower people with the tools to transform their own environments
this is what architecture ought to be. If geography
is the documentation of the world as it is architecture must become world craft
the craft of making our world
where our knowledge and technology doesn't limit us but rather enables
us to turn surreal dreams into inhabitable space
to turn fiction into fact