Having lived in eight countries across three continents, and studied at three European universities, globetrotting German architect Ole Scheeren possesses a worldly sensibility that informs his work. “I always felt it was important to not be subject to a singular ideology, but to comprehend things from multiple perspectives,” he says. At just 21 years old, the son of an architect completed his first professional project, a high-end clothing store in his hometown of Karlsruhe, while attending school. He cut his teeth for more than a decade with Rem Koolhaas, working on such innovative concepts as Prada outlets in New York and Beverly Hills. Since going out on his own eight years ago, he has been the mastermind behind groundbreaking projects like the Interlace apartment complex in Singapore and MahaNakhon, Thailand’s tallest skyscraper. “I like to start that conversation away from environmental sustainability. My first questions are: How socially sustainable is the building? What does it do to the people that live in it? Because that is the absolute fundamental basis for any notion of sustainability,” he says. Here, Scheeren discusses the inspiration behind his greatest achievements, and weighs in on the future of architecture.
On uprooting traditional retail with Prada in New York in 2001 and Beverly Hills in 2004
It was an incredible collaboration with Miuccia Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, at a time when the entire notion of a flagship store was still fairly untested. We were interested in how we could explore fashion as a culture and elevate it beyond the context of commerce. The day-to-day experience in retail was still very focused on buying, and we wanted to turn it into a greater and more complex experience rather than a transactional one. Those two spaces explored how public space, culture, and fashion could interact in a completely different yet meaningful way.
Reimagining the skyscraper with Singapore’s Interlace apartment complex
I felt it was time to explore a different system of how buildings function and how buildings are organized. And so, the Interlace was, in its most literal way, a subversion of the tower by toppling it and converting the vertical into the horizontal, and then stacking these horizontal blocks to create a skyscraper that no longer had anything to do with verticality. Technically, this is still a skyscraper by code. But it shows that we can rethink existing typologies to generate a completely new set of parameters and qualities. This notion of how we want to live, or the quality of our lives, is absolutely essential to my work.
Developing the multifunctional Guardian Art Center in Beijing
The Guardian Art Center is a very beautiful project, not only in its façades and articulation, but the whole way in which it integrates a highly contemporary piece of architecture in one of the most sensitive, historic contexts in the world, very close to the Forbidden City. It’s also a building that explores a new hybrid in which culture, events, and hospitality come together. It’s an arts space, a big event machine, and a hotel at the same time, so you can live with all the things you interact with in this building, and that’s a very exciting notion for the future.
On giving buildings a second life with the Riverpark Tower in Frankfurt
The tower in Frankfurt explores how we can look at the adaptive reuse, or conversion, of an existing structure. We investigated all the specificities that this [1970s-era office] building had and turned them into spectacular qualities for residential usage. One example being the structure of the building. It rests on four mega columns at the corners, and has free spanning floor slabs in between, which means you have nearly 50-foot-long panoramic windows without any structural elements interrupting those. This is something that you could not typically build for a residential tower. But we’ve found all these amazing qualities and enhanced them.
Changing Bangkok’s cityscape with the MahaNakhon tower
The building has become a reference point within the city. It has had a strong effect on public space and how people start to use them, especially the observation deck on the tower, which will be a very exciting feature with 360-degree-views of the city on multiple floors. I’m interested in finding out how we can have an energizing, positive effect on the environment we build in. This is a great example of that.
Redefining urban living in Vancouver and Vietnam
I want to create an active position in life, not only for me as an architect, but for the people who inhabit the buildings I create. The [two residential] buildings in Vancouver explore how to integrate and relate to the stunning environment of a great city and the nature around it. I wanted to show that you can live in a much more active and participatory way with your surroundings.
Vietnam is one of the youngest cities in the world that does not have a set vision for how its future could look. [Empire City] is in a very large complex, close to 4 million square feet, and it was very important to reintegrate some of this country’s incredible landscapes, which have defined its identity more so than its cities, in this project. It’s a new hybrid between a highly dense urban, yet natural landscape.
On taking a chance with Dean & DeLuca
We developed a fast food concept for Dean & DeLuca that will enable the brand to multiply its reach. I call it Stage because making great food always has a theatrical quality. But it also has a social quality. To introduce this social and communal component is where this project connects to all the big projects I’m doing because it again declares human interaction as the core of its ambition. It’s an ongoing collaboration, and we’re looking at opening the first real store at the end of the year in Manhattan.
On the future of architecture
We’re living at a time where change in society is so fundamental. It has become clear that formalities are no longer the answer to things. There was a time in which architecture very happily exhausted itself in stylistic or formal gestures, and that time is clearly over. Very direct challenges are posed to architecture that produce incredibly exciting situations and scenarios, and my work in Asia for the past 15 years has been a part of that. That’s why it’s so exciting to be engaged in a context that simply had no other choice than to ask the question of the future in a very radical way.
