Great Throughts Treasury

"One of our latest ideological pursuits is the notion of hedonistic sustainability. What if sustainability actually becomes a way of increasing life quality? For example, in our waste to energy plant in Copenhagen we’re using the sheer mass of a power plant to explore the fact that Copenhagen doesn’t have the topography for skiing. By installing an elevator we can create a man-made ski slope and save people the eight-hour bus ride to Sweden. It’s a decent hill, 350 meters tall, so you can actually do some serious skiing there. Factories aren’t just places for work. They actually turn trash into electricity and can serve as a giant park."

"For quite a while the notion was that sustainability was so important that it had to happen at the expense of everything else—this Protestant idea that it has to hurt to do good. If everybody gets the idea that sustainable life is less fun than normal life then it becomes a very undesirable proposition. Who wants to opt for something less nice?"

"I think the level of sobriety in our work is that we’re committed to the fact that our buildings look differently because they perform differently. It’s the spark that triggers the design. They respond to completely different conditions, they answer completely different questions, they solve different problems and they exploit different potentials. The architecture is less an expression of our preconception than it is an expression of the specific qualities or ideas that that project is pursuing. The Figure 8 building in Copenhagen looks like a distorted 8 because it allows the townhouses and the apartments to gravitate toward the sun and the view. It allows the commercial spaces to be as deep as they want to be. As a result you wind up getting this path that lets you bicycle all the way to the top of the building. The distorted skew of the building is not a result of some sort of craziness. It’s a result of some very practical optimizations of the conditions for each program and the facilitation of this public invasion."

"Architecture is most appealing with simple lines and clear ideas. A city, on the other hand, becomes alive when it is rich with experiences and surprises. So the paradoxical challenge is to simultaneously create simplicity and variety, diversity and coherence. In other words, to create a city in the building."

" Each project needs to understand its climatic context, its cultural context, its urban context, its infrastructural context. A lot of our early work was dealing with the culture and the conditions of Copenhagen. As a result it’s a series of projects that try to develop the local typologies one step further. Now that we’re doing projects in Shanghai and Shenzen and Astana and Athens and Hamburg and Stockholm and New York and Vancouver and maybe in LA, we’re having some interesting conversations. Each time it’s an opportunity to understand the possibilities and the limitations of the specific urban typologies and of the local lifestyle and culture."