from Sustainability Reloaded

Interview with Pablo Georgieff from Coloco @ Venice Biennale

We live in an epoque in which the end of the resources and the rise of global population force us to choose between war or conviviality.
As declared partisans of the latter option, we need to learn how to economize all that it is not renewable, and to recycle everything as much as we can.
Time will be an essential component of our work, as we have to deal with life. Today, we are called to think at the reversibility of our manufacts, without capturing resources and creating constrains which will narrow the future choices.

Coloco is a Paris-based collective of “explorers of urban diversity”. Rather than a conventional architects, people at Coloco think themselves more as
Active gardeners, we don’t recognize ourselves into the corporative borders of our discipline. On the contrary, we became a symbiotic structure aggregating knowledge and skills we need for every different project. A living structure evolving in response to the environment.
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We had the chance to meet Pablo Georgieff at the Venice Biennale. Here’s a report of our talk.

Would you like to explain to us the theme of your installation here at the Biennale?
Our presentation here at the Biennale is just a mosaic of some projects that we have been working on in the last eight or nine years. It’s kind of a genealogic tree connecting projects with one another, sort of families of projects: our works on abandoned buildings, on spontaneous gardens in the cities, landscape works from very small individual gardens to the green belt we are now working on in Tripoli, Libia. It’s a cross-scale project with some topics that we are interested in, that we think important for our practice and that we call Urbanodiversity.

Can you explain the idea behind this term?
Urbanodiversity is the idea that the city’s richness depends on variety of activities, situations, living beings that can be hosted in it, and it is the opposite of the generic, monotonous, functionalist city.
We believe that very different interesting situations can occur in accidents, in small places, in what we call ‘turbulences’ of the flux of people, materials and information of the city, where creative behavior, new experiences, new solutions can be born.

You use the metaphor of fluid dynamics in the city…
We see urbanism as an ‘aerodynamic’ discipline, based on movement, fluxes and energy, and no more based on dead matter and materials, as it was in the past.
We think that it is necessary now to work seriously on the living, human material of the city. The city is not just a collection of bricks, or more or less sophisticated materials in more or less fancy shapes, but it’s also a set for relationships, for stories, for love and hate. This is something we would like to use as material for our projects. We don’t mean to quantify human parameters in the way social disciplines do, but to engage individuals into action.

You also present a different insight on nature, different from the idea we are used to
We always want to remind that there’s nothing ‘behind’ nature. Nature is not opposite to anything, because everything is part of nature. There are just different environments, different equilibriums. We have been consulted last year by the municipality of Paris asking us where the new nature spaces in Paris would be. We answered that there would be no new nature spaces, for nature is already everywhere. We proposed to call this project ‘Welcoming Diversity’. It’s about creating the living conditions for life forms and the relationships between them.

That’s not really a common task for architects. For example, in the Arsenale you can’t even touch objects that are supposed to be furniture. Weird situation. Our job is supposed to be about hosting life… Of course there are also positive examples: now this interview is taking place at the Biennale in a semi-underground space with lots of cushions on the floor, outside it is raining very heavy and this has become a very interesting place: everybody is talking with one another, meeting. In this Biennale places to exchange ideas are very rare, and this space is a real success just because we can use it and it is welcoming.

What are the tools you developed to achieve, or to deal with, this Urbanodiversity?
We are trying to work on tools that help us to integrate time in our projects. It is not a thing completely out of the blue, or completely new, or never seen, but we are trying to introduce chronograms as information-exchange and project-driving tools with the clients. We were thinking about how to improve participation, working together, operational sequences to give also the possibility to have spontaneous collaborations, to have optimizations, to have inventions. To do that, you always have to know what is going on, in what sequences, what is necessary to do first, what you have to prepare in order to make things happen, etc.
For example, next year we will have this project in Brazil for the French cultural season. After some proposals and negotiations we have been given a 20-storey building from the Sixties in the center of the city which is now empty. We have suggested activating it as a cultural laboratory during the eight months of the season. Also, it will serve as a negotiation platform to decide what to do with this building, to see if an entity emerges out of this experience that can make this building function with a mix of dwellings, cultural workshops, communication, etc.
In this experience we really don’t know what is going to happen: our aim is to set up the tools by which all people involved can share ideas, and finally act together. This is what we call ‘process architecture’, which is not about the final form, but how we can work with one another, how you can find places where you can discuss, making the project evolve and in the end to create the possibility to really invent something together.”

Source: Sustainability Reloaded
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Popularity: 2% [?]

from Wallpaper

” After nearly 30 years of planning, and eight years since the international competition was launched for the project, the New Acropolis Museum in Athens is ready: the collections are carefully being moved in as we speak, and the official opening is expected with much anticipation towards the end of the year.

Proudly headed by architect Bernard Tschumi, the new museum project team also comprises local architect Michael Photiadis and the museum’s director Professor Dimitrios Pandermalis, who showed us around the new bright and airy building, where we had the chance to meet Swiss-born Tschumi, and discuss his concept, the design, Athens and the Parthenon sculptures.

The new Acropolis Museum in Athens
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Describe the building – how does it work?
The building has two layers; one leads to the excavations. It is quite unusual that you actually have to save and show the finds, so the whole building is on stilts. The ground floor is really structured so as to reveal the excavations, which is why you have all the glass, including the glass ramp leading to the galleries.

The second layer has all the sculptures and the artefacts related to the Acropolis. This part of the building, its geometry, follows the street’s geometry and pattern. But the top room, the glass enclosure, is really all about the Parthenon – it is absolutely parallel to it. This is why the building makes this strange shift on the top floor, and why the corners seem to stick out over the street.

The whole shape comes out of the conditions of the brief and our solution. We started from that shape and everything proceeded from there. We made it as minimal as possible, in terms of form as well as material, as we did not want to compete with the Parthenon. There were people who advocated that the New Museum should be in the style of the Parthenon; I always say that I did not want to imitate Phidias, but to think like Pythagoras. In other words, think of mathematics and master geometry, and start from a level of abstraction.

Aerial view of the new Acropolis Museum in Athens
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What are the main materials used?
The materials are very simple: glass, concrete, and steel. Inside it is marble, glass and concrete. The main structure is reinforced concrete.

What lead you to this choice of material?
The concrete I chose is really soft, so it absorbs the light. The sculptures, the real ones, not the copies, are made of marble, which reflects the light. This combination makes the exhibits stand out, which is why I selected it. This is clear in the top room, but also in the sculpture rooms with the big concrete columns; they bring out the sculptures’ detailing, making them look alive.

The new Acropolis Museum in Athens
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Did your main idea, the concept and the shape of the building evolve and change a lot during the design process?
Yes, but surprisingly little. You know, sometimes we are lucky and we get it straight away. Even when they found more excavations, we just continued with the same concept, it just worked; we didn’t even have to revise it.

Certain things of course evolved – and these were mainly the exhibits’ layout within the space. Of course we included the sculptures in the plans from the time of the competition, but now that we are putting them in their place and not on a piece of paper, we notice things that would work better, so some have been moved.

What kind of special technology was needed for the building design?
There are two things, which were technologically important for the building, and they have to do with the location, Athens. One is that this is an earthquake country, and the other is that it can get quite hot. The earthquake part means that we had to devise the building in such a way as to include the latest technology. Instead of making the building as heavy as possible, as was the usual practice until recently, we made the structure as subtle and flexible as possible.

This museum is done with the latest earthquake protection technology, developed in the last 20 years from our experience in Japan and California, called Base Insulation System. The lower part of the building is anchored into the ground, but the upper part is actually separated from it by a sort of cushion, like ball bearings, so that the upper part can move separately from the lower part.

The second technical aspect is the glass skin. There is a gap between the double-glazing of the top floor, so the hot air from the galleries circulates through the glass wall gaps, via the ceiling and ends up in the basement, where it is cooled and brought back up in the galleries. We recycle the air all the time to help keep the temperature stable and cool.

The new Acropolis Museum in Athens
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Excavation site at the new Acropolis Museum in Athens
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Drawing of the new Acropolis Museum in Athens
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How eco-friendly and sustainable is the building?
Museums are never your perfect, sustainable buildings as there are always difficult and special conditions in the brief for preserving the exhibits. Nevertheless the architects can always help as much as possible towards sustainability through design, and that is exactly what we did by recycling the air. We filter it, cool it and recycle it, so we use the least air conditioning possible. The floor itself is marble, so it is also very cool naturally.

The project is very well known, of course, because of the Acropolis, but it is also one of the few projects built by an international architect in Greece. How do you feel about building in Athens?
I don’t think much about being an international architect in Athens per se, but being able to build the closest new building next to the Parthenon, of course is terribly important to me! You have to be very humble and very arrogant at the same time to go through with something like that. This is one of the masterpieces, probably the masterpiece, of ancient architecture, and building next to it, establishing a dialogue with it is very important.
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Even though it has concrete structure, the glass makes it a very discreet building. Was that you intention?
Yes, that is exactly what I wanted. And the skylights – you hardly see them. Everything was planned to be as minimal as possible.

The building reminded me of Greek modernist architecture, like the Karantinos-designed Aristotle University buildings, and Aris Konstantinides’ work. Was the design influenced by particular architectural styles or philosophy?
When you decide to search for clarity, for simplicity and put the emphasis on the purity of materials, like I did here, inevitably you will touch upon some other sensibilities that dealt with the same issues.

And there are moments in 20th-century architecture that have done this. Of course they did it slightly differently, for example the slight shift of the upper floor; nobody in the 1970s would have done that. But the minimalism of it, yes, it happened. And I don’t have a problem with that – we don’t live in a vacuum, buildings and styles evolve over centuries, so I am quite happy with it. It means the building is connected with the history, it has evolved in the same way as the Parthenon evolved from a generation of temples before.

The interior of the museum
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Do you feel your architecture, the way you treat buildings, is changing a lot from one project to the next?
Yes and no. It is not about style. But conceptually, there is a very strong coherence in the way I approach the projects. I will always say that the most important thing is the idea. The building itself is just the translation of the concept. So was La Villette, so was a major auditorium I did in France, buildings I did in the US etc.

I always use the materials rather than the forms in order to give expression to a building. I always say ‘Architecture is the “materialisation” of a concept’. It is always very much about a logic, as well as the simplicity and the clarity of the expression. So if La Villette and this building have something in common, it is the clarity of the concept.

It is never about fancy shapes, and there is a reason for that. In a way this case is the opposite of Bilbao. Bilbao was a city that didn’t have much of a presence, and for its art museum there were no sculptures to start with. While here, with the Parthenon next door, you build in a relationship with what is already here. You react in different ways for different situations, and it is always a case of translating an idea. That is how I see every one of my projects.

The interior of the museum
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Exhibition hall at the museum
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And the question on everyone’s lips; what is your position on the return of the Parthenon marbles?
You would rightly assume that I do support their return. In fact I am absolutely convinced that the marbles will come back. Of course they will. Now that the building is finished and everybody will be able to see the quality of light that you get here, and the way they will be displayed here compared to the way they are displayed in the British Museum, their return will make sense straight away.” Wallpaper
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Popularity: 4% [?]

from Archinect

“Built on many layers of past empires and having shed glorious names like Byzantium, Constantinople and Stambuli, Istanbul is a much contested territory at the moment by foreign and domestic investors and by the international architects playing the we-know-how card.

The city’s regain of rock star status is on the charts everywhere. The original junction of the civilizations still performs that great act.

Istanbul’s architectural pedigree is impressive, you can study centuries old masterpieces still in use, have a cup of tea in the same coffee house where Corbu drew sketches for his Journey to the East and trace hillside homes by Bruno Taut, Ernst Egli and others. There are many Turkish modern buildings from the Republic’s early years after the tired Ottoman Empire. Those were the days, the second quarter of twentieth century, when the idealist young architects of Turkey produced works worthy of their modernist mentors’ praises and confident of their own identity.

Then, something drastic happened in 60’s. Coupled or tripled with political unrest, democratic regression, economy without ethics, cities and buildings without architects became the norm.

Architects and planners simply did not disappear; they have just become puppets in the hands of speculative builders who did not know what a plan meant and why there should be architects designing buildings. These instant entrepreneurs caused a lot of damage that most Turkish cities will never recover from.

Although, with its largely infected fabric, Istanbul is not beyond the reach of urban solutions within its physically and economically dilapidated sections, and against its dubious land transactions.

These days, many foreign architects are visiting the city, giving lectures and offering solutions. Bold plans pitched to the mayors and high-level politicians, distant friendships made and large districts of the city are eyed, often in the name of unfair gentrification schemes called, ‘Urban Transformation Projects.’

Market researchers and PR people from the Gulf Region, Western Europe and United States based large firms are busy to get contracts signed for their developer clients. Their architects are also busy finding local offices to carry on their projects designed in their home offices elsewhere. They want a building in this highly symbolic place that spans between the continents and joins them via the monumental handshake of two Istanbuls, one from the East and one from the West. Civilizations will have to brace each other over Bosporus before they fly off to Baku, Almaty and thereoff to build the future cities.

In Istanbul, the task is mainly a repair job, but a very delicate one.

Lesser known to most outsiders, this fascinating metropolis is also a place of beehive like activity for the domestic talent. A place for a young group of Turkish architects who are mainly surviving through national competitions, designing for emerging new communities, businesses and institutions. They want to shake things up, establish their territory, build various scale buildings compatable with their foreign counterparts, and perhaps start to export their talents in all directions from their strategic location.

This article started out as a rather personal research to find out what was going on in Turkey via Istanbul and its architects point of view. I was trying to get a certain cross section of younger generation of Turkish architects, who were mostly educated in Turkey and ask them about their work, challenges and daily grunge. It quickly developed into a multiple long distance short interviews with the help of Emine Merdim-Yılmaz, editor in chief of Arkitera, I was able to construct my own very first ‘five architects’ curatorial article, to say the least…

Some readers will be surprised with the familiarity of the issues these architects are dealing with, and if you are slightly familiar with the chaotic context where they are executing their work, you would appreciate their resilience, quest for quality and fighting spirit.

The unchecked obtuse growth, many irreversible urban design and architectural blunders committed on daily basis in their vicinity, these Young Turks have to wear their battle gears on all phases of their work and year around with no rest on sight…

They are political, active, business savvy, determined and restless. We have few things to learn from them.

I asked similar and sometimes the same questions to the architects, and when I understood the context of their practice better, the preciousness of their work became all the more apparent.

They say, as an architect you’ll get better as you get older, but you will be doing your most important and difficult work during the youth of your professional life.

- Orhan Ayyüce, Senior Editor, Archinect

With special thanks to Emine Merdim-Yılmaz, Editor in Chief, Arkitera, all the architects and their staff who participated in these interviews.
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DB ARCHITECTURE
Bünyamin Derman / Dilek Topuz Derman
ww.dbmimarlik.com.tr

Bünyamin Derman, photo courtesy of Arkitera
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Orhan Ayyüce- How do you describe your involvement with architectural competitions and your way of winning them. What it takes to win a competition?

Bünyamin Derman/Dilek Topuz Derman- Competition is a widely used tool for acquiring new business all over the world. It is the key to both improve and create awareness of oneself as a young architect. From this perspective, it is surely not a coincidence that our career started with competitions. National and international competitions serve as platforms to compete with highly experienced architects. Everybody competes to win of course but there is no clear-cut formula for it. If you had done your homework, have an original idea and have expressed yourself articulately, then an experienced selection committee would not be indifferent to your work. And, the journey is as important as the destination you arrive at in the end.

OA- How do you feel about doing highly complex and large project like airports early in your carrier?

BD/DTD- Dalaman Airport is special both as a project and as a practice without a doubt. This project is a milestone of our career in terms of organization, coordination, fieldwork, and client relationships. And, the high standards we have achieved with it are to last. We can clearly express with contentment that we continue to make large scale projects with great quality.

Dalaman Airport, Bünyamin Derman with Emre Arolat Architects
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Dalaman Airport, Bünyamin Derman with Emre Arolat Architects
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OA- How do you describe the transformation of the architectural scene in Turkey?

BD/DTD- With the globalization of markets, Turkey has become an attractive market for investors. Although this mobility seems attractive because of the variety and number of projects, competition metrics have changed. Foreign investors are bringing banks, supply chains, and architects with them. This, by weakening the competitive position of the local firms, has forced them to re-organize to do business with global standards. In other words, if you want to exist and manifest yourself with quality work, you’d better be good at what you do. And, that is what we are trying to do.

OA- Do you actively seek work abroad?

BD/DTD- Naturally, we do not border ourselves with national projects. Our international presence best manifests itself with the awards we have got for several international competitions we had attended. In addition to that we have international proposals, projects and consultancy work we are executing for the time being.”

Read the Full Interviews here
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Popularity: 3% [?]

SPIEGEL ONLINE

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas talks about new trends in architecture and urban development, the end of the European city, the rise of Dubai, Russia and China, the obsession with XXXL and the difference between the people who design buildings for a living and “star architects.”

Rem Koolhaas's CCTV Tower in Beijing: "It looks different from every angle."

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SPIEGEL: Mr. Koolhaas, you are designing buildings in Europe, the United States, the Persian Gulf and China. From which part of the world do you expect to see the strongest impulses for architecture and urban development emerging in the future?

Koolhaas: We have to draw some distinctions here. As far as the experience of building goes, the strongest impulse will undoubtedly come from China and the Middle East, and probably from India, as well. Things get more complex when it comes to thinking. The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models. There are many young, good architects in China. The unanswered question is whether our cooperation, this internationalization, will result in a common language of architecture, whether we will speak two different languages or whether there will be a mixture of the two.

SPIEGEL: At a recent talk in Dubai, you showed two slides. The first image was of a series of iconic skyscrapers that you, Zaha Hadid and other star architects designed. The second was of a collection of high-rise buildings designed by unknown architects. The images were surprisingly similar.

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas: "I have a very hard time with the expression 'star architect'."

Koolhaas: I have a very hard time with the expression “star architect.” It gives the impression of referring to people with no heart, egomaniacs who are constantly doing their thing, completely divorced from any context.

I believe that this is a grotesque insult to members of a profession who — to the extent that I know my colleagues — go to great lengths to find the right thing, the appropriate thing, for each individual case.

At the same time we are, of course, driven by the market — and by developers who try to pin us down to certain forms. I have spent a lot of time thinking about the best way for us to escape this being pinned down to the purely formal. That’s why I decided to simply demonstrate it:

There is, in fact, no great difference between the buildings by “star architects” and those designed by others.

SPIEGEL: When you work on large projects, how much time do you have to engage with a place, a specific context? In Dubai, you recently designed, in the space of only one year, a city for 1.5 million people, known as Waterfront City.

A Koolhaas design: An external view of the Koolhaas-designed Dutch Embassy in Berlin's Mitte district.

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Koolhaas: There is less time available for research, so that a tendency toward imitation develops. One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity. That’s one effect of speed. Another one is the now universal demand for everything to be “sustainable.” We have been interested in this idea since the 1960s, so in that respect we feel vindicated. But now sustainability is such a political category that it’s getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament. Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.

An overhanging form: An exposed conference room stetches out of the facade of the Dutch Embassy in Berlin.

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SPIEGEL: You apparently don’t like the concept of sustainability.
Koolhaas: Because it’s become an empty formula, and because, for that reason, it’s getting harder and harder to think about ecology without becoming ironic. On the other hand, there is of course a benefit to the label of sustainability being so popular today. We have long been trying to build in such a way that we can manage without air-conditioning as much as possible, by avoiding unnecessary exposure to direct sunlight and by creating a mass that provides shade. There was hardly any interest in this in the past, whereas today customers pay for it.

Koolhaas has helped to further innovate downtown Seattle with his design for the main library.

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SPIEGEL: Your Waterfront City in Dubai is also supposed to be sustainable. What exactly do you want to achieve with this project?

Koolhaas: My goal is to establish a section of the city in Dubai that is a true metropolis. That includes, most of all, a true public space — not the caricature of a public space, meaning shopping malls. I am very grateful to the government in Dubai for the fact that we will have a court there, hospitals and the terminus stations for two subway lines. In other words, this space will have a recognizable identity: ingredients of what characterizes Dubai, but also a real urban life …

"Our attention shifts to the interior": Koolhaas's "Educatorium" building in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

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SPIEGEL: … which is still lacking?

Koolhaas: It isn’t lacking, but it is confused. We have a neighborhood there called Deira, which is completely urban. It’s unbelievably dense, mixed, exciting and beautiful — the type of beauty that will probably need our protection soon. In fact we, as city planners, will have to spend more time in the future thinking about how to plan and preserve at the same time.

SPIEGEL: In other words, the organic European city that we know could soon be a historical memory, a world cultural site?

Koolhaas: Exactly. Though we don’t have to bid farewell to the European city — it’s still there. But it simply happens to have served long enough as a standard, as the only model. This is, in a sense, the tragedy of the last 20 years. Because it is so dominant as a standard, because it is so obsessed with contemporary architecture, everything else comes across as negative. We are against China, and we are against Dubai, because all of this isn’t European. Perhaps this also describes one of Europe’s problems, in a broader sense: We are so strongly influenced by our model that we have trouble thinking in terms of other worlds.

"Bigness is getting more important": The Casa da Musica in Porto, Portugal

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SPIEGEL: Critics of development on the Gulf say it’s “all Disneyland.”

Koolhaas: In truth, the constant return of this Disney fatwa says more about the stagnation of the West’s critical imagination than about the cities on the Gulf. What our office is building is the subject of controversy everywhere, but I have noticed that people who actually live in China or on the Gulf are usually open to our ideas. They happen to be out in the field, and when you’re in the field you have a different perspective.

Architect Koolhaas and partner Shohei Shigematsu display a mode of the New Jersey City Museum.

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The original Koolhaas design for a planned Science Center in Hamburg, Germany's Hafencity, the site of massive urban redevelopment in parts of the old port that are no longer being used.

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Part 2: Biggest, not Tallest, s the Superlative of the Day

SPIEGEL: Can the development that is going up in Dubai be compared with the “Science Center” you designed in Hamburg, a spectacular ring of stacked containers?

Koolhaas: What is comparable is the fact that, in both cases, we are dealing with large projects driven by real estate developers, that is, with a very abstract substance. As a result, people often fail to recognize the differences between such projects. But the real differences lie in the conditions in Hamburg and Dubai, the political environment, the freedom and the amount of latitude an architect is given. This, in turn, highlights a characteristic of contemporary building: In essence, we are trying to pour the same materials everywhere into molds shaped by local circumstances.

The current Koolhaas design for the Science Center.

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SPIEGEL: You complain that modern architecture subjugates itself to the primacy of the iconic, making it arbitrary. On the other hand, you yourself have created a few of the most memorable icons around, especially the building for the Chinese television network CCTV in Beijing.

Koolhaas: I am a critical spirit and an architect at the same time, and I do not feel obligated to constantly validate my own theories in my specific work. There are contradictions, and the possibilities we have at our disposal today provoke such contradictions. Nevertheless, we try to build structures with unstable identities — that is, buildings with depth. Take the CCTV complex, for example. Now that it’s almost complete, the way it functions becomes clear. It looks different from every angle, no matter where you stand. Foreground and background are constantly shifting. We didn’t create a single identity, but 400 identities. That was what we wanted: To create ambiguity and complexity, so as to escape the constraints of the explicit.
SPIEGEL: Does that mean that the icons of the 20th century, skyscrapers, sheer vertical structures, are on their way out?

Koolhaas: There were many typologies of building in the early 20th century. Today we have essentially only two of them: the house and the tower, and nothing in between. I see few indications that this is changing. In fact, we are experiencing a veritable apotheosis of the tower in Russia and China. But perhaps some typologies only experience their mystification when they are in fact already dead.

A prestigious building that has already become an icon: The CCTV tower in Beijing being erected now was designed by Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

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SPIEGEL: How do you feel about the towers that are competing for the title of the world’s tallest building? Do you like any of them?

Koolhaas: I think it’s ridiculous. Objectively speaking, I even like a few of them — the Burj Dubai, for example, simply because it looks so ludicrous, a building that is much taller than anything else that ever existed. I cannot completely resist this temptation, but from an intellectual standpoint I’m certainly capable of rejecting this race.

SPIEGEL: What comes after the skyscraper?

Koolhaas: Height is becoming less and less of a factor, while size — “bigness” — is getting more important. In the Middle Ages, a large building had about 200 square meters (2,152 square feet) of space, by the Renaissance it might have been 10,000 (107,600 square feet), and in the 19th century it was 40,000 (430,400 square feet). Today we build complexes of 500,000 square meters (5.4 million square feet). The change in quantity has consequences. One of them is that we are dealing with multifunctional buildings, because a building of that size can no longer be filled with a single function.

The CCTV tower has already changed Beijing's skyline.

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SPIEGEL: So that we have, in the case of the Burj Dubai, 50 floors of offices, 50 floors of hotel rooms and 50 floors of apartments.

Koolhaas: Another consequence is that our attention shifts to the interior, because the bigger a building the less contact it has with the outside world. But we are now dealing with different zones in the interior of such complexes, zones that are occupied at completely different speeds, have a completely different metabolism, are constantly in motion, are being renovated, repairs or altered to perform a new purpose.

SPIEGEL: A few years ago you were in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, and you returned with a message of humility: Architects, allow things to take their natural course and adjust to reality!

Koolhaas: The first time I went to Lagos, I encountered a completely dysfunctional city that forced its 10 million inhabitants to find ways to survive. To me it seemed like a process of sheer self-organization — a term that was in vogue at the time. Meanwhile, I have studied the history of that city at length, and it has become clear to me that this self-organization does in fact take place within the framework of a structure created by a series of modern thinkers, architects and urban planners.

SPIEGEL: You coined the term “junk space” in Lagos. What does this mean in Europe?

Koolhaas: The expression describes the effect commerce has on architecture, how it affects the beauty, authenticity and acceptance of a building. The irony is that in the West, of all places, an overemphasis of the economic forces us into permanent chaos. In the past, an airport could be proud of the fact that its paths, from the airport entrance to the gates, were short and direct. Nowadays the large numbers of shopping areas have turned airports into labyrinths. In other words, starting at the paradigm of clarity, it has taken us only 20 years to end up in a paradigm of chaos.

SPIEGEL: Can architecture and urban development do anything to counteract the forces you describe — the omnipotence of commerce, the atomization of society?

Koolhaas: When we were planning the Universal Studios headquarters in Hollywood, a problem we had was that the company’s individual components are scattered across a large area — so we designed the building as a sort of machine, which brings the components together again. And now we have done something similar with the CCTV building. It includes something we call a “Visitors’ Loop,” a common space where people who would normally work away in disparate offices are likely to run into each other.

SPIEGEL: In doing so, are you taking up a concept, in a modern way, that American architect Louis Sullivan defined with the phrase “form follows function?”

Koolhaas: Some of our buildings fulfill this basic concept completely. Ironically, this functionalist idea is so forgotten, so unknown today that it seems completely new once again. Modernity is ultimately shaped by the idea of enlightenment, of progress. As unsteady as these concepts may seem to us today, it would be absurd to abandon them, because it hasn’t been until today that we, as Europeans, are in a position to share them with the world. This, in turn, is what makes up the credibility of European architecture in an age of globalization: That we are able to execute our formulas in a less formulaic way than others, and that we can pay closer attention to the circumstances under which other people live.

Interview conducted by Stephan Burgdorff and Bernhard Zand.

SOURCE: SPIEGEL ONLINE

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ARUNA TV: Interview with Rainer Pirker; hierarchical design procedure for a “responsible architecture”
from ARUNA

Rainer Pirker is an Austrian based but internationally focused successful architect; from his very first projects (apartment building Ulus,Istanbul) to the very last (specially HEAVEN’S SEAL CULTURE CLUB in China) his architecture has got a very futuristic taste and an independent identity and it is easy to recognize a fascinating way of delivering a top-quality design trend to the architectural creation precedure. [...] Read

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This is an interview with Yves Lion,  the winner of the Grand Prix d’ Urbanisme 2007 in France. The interview is done by Pierre Valet (in 6 parts) ,

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