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 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