If documentary is to document our world as it already is, fiction is to fantasize.
About how it could be and that sense architecture is the fiction of the real
world. So turning dreams into concrete reality with bricks and mortar.
Architecture is the canvas for the stories of our lives.
The city is never complete. It has a beginning but it has no end. It's a work
in progress. Always waiting for new scenes to be added, new characters to move
in. When I started studying architecture and told people what I did, the most
frequently asked question was always, can you tell me why all new buildings are so
boring? People have the idea that in the past buildings came with ornaments and
decoration, moats, straw bridges, spires and gargoyles. Today they had been
reduced to containers of space, boring and boxy. Somehow so many of our choices
today tend to settle with reaffirming the status quo by replicating what's
already there rather than inventing what could happen next. I decided I wanted to
change that. In the movie Inception the architects find that they can finally
realize their wildest dreams because they're in fact designing inside a
dream. The architect hero Cobb explains how he and his wife wanted to live in a
house with a garden but prefer to live in a high-rise. In real life we would have
to choose, he says, but in a dream we could get it as we wanted it. We've made
a building in Copenhagen called the mountain, combining a parking structure
and an apartment building. By turning the parking into a man-made mountain of cars,
we can turn the stack of homes into a cascade of houses with gardens, penthouse
views and big lawns. Cobb's dream home made in real life. We call this idea
bigamy, that you can take multiple desirable elements that might not fit
together or even seem mutually exclusive like the garden home in the
high-rise and merge them together into a new genre. You don't have to remain
faithful to a single idea, you can literally marry multiple ideas into
promiscuous hybrids. The beauty is that architecture not only allows you to dream
stuff up, it also allows you to alter the facts. You can turn pure fiction into
hard fact. We went on to imagine little tweaks of the status quo that now form
everyday reality in Copenhagen and beyond. The eight houses a neighborhood of
townhouses, where you can walk and bicycle from the street to the penthouse,
turning a city block into a Mediterranean mountain town of paths and
squares. The harbor bath brings the beach into the heart of the city, realizing
the Peresian slogan of May 68, Sulepavila Plage. The court scraper combines the
urban oasis of the courtyard with the extreme density of a skyscraper into a
new warped hybrid of the two. Copenhill is a power plant that turns waste into
electricity and that is so huge that it's going to be the biggest and tallest
structure in all of Copenhagen. How could we transform the stereotype of the
power plant into a public amenity? We thought Denmark is cold, we have snow but
no mountains, but we do have mountains of trash. So we wrapped the plant in a
continuous envelope of a giant ski slope. This is only possible because the
power plant is so clean. The smoke coming out of the chimney is completely
non-toxic, only steam and CO2, so the top of the hill will feel fresh like
mountain air. To completely alter people's perception of a power plant from a
dirty neighbor to a public park, we designed the chimney to release its
steam in puffs of smoke rings. The ultimate transformation from a symbol of
a problem, pollution, to something playful that puffs rings of steam. This
sounds like science fiction, but this is the world-changing potential of
architecture. What started off as wildly fictional ideas, ski slopes and smoke
rings, is turning into everyday reality. In Venice they sail in gondolas through
the streets and in Copenhagen they ski on their power plants that turn trash
into electricity. A weird dream has crystallized into concrete reality.
Today people flock towards immersive worlds in the virtual realm. More than
a hundred million people populate Minecraft where they can build their
own worlds and inhabit them through play. The real world predecessor for
Minecraft, Lego, has become the greatest toy company in the world with a
population of minifigs of 3.7 billion, the largest ethnic group on the planet.
These fictional worlds empower people with the tools to transform their own
environments. This is what architecture ought to be. If geography is the
documentation of the world as it is, architecture must become worldcraft, the
craft of making our world. Where our knowledge and technology doesn't limit
us but rather enables us to turn surreal dreams into inhabitable space, to turn
fiction into fact.
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