Do you realise that the core of the building you are drawing is the size of the entire floor plate, the size of the entire building, and the building we are drawing is a multitude larger beyond that?’” “There was a moment when they were sitting there and drawing the core of a building, and I stopped everyone’s work, called them together and said, ‘Stand here and look of the floor plate of our office. “With CCTV, my team struggled for a while to deal with the radical shift in scale, which was a multitude beyond the largest thing they’d ever experienced designing before,” he recalls. To ensure the architects working on his projects keep one eye on the real world, he is unafraid to embrace some fairly radical methods. Scheeren’s completed projects so far provide rare examples of finished buildings that are perhaps even more dramatic than the early computer renderings of them.ĭespite his interest in fantasy – a word that crops up repeatedly as we talk – he says “it matters most that I translate my ideas into reality because to directly affect things they have to see the light of day.” “I want to unmute the towers to make them speak and celebrate the people they accommodate.” “I’m interested in how to break down the inertness of the skyscraper to reveal the presence of human life within these structures,” he says. Scheeren’s best-known creations – from the landmark China Central Television (CCTV) Headquarters building in Beijing, with its 5 million square feet of floor space, to the 77-storey MahaNakhon in Bangkok and the Interlace apartment complex in Singapore, formed of 31 stacked blocks – are vast, complex spaces occupied by thousands of people: living, working, interacting. “The fantasy of people’s lives and the ways we interrelate as human beings are as defining as any functional, numeric or technical concerns in my work,” he says. All the best buildings, he argues, are the ones that tell stories. He is particularly articulate on the subject of storytelling, and lights up when I broach the subject. My questions are greeted with lengthy pauses while he composes carefully considered replies – strenuously avoiding the flippant or superficial. Scheeren is friendly and focused – with no signs of jet lag despite being bang in the middle of a monthly travel cycle that takes him between Asia, Europe and the US. With a relentless schedule ahead and no chance to rest, I worry he might not be overly receptive to an in-depth interview. Thanks to the city’s unforgiving traffic, he arrives late from a previous appointment. I meet Scheeren in the lobby bar of a busy London hotel, which he is using as a base in between a series of business meetings. “I consider the things that could happen inside it, the things that could happen around it, the role it plays in the story of the city and the memory it leaves behind.” “When I design a building, I think about lots of stories,” continues the former OMA director and the founder of Büro Ole Scheeren. “In my work,” the German architect tells me, “form always follows fiction.” Ole Scheeren, though, wants to promote an alternative to this well-trodden architectural soundbite. Form, in the famous words of Louis Sullivan, should always follow function.
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