Bjarke Ingels (Part 1)

Bjarke Ingels is one of the world’s leading architects as the founder and creative director of renowned architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Recognized for his innovative approach to sustainable and futuristic design, Ingels has led transformative projects worldwide, including the Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art in China and groundbreaking urban plans like The Dryline in New York. A partner in multiple ventures, he co-founded Nabr, a consumer-first housing company, and collaborated with Lonestar Data Holdings to create the Freedom Payload—a solar-powered, 3D-printed data center designed to store data on the Moon. Named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2016, Ingels is renowned for pushing the boundaries of architecture to address global challenges, blending art, technology, and practicality to shape the future of urban living and sustainable development. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www.athleticnicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Vivo Barefoot http://vivobarefoot.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA25' ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  Architecture is the art and science of creating the framework for the life that we want to live. And I think a beautiful way to understand design and architecture is the Danish word, the original Danish word for design is "formgiving", which literally means "form giving", because to design something is to give form to that which has not yet been given form. In other words, to give form to the future, because when you are designing a space or a building or an object,

• 1:08Speaker 00

  you're giving form to the world, like at least a corner of the world that you would like to find yourself living in, in the future. And I think once you start thinking about that, then design is liberated from the association with, you know, style, fashion, and it becomes much more about the fundamentals of what kind of a life is it we want to live? And how do we accommodate it? How do we give it form? How do we create the framework around it?

• 1:40Rick Rubin?

  Interesting in your definition, it doesn't really include the building part of it. It's more the imagination of what it could be.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, but of course, like at the end of the day, architecture is a discipline incredibly sort of bounded by the parameters of reality, including gravity and, you know, regulation and budget, just to name a few. So in that sense, of course, to get from...

• 2:11Speaker 00

  From fiction to fact, to turn your vision into reality, you have to have an understanding and even an appreciation and a and a love for the parameters that that end up constituting your your problems as well as your possibilities, right? So you can say like the fabric of reality are the ingredients that you have to work with. But it's important that

• 2:39Speaker 00

  that ultimately

• 2:42Speaker 00

  the tectonics of building the building is really the the tool with which you end up creating the the world that you want to live in. Like there was a moment, for instance, like in the sixties and seventies, where architecture devolved into what was called in Denmark crane track modernism. And you know these housing projects, you see them in the peripheries of all cities in the world. These kind of slabs of apartment blocks that are distributed with a certain distance. And all the emphasis was put into the logistics of putting these concrete elements together in the most efficient way possible.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  But there was no thought put into the life that was going to be lived there afterwards. It was almost like this almost like an Excel sheet of so and so many bedrooms and toilets with so and so many square feet per unit. So the the process of building became the primary. And the result was afterwards, we were left with neighborhoods and cities that that we didn't want to live in, and many of them have been demolished like a few decades later.

• 3:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  So it's true in that sense. The primary question is what kind of a what kind of a life do I want to live and what kind of world would I like to live that life in? And then after that comes the entire effort of getting there.

• 4:06Rick Rubin?

  Where does beauty come into the picture?

• 4:10Speaker 00

  I think, once you start asking yourself, what kind of a life do I want to live? I think beauty is probably gonna be a major part of that. And I think, I think that the thing about beauty is that it is something that makes you look again. Or like, it draws you in, it opens your, your eyes and ears to, to sense, because there's something for you that nourishes you. And I think in that sense, the art that interests me

• 4:41Speaker 00

  often is the art that expands my perception of the world. It can be a piece of music that somehow makes me notice the potential harmony in sounds that I might normally have disregarded as noise, or photography, or cinema, that, that makes me aware of situations in things that might be very everyday, but by somehow directing my attention towards the way the light falls on something, or like, you suddenly see something meaningful in the mediocre, or you see something poetic in, in the practical. And I think similarly, in, in architecture, you could say that architecture is, is also a form of practical poetry,

• 5:26Speaker 00

  that you have to organize a lot of practicalities of everyday life. You know, where you go to work, where you, where you park your car, where you, where you come home, where you spend the evening, where you, the kitchen, you know. Like, so you have to orchestrate all of these practicalities, but in a way that becomes more than the sum of the parts. And within that, all these practicalities, there is the possibility of poetry, to resolve what, what has to be resolved in the most beautiful way possible.

• 5:56Rick Rubin?

  Do you always start with the practicalities in consideration? Or do you start with anything's possible and then decide what is actually possible?

• 6:09Speaker 00

  I think each project has a completely unique potential that you somehow have to uncover. And therefore, in architecture, there's always some kind of ulterior motive. There's always someone who has a need, like they need a place to live or they need a place to work or they need a place to play music or perform theater. And therefore, they have a set of requirements that need to be met. And those requirements is the whole reason why they're calling upon someone to make them a building. So you need to somehow understand that and fully understand it

• 6:50Speaker 00

  and maybe even help them refine their request. Because there's also a tendency to, like, everybody knows what a house is. So therefore, you might just describe the last house you saw that you liked and say, this is what I want. But it might not actually be what you want. You just know that this is a house that works. So therefore, like, just to help, almost like interrogate a little bit, what exactly are you looking for and how is your life? And what do you and your family like to do? And like, you know, so to try to find ways to even refine the ask. Then secondly, the building is going to go into a place.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  And that place has a character. It maybe it has a topography. It has an orientation where the sun rises and the sun sets. It has a climate that you need to, you know, shelter or shade against. So all of these specifics, and there's definitely a budget and there's definitely some regulations. There's maybe some local expertise that would be smart to take advantage of. And there's, and there might be other things that would make sense normally, but here they would be either expensive or unpractical. So I would say when we start a project, we're spending quite a bit of time

• 8:13Speaker 00

  educating ourselves in the specifics of this place, this client, what it is that they do. And from that, from asking these questions.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Things might pop up. If anyone has seen The Wire or any kind of crime show, when they try to sort of unravel a case, they typically make this board where they take, you know, all the victims, all the suspects and their suspected relationships and the different locations where things happened. And they kind of map it out in a way that makes it possible to see all the ingredients at a glance. And by somehow standing for hours in front of this, of this wall where all the constituent parts,

• 9:07Speaker 00

  they may allow themselves to see a pattern or relationships that wouldn't reveal themselves if you just went through a kind of linear process, like first we solve the program and then we solve the regulations and then we solve and then we sort of, finally we add a layer of design. Or we start with an idea out of the blue and then we try to jam the program into that idea. But somehow by having everything available at a glance, at the same time, you allow your brain to notice possibilities. And then out of those possibilities, you start putting forward like actual ideas.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  And an idea might stem from something very practical. It might stem from something purely imaginative. It might be something in the surroundings that informed it. Or just like an idea you've always had, that you always dreamed about. And maybe this could be the time you could get that idea out. And you start trying to combine these things. And that's when it becomes almost like an evolutionary process. I think Charles Darwin is one of the most brilliant minds of the recent centuries. Not just because he managed to formulate a very beautiful and incredibly simple recipe of how all of the wonders of the biosphere have evolved through sex and selection,

• 10:36Speaker 00

  adaptation and selection. But also because his. His theory of evolution through adaptation, through access and selection, actually not only explains the biosphere, it also can be a way to evolve ideas within a design studio. So what we start doing is that we start making specific sketches, often in the form of a physical model, and we start trying to insert these sketches, these little physical models, into the context of where they want to sit. And we start looking at it. And we always work in a team. So someone might have come up with an idea. We insert it and we all look at it.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  And maybe someone misunderstands the idea or maybe someone sees something else in the idea, turns it upside down. Because it's always physical. It's always manifested. I like to say that we don't like to discuss things that are not present in the room, that you can't see or touch. But once it's present in the room, we want to discuss anything. And once it's there, it becomes available to the collective imagination and scrutiny and ingenuity of the whole team. And like that, almost like an evolutionary process, once something has come into fruition, maybe two ideas are very promising. Maybe they can be combined. Maybe they can have various kinds of offspring

• 12:04Speaker 00

  that combine aspects of both ideas into a new idea. And gradually, you almost follow different trajectories. And slowly but surely, you start sort of building convictions and maybe certain assumptions are then proven wrong. And other assumptions turn out to have more promise than imagined. And gradually, you arrive somewhere.

• 12:31Rick Rubin?

  Really interesting. Tell me about a team. Are the members of the team experts at different things?

• 12:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, I mean, in general, in our studio, I mean, I work with seven hundred different people. Most of them are architects. But even within, within the people that are architects, people have different strengths. Maybe someone has a very visual strength, maybe someone has an incredible deep technical knowledge of how to put things together. But we also, in our team, have landscape designers, engineers, architects and product designers. Because somehow, like, to, to go beyond the conventions or the status quo, you need to not only have creative ideas, you also need to have deep technical knowledge, to know how to qualify an idea, or to even sometimes go to the root of a problem and find new solutions.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  So in that sense, a team typically consists of a bunch of designers and architects, but that have access to some of the more technical skills, like, like the engineers. And then I would say also, as architects, we always work for someone who does something other than what we do. So if we're doing a neuroscience center, there's a bunch of scientists, technicians, doctors, that, that we have access to, and then we can ask a lot of questions. And so in that sense, you can say the beginning of a process is this crash course, where we try to educate ourselves in what are the critical criteria for this particular project.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  And I think in that sense, as architects, we have almost like an investigative journalist. Journalists often write about things they don't have prior knowledge about, but they're good at asking questions. And I would say similarly to journalism, to make a story living and relevant to the reader, you need to approach a problem from many different angles, many different perspectives. Because from each perspective, you might uncover something new. And we try to do the same thing, we try to... See how many ways is there to approach this particular project? Looking for a new angle.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  Because once you've found a new perspective that reveals something that is normally not addressed or normally not accommodated, that becomes a possibility to do things differently. And in doing so differently, the cascading consequences from altering just one thing might actually reveal a world of possibility. So you're not imposing the different perspective. You simply ask so many questions that you uncover a real reason why things need to be done differently. And by having that necessity, the necessity becomes the mother of invention.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  And you end up coming up with new ideas, new forms, maybe new materials, because you have to, not just because you insisted on it.

• 15:44Rick Rubin?

  You're not doing something new for the sake of being new. You're doing something new to solve a particular problem that changes the way we look at this thing that we're building.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  Exactly. The building might end up looking different because it performs differently.

• 16:02Rick Rubin?

  What would be the questions that would help you design a house for someone? They wouldn't know to tell you.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  The single-family home is almost like the smallest molecule of architecture, right? And everybody can relate to it. So we designed a house in Mexico for a couple. And we tried to sort of understand what their passions and requirements were. And they were both like very much into personal training, fitness regimen. And they wanted an Olympic pool, so 50 meters long, more than 150 feet. And the site was a rectangle overlooking this ravine. And you couldn't fit. A fifty meter long pool, except on the diagonal.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  So, as a result, we ended up saying, okay, but if we really take this requirement, and it would be amazing for them, because they love to swim. Seriously, then imagine this rectangular side was divided into a triangle, so that one side of the triangle was the house, and the other side was the garden, and the pool was the moat between the house and the garden. And as a result, the house corrects from the triangular shape at the ground to a rectangle at the top. So it almost starts overhanging the pool like a cliff.

• 17:23Rick Rubin?

  So the foundation is triangular.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  And the roof becomes a rectangle, exactly.

• 17:28Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  So the house ends up having this rather sculptural form that overlooks the pool and the garden, but then eventually ends up like overhanging and partially covering the pool. So the very sculptural shape that the house ended up having was trying to resolve the kind of impossibility of the unreasonable demands to put a fifty meter pool that could only fit on the diagonal. So it's one of these things where it's almost like an obstacle.

• 17:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Why was the rectangle at the top important, instead of it either being a triangular building or a pyramid-shaped building?

• 18:03Speaker 00

  No, in this particular case, they wanted the top to be almost like a their master bedroom, almost like a little penthouse.

• 18:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  So whereas the floors that divide further down had more like fluid uses.

• 18:17Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  So it's almost like combining the eccentricity of the large triangle at the bottom with a kind of more like perfect square at the penthouse. But like, and you know, like another example was a house for a car collector. So he had like his children, him and his wife. The house was located on the top of a hill, but to be able to build there, they had promised the city that they would keep the surroundings open, also because it used to be the snow tubing hill for the neighborhood. And to not take that away from the neighborhood, they said, okay, we maintain the grounds around public, but we put our house on the top.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  So the house became a kind of linear house wrapped like a scarf around the top of the hill. So almost like a ribbon, a loop in plan. The surroundings are actually enclosed because you have people walking in the park around it. But as it starts rising, the bedrooms start looking out over the edge of the house in front. And the kitchen, living, dining at the top overhangs. So you actually have sheltered. You have views to the surroundings, but it's sheltered because the entire outside of the house is actually enclosed. And then the bottom part of the house, almost imagine if the house is a linear building.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  Where you have kitchen, living in one end, then a series of bedrooms and then like an office. And then the garage for all the cars, a third, a third, a third. And then you wrap it into a loop so that the bottom is all the cars. Then the bedrooms rise up and then you have the kitchen, living at the top.

• 20:00Rick Rubin?

  Is the whole house a ramp?

• 20:01Speaker 00

  So then the whole house is actually a circular ramp, exactly.

• 20:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, so like the Guggenheim Museum, let's say.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, like one, one kind of loop of the Guggenheim Museum, exactly. So each bedroom in itself, of course, has a flat floor. But the, but the corridor that connects it is gently sloping up.

• 20:17Rick Rubin?

  Sounds great.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  And, and then when he goes to bed at night, he overlooks the garden that slopes down towards the garage. Then you see the garage has windows facing the garden. And he can like, almost like say goodnight to his cars and turn off the lights in the garage before he goes to bed. So, so again, like this idea of taking what's unique about this. In this case, it was the passion of the client. That we said, rather than giving you the typical house that doesn't maybe have room for your passion. Why don't we make room for your passion? And then all the other functions, of course, we're going to solve them and we're going to make them, you know, beautiful and elegant.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  But, but by prioritizing your passion out of proportion, the whole house becomes different for it. It acquires a personality and, and a beauty that is a different kind of striking beauty. Like sometimes the most beautiful people are the ones that actually have striking features that maybe. A, a very characteristic nose or, uh, you know, it's like something that. That stands out, that you wouldn't normally describe as the conventional definition of beauty.

• 21:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  But because it comes with such rich character, it elevates everything.

• 21:32Rick Rubin?

  When you described beauty earlier, you talked about it drawing you in and wanting to know more. I'm wondering if not understanding something about what you're seeing is part of what makes something beautiful.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's an interesting thing because like, I think in architecture, architecture is similar to maybe film in the sense that architecture costs a lot of money. Like, and if you're doing someone's house, they're probably going to spend a a good part of their net worth on on building this house. So and if you're, you know, making a a city block or a high-rise, it's probably going to cost more than what it costs to make the last Avatar movie. So in that sense, architecture costs a lot of resources. So before an architectural idea gets a chance at speaking for itself,

• 22:33Speaker 00

  the architect needs to arrive at solutions and convince the client, but also the city architect, and also the builders, and also maybe the banks. So like, maybe even hundreds of people need to approve and agree. A big part of architecture is to explain the reasoning why once the building is built. All of those layers of reasoning, all of those little ideas and those elements of problem solving don't really have to

• 23:07Speaker 00

  be explained. Of course, if you're curious, you can poke at things and you can ask questions if you have access to the architect.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  Like sometimes like if you if you go to a building, you can feel the carelessness or the care.

• 23:22Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  That was invested into it. You can feel if decisions were taken thoughtfully and with heart and passion, or if they were just like ticking boxes. You can also feel if people were trying to create a picture, maybe a picture they'd seen somewhere else, or if if the expression ended up emanating from a deeper reason for being.

• 23:49Rick Rubin?

  Like a unified vision.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. And I think in that sense, and it's a bit back to your question about it. Part of beauty is that there's more than what you can immediately understand.

• 23:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  I think often what really makes you attracted to something is that you can sense that there's a lot going on, but you don't know exactly what it is.

• 24:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  But you definitely know that that you're.

• 24:10Rick Rubin?

  There's a mystery aspect to it.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And maybe there's an underlying will that has a certain confidence and a certain nature that is evident. Not not that you know exactly what it is and why, but you you sense that it's there. What we strive towards in our work is that it comes across with an air of effortlessness. And sometimes it's very laborious to arrive at effortlessness. Because if something feels laborious, like, uh, like, you know, full of, you know, na, na, na, na. It's exhausting and maybe clumsy and like over elaborated then. But when when it feels effortless, it has just this kind of air that you can feel like, ah, this was done and all.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  Maybe you didn't even do anything here like. And and to get to that point where every decision almost takes itself.

• 25:02Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Where the the overall idea extends into every decision, then then it becomes. Everything functions in concert and everything becomes more than the sum of the parts. It takes a lot of care to arrive at effortlessness.

• 25:18Rick Rubin?

  But the beauty, what you're describing is, once you get to that point, the decisions become much easier to make because there aren't many choices. The palette is established and now you're just filling in the blanks from the formula that you've created.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  So you can say like that the process I was describing before of this kind of evolutionary process, a thousand things are in play and part of that journey, you might add certain things or new discoveries, but mostly what you start is that you say like, we're not gonna go down this evolutionary trajectory or like this branch. It wasn't that.

• 25:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  We're taking this other branch.

• 25:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  And then, once you arrive, like almost imagining a genealogical tree, an evolutionary tree, once you arrive at the end and there is a kind of eureka moment, where everything clicks.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  And that moment is this moment of great relief and clarity and it could be that two hours before, you had reached a moment of frustration and maybe thinking, okay, maybe I lost it.

• 26:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  We're not gonna get there.

• 26:27Rick Rubin?

  Maybe it's not solvable.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, no, exactly.

• 26:30Rick Rubin?

  And it's funny, when you get to those states and sometimes it clicks into place and the shift might be tiny.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  No, exactly, exactly. No, exactly.

• 26:40Rick Rubin?

  One percent.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  And but it.

• 26:42Rick Rubin?

  But all of a sudden, it all makes sense.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  The whole thing clicks.

• 26:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  And now you know exactly what is this project all about.

• 26:48Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  And then from now on, not only do you, but everybody on the team, because like you say, every time you meet, you reformulate what is this project all about. And once you arrive to this, you formulate, like you said, the formula.

• 27:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  This is what this project is all about and now we can all just start running with it. So sometimes you can actually get stuck on.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  On details or and sometimes it's simply because you forgot to go back a few steps and say, what is it that this project is really all about? And if we look at it in that light, suddenly this choice becomes quite simple. So in that sense, you can say, in the beginning, you open up and you branch out and it becomes more and more complex. When you reach the eureka moment, you don't have to question all these other things anymore. And now you can just start refining it and resolving it based on the formula that you've that you formulated uniquely for this project.

• 27:46Rick Rubin?

  You've had the eureka moment, you go down to the end of the process, you have plans down to every detail. From there until the time it's built, how much might it change?

• 28:00Speaker 00

  So one thing that's I think is very important is that each time you change medium. And you know, one medium could be projection drawings like plants. And another one can be the projection drawings of the sections because you see the the vertical relationships rather than the horizontal ones. There's the physical model, there's the 3D model that you can move around and you can.

• 28:21Rick Rubin?

  Do you do all of those typically?

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, we do all of them. I mean, personally, at this point, I benefit from from having a lot of various.

• 28:31Rick Rubin?

  For every project, you'll see every different

• 28:34Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 28:35Rick Rubin?

  Version of a model.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  Exactly, because each medium reveals different things. Because if you if you only do 3D models, like in the computer, you can map on materials, you have daylight settings and you can move around in it visually, you can even put on goggles. But it is a non-tactile environment. It's purely visual. And you can fool yourself a lot. It's also harder to really understand the scale because you're just a an eyeball, you know, floating around. So the tactility of a physical model, and you can also try to use materials that are close to, but you can also just make a cardboard or foam model. But the physicality of it has a bandwidth that is very different from the abstraction of the 3D.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  And also, you have to build it physically. So you start understanding.

• 29:26Rick Rubin?

  You learn through building.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Exactly. At the end of the day, you have to build a building with materials that have to come together.

• 29:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  Then you start making maybe a mock-up where you do like a corner of the building.

• 29:37Rick Rubin?

  In scale.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  In in full scale with the real materials.

• 29:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  To because it might have looked great on on the renderings, but but now that you are now that you're here, it clearly isn't that good or.

• 29:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  Something was was different. So in that sense, I think as human beings, we tend to overestimate our capacity to imagine. And I think human imagination is incredible, but the bandwidth of each new perspective speaks to you in a new way. You learn new things that then can uncover problems you hadn't foreseen. But also those problems can can reveal whole new ideas that you had never thought of. Because I think part of arriving at something that is both rich and kind of holistic and consistent

• 30:25Speaker 00

  is that you have a strong, simple idea that is somehow the the fantasy you want to turn into reality. And once that simple idea starts butting up against all the parameters of reality, including all the good reasons why it shouldn't be like that. And there would be good reasons to not do it like that. And there's often good reasons why no one has done that before. By remaining faithful to the simplicity of what you're trying to do, you might force some of the constituent parts to really have to stretch themselves

• 31:06Speaker 00

  to make the simplicity of the big idea possible and and to preserve it and strengthen it. And therefore, you might actually end up with all of these little surprises that are not there as added complications. No, they're they're there as necessary solutions to make this simple new idea possible. Like in a way, the surprises, the sculptural qualities, the the interesting new things are not there as piling on more, but they're they're there to really make that simple idea possible in all of all of its simplicity that.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Strangely, by trying to keep it very simple and faithful to the Jureka idea, you end up discovering all kinds of cool things that are necessary bridges between the ordinary and the extraordinary that you're trying to do. And then again, it takes some of the burden off the designer and the architect that you don't have to keep coming up with more and more things. You just need to resolve what you already set out to do. And that's kind of the already super interesting.

• 32:23Rick Rubin?

  Do the best solutions tend to be simple?

• 32:26Speaker 00

  Actually, I would say what we strive towards is actually complexity. But complexity not as complication,

• 32:37Speaker 00

  but in computer code, they have a beautiful definition of complexity that I subscribe to, which is complexity is the capacity to transmit the maximum amount of information with the minimum amount of data.

• 32:56Speaker 00

  The equivalent in poetry would be to to transmit the maximum amount of expression or meaning with a minimum amount of words. In music, the maximum amount of feeling with the minimum amount of keystrokes. And I think in architecture, the maximum amount of experience with the minimum amount of moves. So in that sense, you can say that definition of complexity is not one of reduction, but it's almost you try to maximize how much you can say with how few words, how much you can enable with how few bricks. Complexity is a higher form of simplicity,

• 33:41Speaker 00

  one where the simplicity actually does as much as possible. It's almost like condensing impact into an economy of means. It's also funny, like, I like to remind people that both the word ecology and economy come from the Greek word orikas, ancient Greek, which means house. Because economy is the management of the household. Ecology is the study of where you live. So in that sense...

• 34:15Speaker 00

  This idea of economy of means that

• 34:19Speaker 00

  you choose your means wisely to maximize the possibility for the unfolding of human life with just the amount of effort necessary to make that happen.

• 34:33Rick Rubin?

  What are some of your favorite buildings in the world?

• 34:37Speaker 00

  One, one simple one, and I think that's because I think fundamentally in architect, you can also very often get bogged down by practicality. And I think

• 34:48Speaker 00

  when you're designing a building,

• 34:52Speaker 00

  you have the possibility to make the world more like your dreams. And you should take that possibility serious. Like anyway, if we're not trying to realize someone's dream, then then maybe we're wasting our time.

• 35:05Rick Rubin?

  Why bother?

• 35:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And in that sense, a building like the Sydney Opera, I think is

• 35:12Speaker 00

  is very special

• 35:15Speaker 00

  for a lot of reasons. It has become the signifier of an entire continent. It is definitely a very kind of modern, almost like futuristic building, even though it's from the sixties.

• 35:28Rick Rubin?

  It looks like shells, yes, series of shells.

• 35:31Speaker 00

  It's this kind of series of white ceramic shells in the port of Sydney, an opera house and a Philharmonic concert hall resting on a giant accessible podium of steps. And it evokes pagodas, it evokes Gothic arches, it evokes all of these kind of

• 35:53Speaker 00

  timeless ancient forms without replicating any of them. It's a public building for, you could say, in some people's minds, an elitist institution, Philharmonic music and opera. A lot of people might not feel welcome, but the whole building is a giant landscape of steps that are accessible to the public upon which these two pavilions rest. And the back of house is somehow hidden underneath those steps, and the steps themselves is a public space, a destination in the port of Sydney. So. It's a public building that has a generousness and a sense of invitation that goes way beyond ticket holders. And it produced

• 36:38Speaker 00

  an iconicity capable of signifying Australia to the rest of the world, to the extent where it might be one of the most recognized buildings in the world. But at the same time, it feels strangely familiar in many different parts of the world. So I think it it does a lot of what I believe that that architecture can do, that it's it's inviting, it's unifying, it's inclusive, but it's also outstanding and confident and striking at the same time.

• 37:09Rick Rubin?

  It also feels like a a modern church in a way. It has church-like proportions.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And then it is saturated, once you step one step closer, it's saturated with these very rational tectonic choices where it's made out of pre-tensioned concrete elements, like notoriously, the they were having a hard time solving how to build it, also because Johan Utzen, the architect, he had a profound belief that in what he called the additive. It's almost like this kind of emergent idea that he said it, you should always be able to make almost any expression out of a series of mass-produced modular elements. So he wanted to make it out of modules instead of just making like super complex formwork and casting the whole thing.

• 37:58Rick Rubin?

  Like the Eames House.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  Exactly, modular, but you can say like in the Eames House, a very beautiful house, and I think also like when you see some of Utzen's houses at that scale, they are very rational and orthogonal. But when you see the the City Opera, it has all these organic forms. And it was hard to solve it. And then one day he was sitting, it's one of these mythological stories, he was sitting with an orange and he was peeling the orange and he was beginning to cut pieces out of the orange peel and they became these shells. And he just realized if you can take it from the surface of a sphere, you can break it down into modules, repeated modules. And it ended up being made out of these post-tensioned concrete modules that come together to form the arches.

• 38:42Rick Rubin?

  So all of the geometry of the shapes is the same. It's always a piece of a sphere.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  It's always the piece of the surface of a sphere. And it's just different fragments of the sphere that are put together to form these these arches. So that's why it also ends up having

• 38:57Speaker 00

  This kind of feeling that there's an underlying logic, because there actually is.

• 39:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  And when you look inside the shelf, you can see all of these like circular ornaments and these kind of little steps. And that's actually the tectonics of where you had to, once you put all the elements together. You had to run steel cables together and then you had to pull to create the post tension by pulling it together. They become one element structurally. But that produced these, what looks like ornaments, but it's actually the tectonics of mounting the mechanisms to pull these cables. So somehow, every single practicality, every single technicality ends up being resolved in a way that expresses itself as some kind of enigmatic decorative beauty.

• 39:42Rick Rubin?

  And then obviously, things like the Disney Hall in Los Angeles would never exist without the Sydney Opera House first.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  No, no, exactly. Like the, the whole idea that a, a building could be so abstractly expressive.

• 39:55Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 39:55Speaker 00

  Was incredibly unique at the time. Then there's like different buildings that have, that have contributed different things. And another sort of interesting building is, um, is the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe. From the World Expo in Barcelona, I think it was like nineteen twenty-nine, like sort of late twenties. At a time where everything looked like, you know, like old kind of mansions, little palaces, like. He makes a, a, a building purely out of rectangles, no ornaments. But then very thoughtfully sourced pieces of stone. There's like an onyx, there's a green marble, there's travertine.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  And by sourcing the stone and bookending the organic patterns of the stone, you end up with another kind of ornament. But it's the, the natural ornament of sedimentation or marbling. And you just take architecture out of this kind of decorative arts. And more into a much more pure orchestration of space. And again, like this idea of expanding your perception of the world, suddenly you, you see the, the stone as a, almost like a God's own art piece in its own right.

• 41:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  Like, look at this, wow.

• 41:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  So, so that's another, almost like completely opposite example of how a single piece of architecture can.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  Open new doors, because I think ultimately that's what we all dream about. I think artists, architects, part of what you dream about is that

• 41:30Speaker 00

  the field of architecture is a it's a collective project that everybody is constantly trying to formulate and reformulate. And of course, it's constantly injected with invitation for innovation because life evolves, the way we live, the way we work, the way we is constantly evolving, and each time life evolves, the way we used to accommodate it may not fit any longer, and if you are attentive, open your eyes and your ears to observe how people live and how life evolves, you might find real reasons to do things differently, and once you really pinpoint an unaccommodated new way of doing things,

• 42:14Speaker 00

  and you get to sort of create the framework for that, then then you might actually open a door that unleashes a whole new avenue of exploration. And that that kind of innovation can can come from way of living or working or but it can also come from new technical possibilities, like a lot of Le Corbusier's work, like this significant Swiss architect, one of the grandfathers of modernism, together with Mies van der Rohe, was because he he just embraced the potential of steel reinforced concrete. So now that you could make long spans with steel reinforced concrete, you could make the facade free, you could make the plan free, like suddenly he identified all these freedoms

• 42:59Speaker 00

  that came with these new technological possibilities, and because of those freedoms, we didn't have to repeat.

• 43:06Rick Rubin?

  What year was this?

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Like, there was a big, big movement, again, like around the same time as the Mies van der Rohe pavilion, like in the beginning of the of the 20th centuries, the the twenties, the thirties, the forties, and and he practiced all the way up until the late sixties, but back then this new technology provided new freedoms.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  And in a way, it took a lot of will to say, "We don't have to keep doing this bizarre notion of architecture underwear. Rooms are always defined by walls because we needed the walls to carry the beams. Now you could have thin columns and a steel slab and the plant could be completely free. So why don't we take advantage of that? You know, we don't need vertical windows because we don't need pieces of wall in between. We can have a horizontal window that spans all across the entire facade. Why don't we see what that that gives us? Like, so, so sometimes this idea of taking away the rules

• 44:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  that used to make sense.

• 44:12Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  But now there's a new freedom. Why don't we see what happens if we accept these rules? We don't need those rules anymore. We can actually try something new.

• 44:24Rick Rubin?

  Is there ever a case where it goes in the other direction? Where we realize there's an old way of doing something that actually has value? And we bring back some old techniques and old ideas?

• 44:36Speaker 00

  All the time, because like it is a constant vibration in a way, an oscillation between taking out nonsense that no longer makes any sense. And also like rediscovering, hey, we took out a little bit too much.

• 44:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:55Speaker 00

  And I would say like a classic example that everybody will recognize is again back to these housing projects, because, you know, there was this understanding that it's really about the house. You want sunlight in the morning, you want sunlight in the evening, you want cross ventilations. You make apartments that face east and west and you stack them high in a linear and, you know, 12, 18 floors, whatever. And then you put the next one so far away that you get sunlight all the way down to the ground for the first ones. You end up with this kind of dominoes that just... A repeated like a rubber stamp across a site plan. But it doesn't say anything about life between the buildings.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  It doesn't say anything about the diversity of of the household. It doesn't say anything about programmatic diversity that you want a living street with different kind of shops and cafes and and also doesn't say anything about shelter from the wind or it's only about sunlight and views. So you end up with these kind of dead monopole critic neighborhoods that become sort of unsafe or boring.

• 46:01Rick Rubin?

  It sounds like designing a prison.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's because it's prioritizing a single parameter at the expense of all other parameters. And you can say maybe at the time we weren't so aware of the social fabric of the city. And at the time, we were aware that some of the medieval towns, the apartments got very dark and maybe humid in the beginning of the 20th century. There was also like different kinds of epidemics, maybe tuberculosis, maybe sort of other kinds of diseases that that we were beginning to feel that these kind of dark, humid, dense inner cities were not very good for life. And we thought like we need daylight and air and view. But then suddenly we started realizing, but the charm of the meandering narrow streets

• 46:43Speaker 00

  and the the social fabric of walking through that street and you know, the the green grocer and you know, the the butcher and you know. So each time we make these experiments, we maybe over emphasize a new parameter. It sometimes happens at the expense of some of the other parameters. And and that's why, again, this idea of complexity, that you want to find the simplest possible answer to the most complex possible question.

• 47:11Rick Rubin?

  Can you think of any of the projects that you've built that after they were built, you realized more about them once they existed?

• 47:24Speaker 00

  I mean, I have to say, like, first of all, you always learn a ton. That's also why we, uh, once we've built confidence about something, we start making bigger and bigger models. And I think, I mean, sometimes I sound like a broken record because it's really my job to remind the teams that even though we think we already know what we're doing, we should make an even bigger model now. Because it's gonna, yeah, but we already know it and also we don't have the time or money for it. But like, yeah, but we somehow have to do it. Because it's gonna reveal things that we can't see now. And, and once you start building, suddenly, um, a whole new experience. But like, but just like a very simple example is that we, we just finished our own, um,

• 48:08Speaker 00

  studio space in, on the tip of a pier in the port of Copenhagen. We came from a, a Korsberg factory where they used to make bottle caps. And suddenly we had to be on a small footprint, but on seven different levels. And we decided to build a building so that each floor is only half or two thirds. So it's always fully open to the floor above and the floor below. So you can move through the entire building. Actually, when you enter, you can sort of on a diagonal, you can see all the way up to the, up to the penthouse. And each floor is also connected to the outsides. So that there's always a terrace. And that terrace is always connected to the terrace above and the terrace below. So you can almost walk around the whole building on the outside and also bounce between the floors and the inside. So.

• 48:54Rick Rubin?

  So you can go from floor to floor, inside or outside?

• 48:57Speaker 00

  Exactly. So it's almost like undoing the vertical segregation that often comes with a, with a multi-story workspace. And, and as a result.

• 49:05Rick Rubin?

  Would you say it looks like a series of shoeboxes stacked up and twisted in different directions?

• 49:10Speaker 00

  Because then, then we designed it, like the last thing we did, like often when you have a floor plan.

• 49:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  Even if you have the whole floor plan, you put the core in the middle and the core is where you have the elevator, the stairs, the bathrooms, all the necessities. And you put them in the middle because maybe they don't need daylight. So then you can have like nice office space around it. But it means that even if you have the whole floor. You have to hunt, chase around the core like in a donut to find your colleagues, right? So in this case, we almost entirely eliminated the core and only we have a thick wall to the north, where the elevator and the last stair sits, together with the meeting rooms and everything. So it becomes very open. And then the last thing is that the facade is then made out of these giant walls

• 49:58Speaker 00

  that are, let's say, fourteen feet high and sixty feet long, where like a typical building would have like window wall, window wall, window wall. Here you have sixty feet of opening and sixty feet of wall. So you actually have great pin-up space, which architects like, and then you have panoramic views. And one of the things that we noticed when we started building the building is that as you move up through the building, these panoramic sixty-foot-wide, fourteen-foot-tall windows become like cinematic frames. And because we're at the tip of the pier in the middle of the city,

• 50:39Speaker 00

  one frame, you see only water. Especially when you're on a level higher looking side down, you see just the texture of the surface of the water. One frame, you see only sky. One frame, you look out of the port and you see only an array of windmills and the horizon. One frame, you see the inner city of Copenhagen. One frame, you see the historical warehouse across the street. One frame, you see only the container port. And at five o'clock, maybe in one frame, you see only the ferry boat that goes to Sweden. So the whole journey, the experience of being in the house is that even though it's one building, it's as if it's located on ten different locations in the city. Yeah.

• 51:23Speaker 00

  And each frame is so radically different.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Almost like a Gersky art piece of just looking at a different aspect of the world. Of course, now I I take incredible credit from it and I at least get a lot of pleasure out of it. But that we hadn't really uh

• 51:39Rick Rubin?

  Hadn't considered that.

• 51:40Speaker 00

  Understood that that was what what was gonna happen.

• 51:42Rick Rubin?

  That's so cool. What a great surprise.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  It becomes also because it's an architect's office and it becomes really a way of looking at the city. Moving through the building. So that's that's that's a total gift.

• 51:53Rick Rubin?

  Incredible. I love that story. I can't wait to see the building.

• 51:57Speaker 00

  No, no, you you must come. It's a gorgeous spot.

• 52:00Rick Rubin?

  How did you learn to be an architect?

• 52:03Speaker 00

  I ended up in architecture like by by accident.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  Since I was, you know, a little child, I was always very, very much into drawing. You know, when I was like five or six, I could draw with perspective that, you know, so I I I got a lot of positive feedback for my drawings and and it became a big part of my identity. So I I loved graphic novels and

• 52:29Speaker 00

  you know, I have two siblings. My big sister was a great musician and I had piano lessons for five years. It never really materialized into anything. And and my little brother was obsessed with maths and sports and games, which never really sort of interested me too much. So I had my space was was drawing. So I thought I was gonna be a cartoonist or a graphic novelist. But then after high school, there was no cartoon academy. And architecture was part of the art academy. The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. So they had painting, sculpture and architecture. So it felt like the closest thing I could find that had to do with drawings.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  And because education is free in Denmark, I always thought,

• 53:17Speaker 00

  you know, I might as well do it for a year or two. Because like I would say like until then, until eighteen, I had mostly drawn, you know, of course, like people and animals and vehicles in action. So I thought let's spend some years getting good at drawing the background, like the the buildings and the landscapes. And I realized I never thought much about buildings. And and the art academy was such a free school. It was such a liberal art school that there was hardly any curriculum. It was it was very practical, like studio. I was longing for like deeper meaning, maybe. So I ended up in the library, essentially just pulling books out of the shelves.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Trying to find something that spoke to me. And if I would find something that spoke to me, I would find more of that, the work of that architect. I would read interviews. Look for the footnotes in those interviews to see who was being referenced. And I started almost like reverse engineering a curriculum.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  So you could almost call it like serial monogamy, that I would fall in love with the work of an architect or an architect. I would

• 54:37Speaker 00

  dig as deep as I could within that oeuvre, that body of work. Until, I would say, almost like every time I would arrive at a point where there were certain fundamental assumptions. Or like you call it, you call it like axiomatic assumptions. That once you questioned those assumptions,

• 55:07Speaker 00

  it all a little bit fell apart. Because like most architects

• 55:13Speaker 00

  are somehow governed by a style. And most styles are somehow

• 55:23Speaker 00

  a list of things you cannot do and a list of things you have to do.

• 55:27Rick Rubin?

  Limited.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. A kind of straitjacket.

• 55:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 55:31Speaker 00

  And if you start questioning that straitjacket, then the whole thing falls apart because then it isn't much more than its consistency. And I would say gradually, but it took me on this kind of journey.

• 55:45Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember any of the architects from that journey that spoke to you at first?

• 55:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty random list, but like, like just as an example, like a Dutch architect that at some point spoke to me, a guy called Ben van Bergel and Caroline Boss, his wife was a philosopher. He had worked for a Sahar Hadid.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  And Santiago Calatrava in the past. So then, you know, I explored them. Then Saadid, of course, there was like some, some references to

• 56:24Speaker 00

  the suprematists, like various kinds of artists, but also references to, to some, some of the organic architects like Jorn Utzen, was always one of my favorites. Alba Alto was somehow one of his predecessors as well. And Saadid, apart from her references to, to some of these kind of organic masters, she had been part of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, together with Rem Koolhaas. And that's how I found Rem Koolhaas, who I then later went to, to work for. And by reading Rem Koolhaas's books, one of them being Delirious New York,

• 57:08Speaker 00

  I actually discovered Le Corbusier, because there's a chapter where Le Corbusier comes to New York. And also Salvador Dali, there's a chapter where Salvador Dali comes to New York. So I then ironically discovered Le Corbusier, one of the great masters of, of modernism, through the, the body of work of, of Rem Koolhaas. And I ended up discovering Dali, of course, I knew of, of his work, but like the, the theories of surrealism. So it was, it was like this kind of detective story or like a, a meandering kind of research, like almost like passing the baton on.

• 57:44Rick Rubin?

  And all self-directed?

• 57:46Speaker 00

  All, all self-directed, because I would say when I started at the Art Academy, I found the vacuum of teaching frustrating. In my fourth year, I went to study in Barcelona. And there I found much more input. But because we were like Erasmus students, we didn't have to like submit to the same regime. Because like my, because my fellow Spanish students were constantly working for the next exam. I, I never got any grades in my entire study. And I enjoyed so much of the input. And I would say in my fourth year, I was 22.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  It all somehow clicked.

• 58:30Speaker 00

  And when I then returned to the Art Academy afterwards, now I could really use that freedom, and I found it incredible.

• 58:39Rick Rubin?

  You got input at the right time. Just luckily, you had three years where you were self-directed, you were hungry for information, you were following leads, and then you went to Barcelona, then got taught more specifically. But because you already had this background, it was probably nice to get some structure on top of it.

• 59:00Speaker 00

  Exactly, and there was more like an overabundance of potential input that I was now, in a way, hungry for and ready to acquire, in a way. Then after that, me and four friends did an open competition while all in Barcelona, a German, a Swede, and three Danes. We did this kind of open competition. We got selected for the second stage. We got the equivalent of seventy thousand euros, which in nineteen ninety-six, ninety-seven in Barcelona was, like, I couldn't even count that much money. So we could sort of semi-drop out of school. We created our own studio down there, and we did the second stage,

• 59:44Speaker 00

  fought like maniacs between each other, and thankfully didn't win the second stage, because we would have been unprepared for it, and I would have gotten stuck in that setup. But in a way, I came back to the Art Academy with a maturity and an autonomy that I was ready to occupy the space of freedom that was there for me.

• 1:00:16Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about Rem Koolhaas. How did you come to work for him?

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  I would say, unlike all the other architects

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  that were somehow governed by...

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  The consistency and limitations of a style. What I found in R. Kohlhaas, he had a more journalistic approach to architecture. He's one of the best writers, I think, I've ever read. Delirious New York is an incredible book about about creativity, actually.

• 1:00:48Rick Rubin?

  What's the name of the book?

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  It's called Delirious New York. It's written in the late 70s, when the architecture was obsessed with semiotics and semantics. Post-modernism was very into signs and symbols and the neo-rationalists of Italy and Germany were into the archetypical building types as a counter reaction to modernism and the freedoms that came with modernism. And, you know, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown had written Learning from Las Vegas, talking about this kind of new

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  Las Vegas, the strip with big signs and big neon signs, but without the built mass of the historical city, more like parking lots and warehouses and casinos. And suddenly, R. Kohlhaas goes to New York, and no one was interested in New York at the time, and gets the idea to be the ghostwriter for New York. And the short idea is that in the beginning of the 20th century, you had all of these incredible intellectual movements, including surrealism in Europe. There was a surrealist manifesto by Henri Beton. And an ideology and a manifesto is a great statement of ideology

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  and conjecture without any evidence to back it up, because it's

• 1:02:14Rick Rubin?

  Theoretical.

• 1:02:14Speaker 00

  It's all kinds of ideas without evidence. And you're saying, at the same time, across the Atlantic, Manhattan was happening, this kind of explosion of skyscrapers and build density, elevators, steel structures, like soaring to the sky, a mountain of evidence without a single ideology.

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  Explaining it. So he said like a ghostwriter is like often celebrities are too narcissistic or too distracted to be able to write their own memoirs or to see any patterns in their trajectory. So the ghostwriter somehow helps them with that. And he said like, since no one wrote the manifesto for Manhattan, he would be the ghostwriter for Manhattan and write the manifesto for Manhattanism.

• 1:03:01Rick Rubin?

  Was he in love with Manhattan?

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's an absolute love letter to Manhattan.

• 1:03:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  An absolute love letter to an architecture that at that moment was not very appreciated. And it's somehow inspired by the by Dalí and the surrealists. They had a method called the paranoid critical, where you somehow use the crutches of, you know, actually, when you know some of these Salvador de Lee paintings, you see these kind of weird blobs that come out of the backs of people that are supported by these kind of Y-shaped crutches. The kind of amorphous paranoia sustained by the crutches of of criticality. That diagram is also the diagram of In situ cast concrete,

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  that you build a skeleton of wood and you pour an amorphous liquid into it. And and once it hardens, you remove all the wood and the the form stands, unsustained by the wooden skeleton. So in that sense, he was creating all of these like slightly far-fetched statements, but using Manhattan and the built substance of Manhattan as the evidence underpinning it. So somewhere between analysis, but almost like using analysis as a creative practice. Nonetheless, for me, it was like, I'd never thought about New York in this way.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  And I've never thought about the power of reason. As this kind of vehicle, not just to to pin yourself into a hole, but actually use reason and rigor as a way to free up possibilities and free up your thinking. And as such, you could really use this. And therefore, in the beginning, when I saw the work of Rem Koolhaas and his studio, a lot of it, I thought it was odd or awkward or not really beautiful or not really elegant. But the more I understood was that it was the fact that it was so liberated

• 1:05:08Speaker 00

  that was poking at me. And in a way, once you you yourself became free enough or strong enough to love it, it it was like the most refreshing and the most exciting and I and I simply had to go there and be part of this. So I I went on this pilgrimage on the second of January, right after New Year's Eve. I'd spent the whole Christmas revamping my portfolio to be the best that it could be in in my fourth year of of architecture and and managed to get past the receptionist and and get an interview and get an internship on that journey.

• 1:05:44Rick Rubin?

  Great. How was that experience?

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  No, it it was. It was one of the most educational experiences, like one of the things I have to say that I learned was that I found

• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  I realized how much I could actually work.

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  And I say this in the best possible way that

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  if you want to if you want to arrive at something fresh or something new, uh, you have to pour a lot of sweat equity into it. And I had no idea how much one could actually work. And I would say my first day at work, I left seventy two hours later.

• 1:06:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Speaker 00

  I I also arrived at the deadline of a big competition.

• 1:06:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  So and I got just sucked into that the submittal.

• 1:06:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  To know that you have that muscle.

• 1:06:32Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  Is incredible and and also to understand that to be able to do the things that you dream of, that's calling you.

• 1:06:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  It will require, not always, but in moments.

• 1:06:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Speaker 00

  An effort that is Olympian.

• 1:06:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's not a nine to five job.

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  And you just have to love that. Like it's part of the, if you, if you, if you want to arrive at things you love, you have to be able to invest that much into it when, when it needs to happen. That, that was like a great exercise. And then another thing was, I was expecting the studio and it was like a small studio when I started, maybe like forty, fifty people.

• 1:07:16Rick Rubin?

  How old was Rem at this time?

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  He would have been like mid fifties.

• 1:07:23Rick Rubin?

  Mid fifties and you were twenty two?

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  Uh, I was at this point twenty three.

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  The other thing that I was expecting, and in my mind, there was no other place. But I, I realized that a lot of the people that came there, they, they had worked for like Peter Eisenman or Richard Meyer, like all kinds of architects that I couldn't even fathom. So I was, I was expecting this kind of homogenous group of people, all thinking the same way. And I wanted to learn to think that way. But I realized that there was like absolutely no consensus. What there was, was this incredible amount of ambition and energy. And then Rem kind of, as the curator,

• 1:08:12Speaker 00

  steering between all of these diverse offerings towards something that ended up somehow being meaningful. And it, it kind of gave me that realization. I was already very interested in, in Darwin, but it was only later that I really understood how fundamental Charles Darwin is. That, that I think one of the givens

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  of the theory of evolution. Is that, and if you say like, what I found in OMA is that there was like, almost like a random source of output. And then it was like, by curating this abundance of output, that Rem would steer the trajectory of the design.

• 1:09:00Rick Rubin?

  So would he give a general program, a problem to solve, to everyone? And then everyone would throw ideas at him of ways of accomplishing that? Is that how it would work?

• 1:09:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, it would, it would almost be more like surgical or like acupuncture that we would start a project. I worked on the Seattle Public Library. I think one of, one of the great works of Rem and of OMA. We would do an abundance of, of research, produce an abundance of material. And then when presented that material, like Rem would like point at things. Of course, we would also suggest certain observations and he was like, not this one, not this one, like this is really interesting. Let's look more here. Let's, let's try to push more into this. And Seattle at the time was home to, of course, Microsoft, this new thing. We were, we were making a library in, in the late nineties, early, early 2000.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  And Amazon was this new company selling books, also out of Seattle. Boeing was there. So you had like technology, you had maybe the end of the library and you had Microsoft. Like, so he, he wanted like us to have an understanding of what, what do these new technologies mean? And they are from the same city as, as we are practicing. So he would point at things that had interest to him. And then slowly, out of that, ideas would evolve and he would, so, so you can say the eureka moment was rarely coming from him, but the identification that this is actually the eureka moment.

• 1:10:34Rick Rubin?

  He was the one who decided it was the eureka moment.

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  Exactly. Like really, it was the selection as an art of creation. And when you, when you think about Darwin.

• 1:10:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:45Speaker 00

  The creative moment. Is never with direction because it's either the random mixing of maternal and paternal DNA that produces various variations, various offspring, or random mutation that comes from virus or bad copying, right? So the creative movement never has direction, but it is once these offspring are unleashed into the wild that the selection criteria, which in this case would be predator-prey arms races or the ability to occupy an econiche or the ability to walk into a new econiche. So that in a way gives you this kind of realization

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  that it doesn't matter where the idea comes from. What matters is why you choose to pursue it. And as you choose to pursue it, you become more and more aware of its potential. You can say the first fish that stranded on land happened to have some kind of flippers that allowed it to sort of move itself around and maybe get back into the waters who could breathe again. But slowly by occupying this kind of in-between zone, natural selection started selecting for the fish that could stay longer and longer on land and eventually breathe. That like once you know where the product is going,

• 1:12:07Speaker 00

  you can start selecting with greater intention. So and therefore I think in my own case that the fact that I can work with 700 people without devolving into chaos is because I love it when I come with the brilliant idea. And thankfully, once in a while that happens and it's a great feeling. But it's not my job. My job is to make sure that when the brilliant idea presents itself, no matter who came with it.

• 1:12:39Rick Rubin?

  You say, "There it is."

• 1:12:40Speaker 00

  That's the one we're going to pursue?

• 1:12:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  No matter who came up with it.

• 1:12:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, because it doesn't matter. All that matters is that the best idea wins.

• 1:12:48Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:12:51Rick Rubin?

  Which also allows you to live with more humility, because you know it doesn't matter.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  Exactly, and also like, so once you can take that that kind of pride or ego out of the equation, then you can also collaborate.

• 1:13:08Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:13:08Speaker 00

  And also like, an architectural project will take five to 10 years to complete, maybe 15 in the case of the Zurich Airport. So if some person keeps talking about how they came up with this idea seven years ago, when they're like, "Well, fuck you", like, you know, like...

• 1:13:30Rick Rubin?

  It just doesn't mean anything.

• 1:13:31Speaker 00

  It doesn't mean anything, like, but what matters is that you can create, by everybody doing their part, the primordial soup from where the idea will emerge, right?

• 1:13:46Rick Rubin?

  How has your relationship to architecture changed over the course of your life?

• 1:13:52Speaker 00

  Of course, like, in the beginning, I didn't get it, and then by going through this kind of serial monogamy of falling in love with various architects, by being fully committed to many different approaches and like ultimately understanding their limitations, I finally arrived at some kind of certainty, a kind of youthful, pragmatic, utopian idealism of sorts. But I would say then, it goes through a kind of ebb and flow. Sometimes you have incredible direction.

• 1:14:37Speaker 00

  You've maybe created a little opening that has revealed an incredible territory to explore and inhabit. And then at some point, you may exhaust that. And there is a kind of dry period where you are somehow tired of what you've been pursuing. And then it takes a while. And and sometimes it really is that you then rediscover a body of work from the past. That you you might have really discarded in the past, but you now see potential in it.

• 1:15:13Rick Rubin?

  A body work of your own or of some?

• 1:15:15Speaker 00

  No, no, I know. It was actually like a

• 1:15:17Rick Rubin?

  Just found material?

• 1:15:18Speaker 00

  Just found material, like

• 1:15:19Rick Rubin?

  Ideas?

• 1:15:20Speaker 00

  Other architects, the ideas, the work of a lot. And I would normally say, and it sounds a bit cynical, but like, you know, you can never really steal from your contemporaries because that's like ripping them off. But if you steal from dead architects, you have historical awareness and you honor their legacy, right?

• 1:15:37Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:15:37Speaker 00

  So in that sense, there is this incredible material out there of the trajectory of certain architects from the past

• 1:15:51Speaker 00

  whose pursuit got stalled, either because they took another turn and they didn't follow this any further, or or they died and no one really picked it up. In that sense, your journey keeps allowing you to pursue trajectories that that you might have discarded.

• 1:16:10Rick Rubin?

  It's almost like you you go through new chapters, like you finish a chapter where you feel empty. And then you're replenished and find a new way in that's exciting.

• 1:16:23Speaker 00

  It's that you're satiated there, you exhausted this. And you might actually be able to return to to that place again, but

• 1:16:30Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:16:30Speaker 00

  impregnated by the the other things you you you found, right? I I think actually Bjarke, the singer, whose name I often use to explain how to say my own name. I I think she's actually amazing and she's been a great inspiration to me as as an architect because I think she's

• 1:16:47Speaker 00

  a person who is very left and right brain. She's incredibly good at talking about how she works. Even though she is like fearlessly creative and widely experimental, she's also very cognitive about what she's doing. And she said, when she did debut, And post. She had to make one of all of her favorite kinds of music. So those two albums are incredibly eclectic. But she almost needed to purge to get it out of her system. So you have like electronic music, you have a kind of a weird jazzy song, you have a kind of like musical show kind of thing, you have a very eclectic two albums that are beautiful and great.

• 1:17:29Speaker 00

  And they have a lot of Bjarke in them, but they're Bjarke plus this other thing. And then she felt finally ready to do Homogenic, where you only have beats and violins, nothing else. Like she could really do something that was 100% her own creation. And I think in a similar way, I needed to somehow get a few projects out of the way that in various ways were somehow launched by certain other things that were happening at the same time. And then, once you somehow get that out of your system, you also don't have to do everything with every project.

• 1:18:10Speaker 00

  You get a kind of calm that this project could be about only this. And there's a thousand other things that are super interesting.

• 1:18:19Rick Rubin?

  And when a project could be about only this, it could be that much better.

• 1:18:24Speaker 00

  Exactly, because you can really like explore everything in this particular space. And then the next project could be completely different. So in that sense, like, I definitely deliberately tried to renounce to the extent it's possible, because I'm not saying that we don't have or I don't have idiosyncrasies. There's certainly certain things that that call me more than others. But I do try that each project should have the freedom to find its own and be only about this one thing and a kind of consistent, consequent pursuit of that thing and not everything else.

• 1:19:01Rick Rubin?

  Would you say there's a spiritual dimension to your work?

• 1:19:09Speaker 00

  I think to the extent that

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  that I believe fundamentally, architecture is about allowing the maximum unfolding of of human life. It has elements of

• 1:19:23Speaker 00

  of invitation, the fact that we work with with material and light. It speaks to you through more channels. So it speaks to you with with another language than words. Something that invites your your eyes and your attention. The way it creates connections and possibilities, the way it hinders other connections and possibilities. I think it has a a major non

• 1:19:55Speaker 00

  linguistic impact on your lives. And I think it has the ability, like other other forms of art, to open your awareness and your perception of the world in ways that you wouldn't have had if you hadn't encountered this this piece of work. And it and it has the lasting impact that once your awareness has been awakened, you can now no longer look at the world without seeing and understanding this. So it it makes your world bigger.

• 1:20:26Speaker 00

  And then maybe finally, like I I heard a conversation between an Indian, I think, TV host and Sadhguru. And the TV host was somehow apologizing that he was neither spiritual nor religious. And then Sadhguru came with this interesting definition that he said, like, religion is when you are looking for answers and you're looking for an authority to be the answer. You're willing to embrace and accept the answers served to you. Spiritual is when you are seeking. So not not actually finding answers that can be the end of your search, but like the constant curiosity

• 1:21:11Speaker 00

  to keep seeking. And I think in that sense, architecture is somehow the material practice of seeking, to accept that life has not arrived to a final state. It is constantly evolving. And in that search, we have, as human beings, acquired the ability to manipulate matter, to manipulate our environment, to be part of that quest. And actually, an interesting thing, like back to Darwin, one thing I love to describe, because I think it's true. Life evolved

• 1:21:48Speaker 00

  by adapting to the surroundings. Until life, through the acquisition of tools and technology and architecture, acquired the ability to adapt the surroundings to life. So to say, in the beginning, we had to find a cave and inhabit that cave. But once we got the power to design our, like, to build our own cave, we didn't have to accept the cave that we found. We could ask ourselves, what kind of a cave would we like to live in? And what does that cave look like? Uh, we didn't have to climb a tree to escape the predators. We could design our own tree and we could ask ourselves, we had to ask ourselves, what kind of a tree would we like to live in?

• 1:22:33Speaker 00

  And in that sense, suddenly, architecture became the extension of the evolutionary trajectory, because life was no longer just shaped by its surroundings. Life acquired the power to shape

• 1:22:49Speaker 00

  its own surroundings to life.

• 1:22:51Rick Rubin?

  We became self-actualized through architecture.

• 1:22:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 1:22:56Rick Rubin?

  That's amazing.

• 1:22:58Rick Rubin?

  How do sound and color play into architecture?

• 1:23:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, if you start with color, quite often, we've had bans on color, understood as the application of pigment on top, right? So color often comes in the form of paint, and therefore, it's almost like a noise that wipes out all of the texture and natural color that comes from the actual material itself.

• 1:23:32Rick Rubin?

  It hides what it actually is.

• 1:23:36Speaker 00

  Exactly, the inherent or intrinsic color that a piece of wood has, or a piece of stone, or even a piece of cement. Like glass itself, actually, even clear glass comes with various shades, depending on the iron content in the glass, etc. So very often, we will have a fatwa against color, except the inherent color of the actual materials, because that's a deeper, truer color. But then, of course, like all dogmas, sometimes you have to question them. And I was like, I bought a summer house like a few years ago when my son was two and a half years old and I realized that's why people get summer houses,

• 1:24:18Speaker 00

  so they can unleash their offspring in the wild. And in this case, I found this very beautiful summer house from 1918, built by Swedish immigrant workers on the north coast of the island where Copenhagen is. So it has a thatched roof, and then these Swedish colors. And the Swedish traditional colors come from the copper ores and the iron ores. So it's an iron oxide yellow called phalo yellow. It's a copper byproduct called a phalo red. There's a kind of dark green. There's a kind of baby blue. But they're these traditional colors, and all the woodwork, my normal instinct would have been to reveal the veins of the wood and the different shades of the wood.

• 1:25:03Speaker 00

  But because it all came with this material palette, I suddenly found this license to then really embrace the color. And then, of course, I found ceramic light controls and switches from this Swedish factory. And suddenly, everything became about color. So like, I would say with any dogma, sometimes the opposite can also be true, and to run with that for a bit can also be an imitation. So sometimes, we really...

• 1:25:32Speaker 00

  Unleash the power of color. Also, sometimes when you have no budget. In some of our first projects, we were doing this very inexpensive housing. And for the corridors that gave access to the apartments, there was no money left. But we could specify the color of the paint and the color of the rubber floor. So there, we just said, okay, since color pigment is the only material we have, then let's really run with it. And that's why you can take a completely neutral, efficient, minimal corridor. And by making it bright red or like a rich green, it does something like the kind of surprise you get when the elevator opens.

• 1:26:16Speaker 00

  And suddenly, like you're surrounded by red and you go from this kind of sense of every day into some kind of sense of like a different setting or almost celebration. Like in cinema, like one way to create a setting or an emotional impact is actually when you do the color gradation. Not only do you try to achieve consistency between different shots, but you also create an atmosphere or a feel of the movie by grading the color. Like a classic scene, Peter Greenaway in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and His Lover. They're in the restaurant, she's wearing a red dress. It's like a colorful, warm restaurant interior. And then she walks through the door into the toilets.

• 1:27:00Speaker 00

  And everything is like bright white, bright white tiles, and her dress is now white. So he's kind of playing with this color as an active component of a scene. And I would say, in a similar way, you asked about color and sound. Just like our natural preference would be to play with the natural color of the material itself. The stone, the wood, the glass, the concrete. And really enhance and play with that color. I think the same is true for acoustics, actually, that The standout response in also like fortified through building code and regulation is to make the acoustics of every room as dead as possible.

• 1:27:44Speaker 00

  So just to absorb the shit out of a room to the point where everything sounds like a recording studio. And a recording studio, it might make sense to not have anything else come into the microphone than than the source. But I think, just like the space we're in now, has a certain reverberation.

• 1:28:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, liveliness.

• 1:28:15Speaker 00

  Exactly, it's not a dead space. And you know, it has some timber ceiling with a lot of like traditional ornaments that will definitely disperse the sound and probably absorb quite a bit of it. It has a terrazzo floor that has a more direct impact. And some surfaces were like single sheet paint glass where the the sound can also travel out. So you end up with an acoustic environment that is far from dead, but it's also not a bad acoustic environment. I definitely prefer to not regulate or absorb more sound than absolutely necessary. Even the fact that once you put a sofa and a chair and a few live bodies, they're gonna absorb some sound as well.

• 1:28:58Speaker 00

  So I think there's a tendency to make spaces acoustically more dead than they have to. And I think the typical example is the corporate office environment with a carpeted floor and a popcorn ceiling. And the soul just dies the second you step in there, not least because of the acoustics.

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.

• 1:29:36Speaker 03

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• 1:29:40Speaker 03

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• 1:30:23Speaker 03

  Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn.

• 1:30:44Speaker 03

  Walk me through some of your favorite projects from the beginning until now.

• 1:30:50Speaker 00

  Maybe one project that is very dear to me is a project called The Eight House or The Infinity Loop. But it's essentially like a generic city block. You know, it has some retail functions, a little bit of office, like a kindergarten, a café, and then it has like 500 homes.

• 1:31:11Speaker 03

  Apartments?

• 1:31:13Speaker 00

  350 apartments, and then we turned it into 150 townhouses. And basically, so we had like a generic rectangle, 1,000 feet long, at the widest 200 feet wide, and some building regulations of maximum heights, etc. But no context, because we were the first building in this new master plan. So there was not much to relate to apart from towards the south, a big open field in the outskirts of Copenhagen. Like beautiful field with cows walking and... And we thought like, let's, let's try to maximize the internal diversity of, of these generic program elements.

• 1:31:55Speaker 00

  So, of course, we put all of the commercial functions, the, the shops and offices on the lower levels. And because retail and commercial floor plates are deeper than residential floor plates, because they're less light sensitive. They were wider.

• 1:32:16Speaker 00

  Then on top of that, we then placed what we call townhouses, two-story, uh, row houses. Taking advantage of the difference in depth between the commercial floor plate and the residential floor plates. We could make little front gardens and a small path to get to it. On top of that, we, we put a layer of traditional apartments, slightly deeper with balconies. And then on top of that, by shifting another layer of townhouses a little bit towards the back, we could create two-story townhouses, again with a garden in front and a small path to get to them. And then simply by raising and lowering the different layers, we could dip down in some of the corners, the commercial floor plates to nothing.

• 1:33:02Speaker 00

  So you could walk up on that little path. In other places, we would raise it up. By these different layers that have different depths and different shifted in different directions, optimized towards views and, and, and sun. We created a man-made mountain path where you can walk along the townhouses from the ground floor to the penthouse and back down again. So you almost turn a city block into a mountain town. Where the kids that live there can, you know, if you live on the seventh and the fifth floor, you can walk out and, and, you know, take your tricycle down to your friend next door like you would in a, in a small-scale community. But inside a city block of five hundred apartments and townhouses.

• 1:33:46Rick Rubin?

  And is this walkway on the exterior or interior?

• 1:33:49Speaker 00

  It's, it's on the exterior. And it's connected to the ground on three corners. So you, you can literally walk and bicycle from the ground floor to the penthouse and back down again. So it somehow invited the small-town public life, communal life into the city block.

• 1:34:12Rick Rubin?

  Had that ever been done before?

• 1:34:15Speaker 00

  Not to this level of consistency, for sure. There's been some attempts to having, like Luc Coubert, she was talking about a horizontal street. But you could only really get to it by taking the elevator up to it. So therefore, and it was interior, not exterior. So it was never really part of the public realm in the same way. And we finished this in 2009, when we were two thirds into the project. The subprime economic collapse happened. And our client decided to finish the project, but we had to save as much money as we could. But because the architecture of the project was in the bones of it. We could only like dial down some of the finishes. So in the end, it's been finished with thin sheet aluminum and visible screws.

• 1:34:58Speaker 00

  But it doesn't matter because the power is in the social architecture. And as a result, it has become incredibly successful. You have families that have moved in there where, you know, a daughter and her husband and their children. And then her sister moved in and then their parents moved in. And then they had another child, so then they moved into another apartment in the same block. And it has given rise to all kinds of community activities. Because people walk by each other or bicycle by each other or take the baby stroller on a stroll and see each other. It has created a kind of social fabric that would be unachievable if the only place to meet is inside the elevator.

• 1:35:39Rick Rubin?

  How wide is that path that goes around the building?

• 1:35:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the path itself is maybe it's ten feet. It's exactly like a wide sidewalk. But then, of course, it's open to one side. And then you have like two big courtyards. It's so it's in the shape of a figure eight. And then you have like where the figure eight crosses itself. You have a kind of vertical spine of some of the communal functions, like a kitchen and a space where they do yoga. With this kind of bouncing stair that connects it all like. It looks a little bit like that scene from The Name of the Rose. Or at the secret library with all these kind of stairs going across a void. But just to say it's made with the most economic means possible. It's taking all the traditional ingredients of a city block.

• 1:36:27Speaker 00

  But putting them together in an unusual way, so you actually create something extraordinary out of the ordinary.

• 1:36:34Rick Rubin?

  Only by arrangement. The materials aren't unusual. The, the only thing about it is the...

• 1:36:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, the kind of configuration, if you like.

• 1:36:43Rick Rubin?

  Configuration.

• 1:36:44Speaker 00

  So in addition to this, this journey, so like the townhouses have the garden in front as a, as a kind of buffer. And then they have also views to the other side. And then you also have elevators and stairs on regular intervals. So you can also get to that path from the elevator and stair. But that, that's also how you get to the apartments. So it is literally just taking all the traditional ingredients of a, of a very large Copenhagen block, putting it together in such a way that it produces a completely different result. We, we've called it architectural alchemy or programmatic alchemy. That by taking traditional ingredients and mixing them in untraditional ways,

• 1:37:27Speaker 00

  you create, if not gold, then at least, you know, added value or...

• 1:37:31Rick Rubin?

  So is it still a one of one or have others even copied it?

• 1:37:36Speaker 00

  I mean, I, I think it has inspired a lot of, of different projects, but, um, but it's, it's, it's also a lot of work to do.

• 1:37:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Speaker 00

  But it has proven to be incredibly socially successful. Then, then I would say another project that I, that is quite dear to me is, um, because again, it, it is so blatant. It's a, it's a museum we created in a sculpture park in Norway. It just had its fifth anniversary the other day. And you have sculpture park on both sides of this beautiful river. And there's a historical pulp mill on the land. And we could place the museum anywhere we wanted, but it was suggested to place it next to the mill. But the mill itself, and especially the, the side of the, the mill that is like facing the, the river is so beautiful, but you can only see it from the river.

• 1:38:29Speaker 00

  And also, we didn't want this kind of dichotomy where you have the old and the new, like the good and the bad. So we, we tried to put the museum as far from the mill as we could by spanning over the river, looking back across the river at the mill. So the museum becomes the bridge that takes you from one side of the sculpture park across to the other side. It becomes part of the journey through the sculpture park.

• 1:38:53Rick Rubin?

  So would you say it's like a floating museum?

• 1:38:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's it's basically spanning over the river, like a like a beam.

• 1:39:01Rick Rubin?

  Does it have posts or just the two ends?

• 1:39:02Speaker 00

  It's resting on the two sides. It's a almost two hundred foot span.

• 1:39:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:07Speaker 00

  And it's a very small museum, so it has two main galleries, one which is a very tall gallery without any daylight as a requirement. And then another one, which is a more horizontal panoramic gallery that has the view across the river and daylight from the sides and and more modest ceiling height, but greater floor plan.

• 1:39:28Rick Rubin?

  Are they stacked or are they next to each other?

• 1:39:30Speaker 00

  It's basically one after the other.

• 1:39:33Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:39:34Speaker 00

  So the transition from one to the other is basically by rotating the space

• 1:39:39Rick Rubin?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:39:39Speaker 00

  from vertical to horizontal.

• 1:39:41Rick Rubin?

  Cool.

• 1:39:41Speaker 00

  And as it rotates, it also rips open a window that then closes when it becomes the roof, right?

• 1:39:49Speaker 00

  So it also looks like a giant sculpture.

• 1:39:54Speaker 00

  So you can say it is a museum and a bridge and a sculpture and a sculpture park.

• 1:40:00Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful.

• 1:40:01Speaker 00

  And again, it's on the outside, it's made with extruded aluminum profiles that you know from warehouses. And on the inside, it's it's made from two by fours, white painted Norwegian timber, two by fours. When you see it, you see curves and kind of warped shapes. But when you look closer, it's just that each straight member is gently shifted, creating this hyperbolic paraboloid or saddle shape to to apply a geometric term to it. So essentially, it's creating an extraordinary form out of ordinary elements.

• 1:40:44Rick Rubin?

  Tell me some of the stages you went through before you got to that.

• 1:40:47Speaker 00

  It was really like, we went on a, on the visit to the site.

• 1:40:49Rick Rubin?

  Yep.

• 1:40:51Speaker 00

  And we saw the mill.

• 1:40:52Rick Rubin?

  Yep.

• 1:40:53Speaker 00

  We understood where you could place it. There was also like a little island you could get to by, by walking with the boots and jumping from rocks. And, and we found that, that that became the farthest we could get away. We could almost achieve the most beautiful view of the mill at a distance. By sort of standing on the edge, but we could feel that the best view would be, of course, in the middle of the water.

• 1:41:15Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:41:15Speaker 00

  And then the second thing was this, this idea that they had the old sculpture park on one side and they were expanding it to the other side and there was one bridge. And we thought like, I hate to trace my steps back. I always like to do the loop, like often when I go on a, on a walk.

• 1:41:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:31Speaker 00

  I will walk through fire to not walk back the way I, I came, right?

• 1:41:34Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:41:35Speaker 00

  So this idea that we could turn the journey through the sculpture park into a loop by adding a, a second bridge somehow made so much sense.

• 1:41:45Rick Rubin?

  When did the idea to put the museum on the bridge?

• 1:41:48Speaker 00

  That was really like day one, so this museum is going to be a bridge.

• 1:41:52Rick Rubin?

  Wow. Right away, that was.

• 1:41:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and then like now you know that it's, it has to do something different. Then what is a bridge gonna look like? Is it gonna be an arch? Is it gonna be a girder? And then, of course, once we started saying like, it was a relatively small 12,000 square foot, um, gallery space. And we thought like, we should have two different experiences. And in the beginning, we thought one is skylit and the other one is sidelit. But then as we won the competition, the curator said like, I would actually prefer to have one without light and the other one with light. So let's say sidelit and unlit. And then, of course, in the middle, you get this third space, which is the twisted space. And in the end, the museum is called the twist.

• 1:42:38Speaker 00

  That twisted space, of course, defies the traditional requirements.

• 1:42:45Speaker 00

  What would be a good gallery space? But that also becomes the obstacle that all the artists that have exhibited there end up coming up with something uh unique that takes advantage of that situation.

• 1:42:56Rick Rubin?

  What does that space feel like on the inside? I can understand what it looks like on the outside.

• 1:43:00Speaker 00

  On the inside, it really feels like you are walking in a room that literally turns ninety degrees.

• 1:43:05Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:43:06Speaker 00

  So the the the floor you're walking on becomes the wall. Uh, the the other wall becomes the floor. Uh, the the former wall became the ceiling. So it really feels like this surreal sculptural experience where every category that you know becomes something else.

• 1:43:28Speaker 00

  But it also meant that normally in a in a museum, you would have painted drywall. And then you would have maybe wood on the floor. And then you would have something else in the ceiling. In this case, because the the floor becomes the wall.

• 1:43:43Speaker 00

  And the wall becomes the ceiling. It all had to be the same, so we had to get the lead curator to accept that the wall was going to be white painted wood. So you would see that the texture of the the wood slats of the wood boards. It wouldn't be this kind of even surface. It would have, it would be white. But it would have quite a lot of texture from all the pieces of wood put together.

• 1:44:07Rick Rubin?

  Would you say more like the inside of a barn, like that?

• 1:44:09Speaker 00

  More like the inside of a barn. And and we ended up, of course, digging through the trenches to find all kinds of cool references. And actually, in Copenhagen, we have something called the Free, which is this um like, I think, at least century old uh art space where all the all the walls are actually white painted wood. And and and it's it's a great sort of venerable institution. So we we found all the references we could find to justify this this choice. But of course, each time you're doing something different, it triggers a lot of concern. Who, is it okay to not do exactly what we normally do? But the result really feels like effortless and beautiful. It took a lot of sweat and and and pain to to go through.

• 1:44:52Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:44:53Speaker 00

  In the beginning, when we had come up with this idea, vertical gallery, horizontal gallery. Twist in the middle. Then we started like, how are we gonna make this nice? And in the beginning, we had imagined more like an Anish Kapoor, like a smooth polished stainless surface. But of course, it became quite clear that the whole budget of the entire museum, just in the facade, right? So then we had to find a tectonic way to achieve this complex sculptural shape in an inexpensive and buildable way. That, and I think that's where the project really found its strength. Once we'd won the competition and were really looking for different ways to materialize it.

• 1:45:37Speaker 00

  This idea of the straight members just gently shifting, that really elevated it

• 1:45:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:45Speaker 00

  from just an image into a tectonic, like a building.

• 1:45:50Rick Rubin?

  So that's an interesting idea that sometimes budgetary restrictions force you to do something more interesting, not less interesting.

• 1:46:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, and also like exactly the budgetary constraints, but it can also be gravitational constraints or climatic constraints. Like sometimes these practical obstacles, reality on one side and your dream on the other side. Once the two blend, the dream acquires more and more definition. And in doing so, necessitates inventions that in themselves, maybe at some point, really become the whole point of the project.

• 1:46:34Rick Rubin?

  Like, yeah.

• 1:46:36Speaker 00

  The twist without that tectonic would be a much lesser building.

• 1:46:41Rick Rubin?

  When did you find that out?

• 1:46:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that came like even further down the process. So like, that's also why like some people, like in America, you have a very unproductive dichotomy between design architect and executive architect. So basically, the people that come up with the the concept and the vision and the image, and then the people who build it. But we will always insist on being part of the project all the way to the end. And often, we're not licensed in the place we're building, so we need a local executive architect. But we want to be part of the process all the way because sometimes the technical solution

• 1:47:23Speaker 00

  has to be completely aligned and in line with the spirit and the agenda of the overall project. If it's just taking whatever image and then executing it with the status quo, it's not going to be architecture, it's just going to be a built image.

• 1:47:41Rick Rubin?

  Has there been any of the projects that you've designed that you've been disappointed with the way they've been executed?

• 1:47:48Speaker 00

  I would say, sadly, the answer is there's always a tremendous amount of disappointment.

• 1:47:56Rick Rubin?

  I wouldn't have guessed that answer. That's interesting. It's real and it's clearly accurate. I still wouldn't have guessed that.

• 1:48:04Speaker 00

  And I would say, of course, that degree of disappointment varies. And I would say the perfect building, the perfect execution is like a singularity. It's a vertical tangent that you can approach like a progressive curve.

• 1:48:29Rick Rubin?

  The closer you get, the steeper it gets.

• 1:48:32Speaker 00

  Exactly, and you will never get there, but you can get very close.

• 1:48:35Rick Rubin?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:48:37Speaker 00

  And you're striving.

• 1:48:38Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:48:40Speaker 00

  And I would say the closest I've gotten, I think at the end, the twist, we got quite close. Not surprisingly, it's the smallest projects where we had the possibility to get the closest, right?

• 1:48:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Does scale really make a difference? The bigger it is, the harder it is to achieve?

• 1:48:56Speaker 00

  Yes, also because it becomes more and more political. It becomes more and more economic. And also, like, we designed a building in New York called The Spiral. It's a thousand-foot-tall, entire city block of Manhattan.

• 1:49:13Speaker 00

  We designed the lobby, the facade, and it has terraces cascading around it, hence the name. So it's like, almost like a hybrid between a modern monolith and a pre-modern kind of ziggurat of New York. So I would say at the scale of a skyscraper, like, very successful, I'm very happy with it. But we didn't do any of the floors, because each tenant does their own work, right? So I think we did very well. On the other hand, it's like ninety-five percent, all kinds of crazy crap. That somehow needs to be able to happen inside a building like that, because it's not all mine. And also, we did a museum of watchmaking, where our client is Ude Mapiki, the Swiss watchmakers.

• 1:49:54Speaker 00

  And in Switzerland, they already have very proud craftsman traditions and a high delivery of quality. In addition to that, our clients are watchmakers. So there, I would say, I would say we came very close.

• 1:50:09Rick Rubin?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:50:10Speaker 00

  Like a clockwork.

• 1:50:12Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the ski slope.

• 1:50:13Speaker 00

  And then we designed, and I think that's another, I would probably have suggested the ski slope next. Because the ski slope in Copenhagen is actually a waste-to-energy power plant. So it's a very large facility that takes all of the waste of Copenhagen. Like, once it's sorted, all of the unrecyclable waste is then used as the fuel to provide the district heating and electricity of the city of Copenhagen. And it is the cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world. So the steam that comes out of the chimney is actually cleaner than the air of Copenhagen.

• 1:50:57Speaker 00

  It does still contain a certain amount of CO2, but much less than the power plant that it replaced. And all of the toxins, or most of the toxins, like, has been eliminated and, you know, scrubbed and filtered. So let's say this marvel of modern engineering that we actually don't have anything to do with on a kind of chemical level, because it's not our technology that's inside. But it's also invisible. So that we thought, as we were doing the competition, how can we express what's really unique about this? You don't have to put giant signs. Uh, but when people see it, they they can understand that this is something completely different. And we got the idea to turn the facade. It's three hundred feet tall, turn the facade into a a climbing wall.

• 1:51:41Rick Rubin?

  Did it have to be tall? Is that the nature of the equipment that it had to be tall?

• 1:51:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's exactly like, um, it came with a kind of phantom layout of the machinery and it was kind of a stepped building, like maybe four steps, ending up with a certain height.

• 1:51:57Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:51:57Speaker 00

  So, let's say shrink wrapping that kind of machine diagram. And then in the further process, once we won the competition with this idea, we worked together with the engineers to optimize, to get closer and closer to this this kind of slope that goes from three hundred feet to, uh, let's say a hundred and twenty and then turns. And you end up, you know, at at the base of where you started and then a vertical elevator can you take you to the top again, or you can take a series of ski lifts back up. So we basically turned the the facade into a the tallest manmade climbing wall in the world, and we turned the roof into an alpine park, complete with pine trees, uh, uh, and like plants and and a skiable surface.

• 1:52:42Speaker 00

  That is, uh, we found, we tested all kinds of surfaces, but we found this this kind of mat. It an Italian product from the Alps, where the grass grows through the mat, so the grass ties the the mat to the ground. And then you ski down on these brushes that has the an equivalent friction and grip to a a groomed slope.

• 1:53:06Rick Rubin?

  It's green?

• 1:53:08Speaker 00

  It's green, it's grass. But it but it has the the brushes as well that are also green in this case, but because we we chose them green.

• 1:53:15Rick Rubin?

  Have you skied it?

• 1:53:16Speaker 00

  I've I've skied it, yeah.

• 1:53:18Rick Rubin?

  Does it feel like you're skiing on a slope?

• 1:53:19Speaker 00

  No, it absolutely feels like a groomed slope. It's definitely not powder, it's alpine skiing for sure.

• 1:53:25Rick Rubin?

  That's incredible.

• 1:53:27Speaker 00

  And and also like, we didn't have much budget for the so the entire roof park, because the power plant by law was not allowed to, uh, also be operating a ski slope. So we had to fundraise the ski slope with seven individual foundations that gave, at the end, I think that the the total budget was A few million euros.

• 1:53:52Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 1:53:53Speaker 00

  To create this.

• 1:53:54Rick Rubin?

  The ski slope.

• 1:53:55Speaker 00

  The park on the roofs. You have a ski slope, the lifts and all the vegetation. That money was raised by, I think it was like close to 10 million euros, actually, now that I think about it. So in the end, the power plant leases its roof for free to the foundation and then the foundation paid for the creation of the park. And then has like an operator that is like a concessionist that runs the cafe and the lift system and the ski rental and all that. And we've called this idea social infrastructure, that you take a lot of what makes a city function.

• 1:54:37Speaker 00

  It's all the infrastructure, the power plants, the waste management. But also the highways, the warehouses, the parking lots, all that stuff. That we treat as if they don't really count. But in the end, they become a major part of our everyday life. Like this idea that you drive on the highway. You pass like the power plants and the different warehouses. You park in an ugly parking structure or in a parking basement. And then you show up in the lobby, hey, the lobby is nice and your office is also nice. But then you park in an ugly parking lot in front of the supermarket and you go to the recycling facility, which is also ugly.

• 1:55:22Speaker 00

  And maybe you work in a factory that is also ugly. So we thought like, what if you take the everyday places? That could become a thoughtful, holistic part of your environment? Then the power plant and the waste management facility wouldn't be some eyesore that blocks the views and cast shadows on its neighbors, but it actually becomes the destination on a Sunday where you go to hike, enjoy the views of the city and get the thrill of skiing down a manmade mountain. But because we had a relatively modest budget, we took only everyday species of plants, essentially weeds that are indigenous to Denmark. So we had the lowest possible budget for the plants.

• 1:56:07Speaker 00

  And then every fall.

• 1:56:10Speaker 00

  Like, once the leaves have fallen, we chop down most of the bushes and the bushes and the grasses, so that the new seeds get a chance. But already after two years, we had gone naturally from sixty species to one hundred and twenty species, simply by seeds and birds. And slowly but surely, it is becoming what a mountain meadow would look like in Denmark if we had mountains. And I think it speaks a little bit to the power of architecture

• 1:56:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:42Speaker 00

  and form-giving.

• 1:56:43Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:56:43Speaker 00

  Is that then... We opened it in 2019. My son was born in November eighteen. So he knows of no time when you couldn't ski on the roof of the power plant in Copenhagen.

• 1:56:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:58Speaker 00

  And we live on a houseboat in Copenhagen, and we see the sun rising over the man-made mountain of Cobenhill.

• 1:57:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:05Speaker 00

  And we see it setting over the Queen's Castle on the other side of the port. And I just like this idea that for him and his entire generation, they take it for granted.

• 1:57:15Rick Rubin?

  There's a mountain.

• 1:57:16Speaker 00

  That there's a mountain in Copenhagen and that a power plant is a place that turns waste into energy, that you can ski on and climb the facade. Like this inviting, almost utopian fiction that we came up with ten years ago is now the world that he lives in and his entire generation. So if he has to come up... Because when we came up with that idea, it was kind of a wild idea, almost science fiction.

• 1:57:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:44Speaker 00

  But when he has to come up with wild ideas for his future, that's just how it is.

• 1:57:49Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:57:50Speaker 00

  Just like Venice in Italy is a city where the streets are paved with water and you sail around in gondolas.

• 1:57:57Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:57:57Speaker 00

  And Copenhagen is a city where you ski on the roof of the power plant that turns waste into energy.

• 1:58:02Rick Rubin?

  Amazing. Is it a well-loved feature in the town, would you say?

• 1:58:08Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I think it's also something that, I think, has captured... Something that is very Copenhagen. Copenhagen is a city where we care so much for the environment that even our waste and power plants is an integral part of the social infrastructure, the parks of the city. And I think in that sense, when you see the skyline of Copenhagen, the slope of the power plant is a major part of the silhouette.

• 1:58:41Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the smoke rings.

• 1:58:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, like the smoke rings is also like an example that you don't always win every battle. So, you know, like we wanted to integrate an art piece in the proposal and we thought it could be interesting to try to distill the message of this idea of turning a power plant so clean that you can ski on the roof and climb the fad into an art piece. And we were working with a German group out of Berlin called Reality United. And out of different ideas came the idea that to play with the steam coming out of the chimney to blow smoke rings. And we ended up taking it incredibly far. We ended up doing a functioning prototype.

• 1:59:30Speaker 00

  A big part of the cost of operating a power plant like that is that you have a huge insurance that if you have failure, you can buy power from elsewhere to provide to the city. So if you do anything that messes.

• 1:59:44Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:59:45Speaker 00

  And we found the solution that we could actually extract the steam separately, almost like the steam you let out of the chimney. We extract separately, compress it, funnel it up, parallel to the exhaust of the chimney and around the mouth of the chimney, because the chimney itself is actually a hollow space and it has two pipes that comes out that releases the steam. So along the perimeter, we could then release the steam we took separately, like through a series of valves.

• 2:00:21Speaker 00

  And that would create the vortex. So we ended up doing a third scale functioning prototype. With amazing results. And because the vortex captures the steam and the temperature inside the turmoil of the vortex. So it actually preserves the steam longer. And that's also why smoke rings work. Because the the smoke gets caught and trapped and therefore it it it sort of remains. So it became this kind of beautiful expression that you take something machine like. And serious. And you create something hedonistic and playful out of it. Like when we did it, it almost seemed like science fiction. Imagine a future so clean that.

• 2:01:05Speaker 00

  You know, a power plant like blow smoke rings and you can ski on the roof and. There is something about science fiction. It's also one of my favorite literary genres. I think.

• 2:01:17Speaker 00

  People like William Gibson and E N M Banks, Bernavenez. Were. Brilliant creative people, really. Speculating, sometimes dystopially, but sometimes utopially. Almost like extrapolating from where we are now, where might we go? And I think the reason that I'm so interested in science fiction is that I think it's very similar to our process is that. Philip K. Dick had a beautiful definition of science fiction. He said.

• 2:01:49Speaker 00

  Science fiction is not a story from the future, even if it often happens in the future. And it is also not a space opera, even though it often takes place in space. But science fiction is a story where the, and I'm paraphrasing. The plot is triggered by some form of invention or innovation. And it's it's often a technical invention. But it can be a cultural, social, environmental.

• 2:02:21Speaker 00

  Innovation, so the science fiction story ends up showing you a world like the one that you know, but by altering this one fact, it becomes the narrative exploration of the cascading consequences that follows from that altered fact. So it reveals alternative outcomes that in a way reflects back upon the life that you know. And not only the writer, but also the reader can speculate along these lines. And I think whenever we start a project, and I talked about this idea of asking the questions, looking at a different angle. I think often we try to understand how has life changed? How has technology changed? Or the way we live, or the way we work changed?

• 2:03:06Speaker 00

  So we find this one altered fact. And we take the consequence of that and we explore the design exploration of the cascading consequences of this one altered fact. And in that sense, I think in the beginning you asked, what is architecture? I think another answer to that question is that architecture is the art and science of turning fiction into fact. You can say when we came up with the idea of Copenhagen, it was a pure fiction, completely wild idea. And then we argued so hard for it and we tried to resolve all the practicalities, enough to win the competition.

• 2:03:49Speaker 00

  And then we spent the next decade solving all the problems, ticking all the boxes, getting all the permits, and then making it happen. So that on the opening day and ever since, it was now just the reality of Copenhagen. But until then, it was pure fiction. And when it started, it was just a wild idea. So this process.

• 2:04:12Speaker 00

  Of giving birth to the future is what makes architecture so exciting that as human beings we have the, not only the possibility, but actually the responsibility to make the world we live in more and more like we wish it was.