Danish architect (b.1974)
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An almost invisible building is... a bunker museum on the west coast of Denmark. It's... a giant nature reserve... The only exception is this old German bunker... from the Second World War, a , a gun was delivered from in Germany and was supposed to be installed on September 9, 1945... and next to it inside the dunes, we were asked to make a museum telling the story... {B]ecause it's an entirely listed landscape, our proposal became to make these... precise incisions and almost imagine the opposite of the bunker. If the bunker is a heavy artifact in the dunes, the museum this... light absence as you slice through the sand, the sand becomes concrete and you have this square, entirely transparent, bringing daylight deep into this... underground museum. You descend into this narrative of the Second World War, the occupation of Denmark, using only materials that are already found in the bunker, so the concrete, the raw iron, the raw wood solving all of the... technical installations for the museography in the tectonics of the concrete work so that all technique: all sprinkling, all lighting, all hanging is done within the tectonics of the formwork. Daylight being sucked in so that even though you are underground it feels... light and airy, almost the opposite of the bunker... [F]rom here an umbilical cord takes you deep into a bunker where you can... explore what's left as this... giant artifact from the Second World War. So you can say, almost like a disappearing act, and the discretion becomes... the most characteristic of what makes the building stand out and... also makes it disappear.
He came to us because he wanted to move his restaurant... to... Christiania, this kind of hippie commune in Copenhagen. It's part of the old fortification... a historical landmark... The hippies invaded in 1969 and never left. You can buy mild drugs openly... The main part of the building is an old... mine storage. ...We thought the city was going to give us a medal for trying to make it nice, but the city had this attitude that as long as it was only deteriorating organically, everything was fine... [A]s soon as we started trying to repair it, everything was incredibly restricted.
We designed and built MÉCA, la Maison de l'économie créative de Aquitaine. It's a... regional art foundation, and a library and...performance center... on the waterfront of in ... next to the first bridge designed and built by . ...As you walk along the Garonne river the museum lifts you up, allow you to pass through and continue your journey... The theater and the library become the pillars that carry the art museum. ...It creates this urban room ...shaded from the Bordeaux sun... gently lifts the public up through the building and out. It creates... effortless seating in the shade of the building overlooking the river. ...[J]ust by opening the facade a tiny bit ...all the programs that need daylight are visible from the outside. ...All the finishes ...almost like Le Corbusien ...raw and simple material. ...[Y]ou enter ...a little storytelling pit ...It's really like a warehouse for the arts. ...As you ascend up, the theater with the skylit stage, so for rehearsals they have daylight, and finally the art space on the roof and the beautiful view of the city. ...[A]lmost like an extension of the industrial neighborhood behind, bringing the city and its life all the way down to waterfront.
This is only a fragment of the plan for the planet that we've done as an in-house research project... to answer some of our own questions... [W]e don't have any jurisdiction over Earth, so no one asked us to do this. So what's the point? ...[D]oing the plan for the planet has given us an insight and a clarity... and we started aligning the projects... with the principles of the plan... [P]roject by project we're beginning to give form to a future that is more aligned with the principles...
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If you look at the different renewables, they've all gone down [in cost], especially solar; massively over that last half decade, except hyro, which has gone up... Hydropower currently provides only 3% of our power. It's believed that there's a bigger potential, but... not enough to provide the entire earth, but 71 of the countries on earth could... be delivering European living standard with the amount of hydroelectricity they have available. ...The biggest [35 TW-h/yr] hydro-station in the world, Churchill Falls in Canada... You could provide the same amount of energy with solar, with a much smaller area [102 km<sup>2</sup> vs. 7,000 km<sup>2</sup>].
[E]scalating in scale and impact, one project is... for a new baseball stadium for the Oakland A's. ...[S]tadia ...these ...massive venues in a giant sea of parking that are only active a few days a year, baseball more than any other sport, roughly a hundred in a year... {W]e thought what if this new stadium could... be... the cultural foundation for the city? What if we could bring the ball park back into the park? ...[B]aseball started in parks and... at some point a guy got the idea to build a fence around the park and charge [for] tickets. So we thought, what if we could... bring the park back, so instead of this... enclosed stadium, what if the main concourse was... Main Street? ...[B]ecause baseball is an asymmetrical sport with the outfield, what if the entire stadium could open up to the city and the water and the views? ...[I]magine as the roof dips down it... becomes... Oakland equivalent of the , a public park that is part of the experience of the game, but 250 days of the year it's... a park for the citizens... [I]magine that 365 days a year this is part of the enjoyable space of this new neighborhood. ...[N]ormally the seats that are the furthest away from the game would be the lousiest. Her they have this amazing experience of... being a part of the park... so... that a hundred days a year they shut down access to the park, like if you have a concert in Central Park, and it becomes part of the spectator experience. All the restaurants and cafes open up to the park. ...[T]he other days they open up to the park so you can... have a coffee... So you have this... connection from the inside to the out. Above... the running track on game day is part of the circulation, and on a non-game day it's part of the experience of living in Oakland. The same for the pinic lawn... [T[he stadium doesn't become this... massive... empty white elephant, a kind of void in the city, it... becomes a... bringer of life and energy into a new neighborhood... [B]ecause of the... asymmetry in extreme you have this... incredible view out over the port towards San Francisco... For the facade we wanted to spend as little money for the enclosure as possible... [W]e need to provide some shelter from the wind, so we came up with this idea of this... louvered structure... facing the predominant direction of the wind... {W]here we have the concessions... the circulation, we need to provide wind protection so it... becomes this series of scarfs wrapped around the building... providing only the necessary protection... [E]ven if you were only trying to make this... skeletal non-building it ends up having... elegant expression. ...[W]hen you arrive, you... walk over the edge of the stadium and onto the arms of the field. To provide access and... minimize... parking, because it's part of an urban neighborhood, we can share the parking. But also we have the BART... only... a mile away, but you have to cross a 12 lane highway, and a freight train, so the simplest way of connecting is by putting a single mast... We can put a gondola that takes you straight from the BART, across both highway and train tracks, lands you on , and... you walk... across the perimeter park and into the game.
[Y]ou have different kinds of es, 4 of them affected by human activity, and of the 4... carbon dioxide and methane... nirous oxide loop and... F-gases... [I]f you have 610 gigatons of carbon in our vegetation, you have a million times more in the sediments, and that's... what we're releasing by burning fossil fuels. So you have two carbon dioxide loops, one takes millions of years as volcanic activity, but then becomes sequestered in rocks and sand and it's then... sedimented on the ocean floors and it's pushed back through tectonic movement into magma... [T]hen you have a more annual loop, which is... living beings absorbing <chem>CO2</chem> and then... releasing it through respiration, decomposition and... human emissions... [C]urrently we are releasing our <chem>CO2</chem> emissions with 4 billion tons per year.
In Amsterdam we... opened the Slicehouse. ...We put a floating solar farm in the water... There's a public promenade where people can overlook... Amsterdam. It's... completely framed by . ...[W]e lift up the courtyard so you can sail into the city block. The local kids can swim. You can dock a boat. It becomes... a... fusion between the public realm, the port, and the private. The facade is made out of maritime aluminum... so the facade continues into the water. ...[T]o let in sunlight some of the apartments become houses with gardens, and you can walk... up to the public promenade... [T]he building... becomes an extension of the city landscape of Amsterdam. It's... piled on energy piles extracting heat and cold from the port... to heat and cool the building.
It's not enough to provide 153,000 [TW-h] because we're going to be 10 billion people and everybody will eventually have the of Singapore... currently the highest living standard. ...[W]e need to have 750,000 [TW-h]. ...[A]t current technology for solar, we could provide ...that with [7.5 million km<sup>2</sup> compared to 510 million km<sup>2</sup> earth's total surface] or with... [20 million km<sup>2</sup>] of windmill parks or... [322,000 km<sup>2</sup> expanded to 76 million km<sup>2</sup>] of real estate for nuclear... because of the plume exposure pathway emergency planning zone... hydroelectricity... [108 million km<sup>2</sup>] We don't have enough hydroelecticity, or biomass [224 million km<sup>2</sup>].
[A] decade ago I got invited to make a proposal for a building on the waterfront of , and we took that as an opportunity to move to New York, and open our studio there. ...[W]e thought we should make a courtyard building. All buildings in are courtyards... a little oasis in the middle of the city. It's communal, so it's shared by... all 700 apartments... The court-scraper... the height of a skyscraper to the northeast and... the height of a handrail in the southwest. So everybody who lives around the courtyard has views of the sun setting over the Hudson river... almost like bringing the communal qualities of a Copenhagen courtyard with the... verticality and density of an American skyscraper.