Innovation by Design
The Danish Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale Danish Architecture Center
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Benjamin Wells
1 Innovation in Renovation 2 Materialising Innovation 3 Innovation through Collective Remembrance 4 Hyper Innovation
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Words Benjamin Wells Edit Robert Martin / Benjamin Wells Š Danish Architecture Center / Arcspace All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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1/4 Innovation in Renovation 2/4 Materialising Innovation 3/4 Innovation through Collective Remembrance 4/4 Hyper Innovation
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Collaborative Innovation
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This anthology was commissioned by Natalie Mossin (curator of the Danish Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale) and the Danish Architecture Center (commissioner for the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale), on the occasion of the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale. The texts are available online at arcspace.com, and are published by the Danish Architecture Center in Copenhagen. The Danish contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale presents a Danish approach to innovation through four architectural projects selected by curator Natalie Mossin. This anthology explores and expands on the themes of the Danish Pavilion - collaboration, innovation and sustainable development - and was commissioned to support the exhibition.
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Innovation by Design
Innovation has become the answer to the future. Business, science, technology, politics, design - all have defined innovation as their mantra and their objective. Innovation is not a new phenomenon, nor is its collaborative nature (it is as old as mankind’s insatiable curiosity to discover and create), but only recently has ‘innovation’ become an end in itself, with all from tech start-ups to blue-chip companies to universities claiming to be playing the innovation game.
This trend has not escaped the design world, with architecture and design featuring alongside disciplines as diverse as biotech, education and sports in lists of the world’s ‘most innovative companies’. Design studios of all forms claim to offer the product of innovation, and the term has become as ubiquitous as the ‘sustainability’ label. As graphic designer Michael Bierut once put it, ‘it’s not hard to see why innovation is becoming the design world’s favorite euphemism. Design sounds cosmetic and ephemeral; innovation sounds energetic and essential’.
Innovation appears to be the answer. But what was the question?
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Innovation has always been inevitable, and is becoming increasingly so. But it has now become an imperative, precisely because of the severity of the problems it has left in its wake - namely the existential crisis of climate change. The Danish philosopher K.E. Løgstrup suggested that it is these unintended effects of technological innovation that have the lasting impact, speaking of ‘the world altering power of side-effects’. The scale, complexity and universality of this once unforeseen side-effect has demanded that we reconsider the conditions conducive to innovation, and collaboration has emerged as the preferred strategy. Collaboration has become a prerequisite for transformative innovation, as it has the potential to enable the synthesis of a universal perspective with a particular need. This gives global knowledge contextual relevance, calling on multiple individuals to tackle collective problems. This increasing emphasis on collective and collaborative practice has reframed the innovation question, as it often encourages a more critical reflection on innovation and its benefits and risks. This is where design becomes a critical component, as ‘design is the conscious activity of creatively combining technological invention with social innovation, for the purpose of aiding, satisfying or modifying human behavior’ (Alexander Manu). Design has the ability to assign a set of values
Innovation by Design
The current fixation on design innovation has arisen from a realization that the last few decades of human development have drastically increased our reliance on technology and products, and thus our need for further innovation. Coupled with the aggressive hyper-competitiveness intrinsic to an increasingly globalized and interconnected world, this paradigm attaches significant value to the new and the original, demanding it at an ever faster rate. It advocates the ‘radical’ and the ‘disruptive’ - innovations with the potential to transform the status quo - but doesn’t necessarily disclose why. In actuality most innovation is cumulative and incremental, building on existing knowledge in a steady process of refining what already exists. But as the quantity of global, accessible knowledge rises exponentially, the process of innovation follows, becoming increasingly productive but also nonlinear and contingent in nature. In this way sociologist Helga Nowotny suggests that ‘the term innovation captures the essence of modernity in its iterative dynamic … for innovation contains a self-fulfilling prophecy - namely that only further innovations will provide the means to master the problems that innovation also creates.’ Perhaps this is the question we were looking for. The evolving complexity of innovation demands ever more innovation, regardless of its consequences.
to innovation, direct its path beyond impetuous technological advancement, and to orchestrate a collaborative effort toward this aim. Design is crucial at the early stages of innovation to give form to nascent and emerging concepts, and thus has a vital and transformative agency. As the looming environmental crisis appears in ever sharper clarity, design must assume its position at the centre of this age of sustainable innovation, in which innovation moves beyond its self-perpetuating tendencies. The Danish Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale presents four projects that demonstrate the role of design in achieving collaborative and sustainable innovation. Selected by curator Natalie Mossin, these architectural projects - Isoropia, Svinkløv Badehotel, Albertslund South and Hyperloop - are exhibited together as ‘Possible Spaces’ While the actualization of most design and architecture projects involves some level of collaboration, the exhibition places emphasis on this process rather than its final output. All four projects are in development rather than completed, and this draws attention to the ongoing frictions and constraints that are intrinsic to collaborative processes, rather than replicating the polished representation typical of the Biennale. The projects present a diverse range of strategies, constraints and ambitions, but each tells a story of collaboration in search of sustainable innovation. The undulating Isoropia (1/4) installation is the product of an interdisciplinary and international collaboration between multiple sectors, which explores the possibilities that are presented when digital design tools allow material behaviors to be understood and actively applied. This methodology allows architectural thinking and digital technologies to become reciprocal, pointing toward an architecture than can be lighter, smarter and more responsive.
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The Svinkløv Badehotel (2/4) project looks to the past before looking to the future, in an attempt to rebuild the figure of a Danish hotel that was devastated by a fire. Architecture firm Praksis Arkitekter orchestrated a collaboration between locals, guests and staff members that encouraged collective remembrance rather than pedantic reconstruction, emphasizing the importance of innovation that finds its relevance in cultural identification and historic continuity.
Innovation has always been inevitable. But it has now become an imperative, precisely because of the severity of the problems it has left in its wake.
Possible Spaces at the Danish Pavilion – Venice Architecture Biennale 2018. Photograph by Rasmus Hjortshøj – COAST
The fourth project attempts to give form to the Hyperloop concept (4/4) with an interdisciplinary and global collaboration that matches its ambitions in size and capabilities. Self-proclaimed innovators BIG are bringing a humanistic touch to the highly technological mobility system, imagining ‘portals’ and ‘pods’ that ‘challenge our habitual understanding of time and space’. The project has had a lasting effect on BIG, who have come to understand the radically innovative potential of such dynamic collaboration.
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The process behind the renovation of 1001 homes at Albertslund South (3/4) also sought to engage with users, although acts as a useful reminder of the compromise intrinsic to democratic and participatory design. Nevertheless, the project is a demonstration of architecture firm Vandkunsten’s tenacious commitment to forwarding the material reuse agenda, and their collaborative research project has led to innovative proposals for dismantled component reuse, which are now being implemented in a number of other projects. Renovation will become an increasingly large part of construction practice in the coming years, and the Albertslund project shows that Vandkunsten are ahead of the curve.
Mossin embraces the diversity of these projects, suggesting that ‘innovation can be radical and systemic, but it can also take place in many small changes over a long period of time; it may be investment-intensive, but may also take place within the budget of an individual project; it may be well known, or it may be completely new.’ Each has a role to play, and the exhibit reminds us that the challenges of the built environment demand ‘we do things in new ways with new partnerships’, regardless of the scale and scope of the project. The four projects are accompanied by a case study of BLOX - a building that has collaborative innovation as its mantra. While the implications of this explicitly ‘collaborative’ architecture are yet to be fully revealed, it represents a necessary perceptual shift from the individualistic, competitive organization to the collectivistic, supportive one, as manifested in the BLOXHUB innovation lab. While still driven by economic incentives, BLOXHUB is vocal in its commitment to innovation that directly tackles urban issues, and its spatial connection to the Danish Architecture Center is evidence of this. Sustainable innovation will become increasingly urgent as the scale of our failure to mitigate and adapt to climate change becomes apparent. Architect Indy Johar argues that we must ‘accelerate distributed, decentralized, democratized innovation for the civic good’, and ‘perhaps most critically reimagine the city in this future’. Innovation will become ever more multidisciplinary and collaborative, and the four projects presented at the Danish pavilion show how architectural practice must not only keep up, but can be active in shaping this transition by turning environmental challenges into design opportunities. The projects do not seek innovation as an answer in itself, but are evidence of architects reframing the question.
9 Right - BLOX, home of the new Danish Architecture Center Below - the Danish Pavilion
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Photographs by Rasmus Hjortshøj – COAST
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Innovation in Renovation
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Tasked with refurbishing 1001 homes in a Copenhagen suburb, Vandkunsten architects saw an opportunity to revolutionize renovation practices through material circularity and democratic design. Their exhibit at the Danish pavilion presents innovative strategies for repurposing materials, but also speaks of the compromise intrinsic to collaboration.
The homes of the future are already built. New housing construction has long been an engine for growth in Northern European cities, but flatlining populations and steady economies have begun to reduce the demand for new homes. Denmark continues to build around 20,000 new homes each year, but this accounts for just 1% of the total housing stock. As in many European countries, the vast majority (94.6% in 2025) of Denmark’s required housing is already built, owned and lived in.
Right - The proposed masterplan for Albertslund South. Drawing by Vandkunsten Following page photograph by Torben Eskerod
Copenhagen continues to build in an impulsive attempt to curtail the rising cost of homes and ease the resulting affordability crisis, but it is becoming increasingly clear that this will only ever be a fragment of the solution. If cities have already reached an appropriate point of saturation, then strategies of repair, maintenance, adaptation, renovation and restructuring will become ever more important aspects of the construction industry, and thus of architectural practice. This encompasses the need for routine upkeep of aging buildings, but also the more urgent requirement to drastically improve energy efficiency (Europe’s building stock currently accounts for around 40%
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of total energy consumption) and resource preservation. Demographic shifts and changing family structures are demanding new types of homes, but perhaps these changes can also be accommodated through adaptation and repurposing.
This debate comes to the fore in the story of Albertslund South, a vast 1960s housing development in the suburbs of Copenhagen. Designed by social housing pioneers Fællestegnestuen, Albertslund is one of Denmark’s largest housing developments, providing affordable housing for 5,500 tenants. The project was experimental and innovative in its applied construction techniques, its ‘atrium’ housing design, and the urban plan that organizes the district - rows of introverted brick bungalows amongst a labyrinthine network of streets and paths. Albertslund’s uniformity is compelling as a direct representation of the democratic Danish welfare system; equity in housing and therefore in opportunity. Despite sitting firmly in the peripheries of Copenhagen’s urban development, Albertslund has developed a strong and committed community. But fifty years of use has made its mark on Albertslund’s poor construction quality, and in 2012 the municipality launched a competition in search of a strategy for the complete renovation and revitalization of the area. The Danish architecture office Vandkunsten won the competition with a
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So if the industry has no choice but to engage more directly with the built environment as it exists, why is it that housing policies and environmental regulations are so focused on new construction, neglecting the existing housing stock? This is reflected in the architectural profession’s enduring inclination toward innovative, new-build housing projects, and together these conditions limit the opportunities for innovation in the field where they’re really needed renovation.
simple proposal; ‘change to preserve’, by closing the material loop. This was developed through an understanding of the collectively produced cultural value and sense of pride embedded in a place as unique and equitable as Albertslund, but also an acceptance that these qualities could not be preserved without extensive renovation works.
If cities have already reached an appropriate point of saturation, then strategies of repair, maintenance, adaptation, renovation and restructuring will become ever more important.
In calculating the figures associated with a project of this scale, Vandkunsten were struck by the sheer volume of construction waste that would result from a typical renovation process - the flooring alone amounted to 80,000m² of solid beech parquet that would usually be destined for incineration (to provide district heating). Vandkunsten’s plan therefore aimed for material circularity, where dismantled components could be repurposed and used anew. Timber flooring could become a porch. Patinated roof tiles could become a wall cladding. An inventory of options were drawn up and preliminary assessments were carried out to evaluate the environmental and economic impact of different strategies, taking into consideration parameters such as LCA (Life Cycle Analysis), LCC (Life Cycle Costing), and energy needs, as well as cultural and social values. Vandkunsten saw the dismantled materials as embodying three kinds of value; a resource value and an economic
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value, but also a cultural value that was closely connected to the site and its history. Six prototype homes were renovated (see photograph) alongside an extensive catalogue of online options, from which tenants could select the components that would comprise their refurbished home and see the implications for their rent. Danish social housing tenants are formally entitled to direct these renovation decisions, and elected tenant organizations play a central role in any kind of development (meetings of 800 tenants took place in a local theatre). This strong collaboration between tenants, municipalities, and architects, as well as housing organizations and suppliers, creates the conditions for a determinedly democratic design process, and Vandkunsten hoped that this ‘social strategy would create stronger ownership between the tenants and the development’.
But the reality will be 1001 very similar renovations, as most tenants simply chose the same set of components. While the interiors may reveal different layouts, fixtures and decorations, the majority of Albertslund’s residents deemed the reuse strategies too avant-garde and opted for the external components that matched their neighbors, retaining the architectural homogeneity and simplicity that characterizes the area. Democracy in action.
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Their vision was 1001 different renovations, each showcasing innovative ways of repurposing materials while also proclaiming the individuality of its occupant.
Undeterred by the dismissal of their reuse proposals, Vandkunsten collaborated with demolition contractors and used-material suppliers to find other ways of putting dismantled components to use. They may not be recirculated within the project itself, but many are now available on the European market through online materials suppliers such as Genbyg A/S. Vandkunsten’s then committed themselves to the optimization of the building process itself, reducing the time that each renovation would take (from 108 days to 68) and implementing other strategies such as ‘design for disassembly’ (the second phase of the project is due to be completed in 2022). More significantly, Vandkunsten refused to let go of their repurposing concept and initiated a major innovation project, Rebeauty - Nordic Built Component Reuse, to record and promulgate their findings in collaboration with Genbyg, Asplan Viak, and Malmö Tekniska Högskola. The team systematically produce and analyze 1:1 prototypes using all kinds of reclaimed building materials, repurposing them with a commitment to their ‘aesthetic qualities as well as their performance’.
Vandkunsten’s installation in the Danish pavilion. Photograph by Rasmus Hjortshoj – COAST
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‘We failed completely in our attempts to implement reuse strategies in the actual renovation’
Albertslund reminds us that democratic and collaborative design processes come with an intrinsic level of compromise, but this doesn’t have to be to their detriment. Vandkunsten’s vision of large-scale reuse and material circularity may have been molded into an exercise in construction optimization and tenant autonomy, but they have used these compromises as the catalyst for a research project that has produced genuinely innovative and scalable ideas, with the potential to impact far beyond the limits of Albertslund. As development in circular economies and material reuse gains traction, projects like this will be ever-more central to the demolish, build, or renovate debate.
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It is some of these prototypes that constitute Vandkunsten’s contribution to the Danish pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Reclaimed timber flooring makes up a partition wall, a metal facade is formed from flattened ventilations ducts, and an exterior cladding is made with patinated roof tiles. These installations intend to show how energy, money and resources might be conserved, but also the aesthetic value in doing so. This is fundamental to Vandkunsten’s approach only when repurposed components become culturally accepted and appreciated will material circularity have a chance of taking hold. In this way Nielsen imagines the Venice Biennale exhibit as a ‘possible Albertslund project in perhaps 20 or 30 years when we have been culturally acclimatized to reuse materials’. (Outdated regulations are holding this process back, with insufficient standards to prove reused materials are safe and clean for use).
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Materialising Innovation
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Isoropia materialises a collaboration that unites architectural thinking with computational modeling and digital fabrication. Led by the Center for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA) in Denmark, the project is innovative not just in its material application but in the collaborative process that enabled it.
Bringing a building to life is a messy, connected and dependent act, its success contingent on input from a diverse range of disciplines and expertise. In an attempt to organize this dependency, the building industry has long been stratified and divided, with specific roles assigned and work stages clearly defined. Architectural vision typically precedes engineering input or material specification, with detailed design, specification, fabrication and analysis taking place later in the process. This fragmentation leads to a high level of waste production, with tasks performed multiple times and potential innovations lost in the lack of communication or collaboration. But while the building industry has been preoccupied with procurement strategies and role delineation, computational capacities and digital technologies have been swiftly and radically transforming our ability to conceptualize, design and fabricate materials and forms. This poses many possibilities for material and architectural innovation, but it also demands a fluidity that sits at odds with the rigid structures of the industry and its tendency to assign new tools to specific actors and limited work stages.
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What happens when new digital tools challenge the traditional territories of building industry actors, and the various stages of design and construction begin to merge and conflate? When architectural thought becomes symbiotic with computational modeling and material fabrication, what possibilities for innovation are presented?
Computational capacities and digital technologies have been swiftly and radically transforming our ability to conceptualize, design and fabricate materials and forms.
The Center for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA), a research program at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, has emerged in response to these questions. CITA embraces the inevitable advancement of computational modeling and technological ability, but attempts to infiltrate it with architectural thought and multidisciplinary collaboration. Through conceptualizing, designing and realizing working material prototypes, CITA and its collaborators condense the industry’s traditional work stages and roles, opening up space for them to inform and influence one another. This begins with integrating complex modeling and digital tools into the initial design stages, allowing multiple disciplines and processes to be engaged from the outset. By challenging the assumption that architectural vision should precede material composition or fabrication, perhaps this challenges architects to be the designers of not just artifacts, but also of the materials that constitute them.
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Left - Isoropia by CITA and collaborators. Photograph by Anders Ingvartsen
Isoropia, one of four projects presented at the Danish pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, is the manifestation of CITA’s experimentation. The name alludes to the balance between structure, material and site conditions that it searches for, finding form in a state of equilibrium. Isoropia utilizes a new software tool, K2 engineering, to design, predict, analyze and fine-tune material performance, mitigating the inefficiencies found in typical construction methods. Traditional tools require labour-intensive manual prototyping and iterative structural calculation, assigning analysis to the final phases. Early stage modeling systems allow structural and material investigations to be integrated in the initial design process, making possible an architecture in which material behaviors are understood and actively applied. While CITA are continually developing this method of production, Isoropia is one possible outcome generated specifically for the Venice
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Architecture Biennale. The installation’s organic form envelopes part of the neoclassical Danish Pavilion in the Giardini, comprised of bespoke knitted textiles embedded with active fiberglass rods which together find a state of equilibrium. Reminiscent of an elaborate tent structure, the translucent fabric and fiberglass rods curve in tension and compression to encompass the pavilion’s central passage and parts of its portico. The parasitic installation is reliant on the pavilion to provide a foundational structure, but it is easy to imagine alternative applications with permanent foundations or as part of an integrated facade system. Every textile panel that makes up the organic form is unique, hinting towards the freedom that computational modeling affords - input variables can be shifted depending on the given context, allowing infinite iterations to be generated.
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Left and right Isoropia by CITA and collaborators. Photographs by Anders Ingvartsen
The realization of a project like Isoropia is only possible within conditions of open and committed collaboration, demanding input from diverse disciplines including material science, knitting, engineering and architecture. CITA’s collaborators, including Kangaroo / Daniel Piker, the Department of Structural Design and Technology (KET), University of Arts Berlin, Fosters + Partners, Robert McNeel & Associates, Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Format Engineers and Mule Studio, represent academia, industry and practice. This Every textile diversity allows the project to utilize the creativity panel that makes of students, the research up the organic ability of academia and the financial and operational form is unique, power of industry, allowing hinting towards them to inform one another and encourage alternative the freedom that strategies. This network computational of academic and industry modeling can actors is open-source and community-led, afford. facilitating a flexibility that a traditional construction process cannot. No individual player holds the rights to the project, ensuring it is open for others to adapt and develop the process that CITA and their collaborators have initiated. While Isoropia is an engaging architectural installation in its own right, it is the process behind it that holds the most innovative potential. In allowing architectural thinking and digital technologies to become reciprocal, CITA and their collaborators have leveled the fabrication process to consolidate work stages and their associated roles. Isoropia hints towards a future where concept, design, fabrication and analysis can happen simultaneously, transforming not just how architecture is assembled but also how it is designed.
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Innovation through Collective Remembrance
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The proposals for the new Svinkløv Badehotel reveal a collaborative design process that values storytelling and remembrance. Led by the Danish firm Praksis Arkitekter, the project is shaped by an understanding of tradition as integral to sustainable design, and of collective affinity as essential for meaningful innovation.
Svinkløv Badehotel in North Jutland is something of a national treasure in Denmark, its figure symbolic of carefree childhood summers spent amongst the dunes of the West Coast. Hidden on an isolated spot overlooking the Jammerbugten bay, the hotel represents many individual memories of retreat and relaxation, and as such has become embedded within the collective memory of the region. Recognized as Denmark’s largest timber framed building, the hotel is iconic in its form as well as in its representation of shared cultural values and identity. In September 2016 Svinkløv Badehotel was ravaged by a fire that destroyed its vulnerable timber structure, rendering formless the memories associated with it. Set against a national drive for architectural innovation and a growing environmental crisis that demands news ways of constructing, Svinkløv Badehotel’s sudden devastation posed a dilemma – should the hotel be rebuilt and if so, what form should it take? While it didn’t take long to decide to rebuild the hotel, its architectural expression proved to be a more contentious issue. A new design might risk losing value associated with the building, but a pastiche reconstruction of the original form might struggle to meet contemporary standards while retaining the hotel’s unique charm.
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Danish firm Praksis Arkitekter were selected to lead the project, not so much because of their design proposition but because of their approach to the development process. Their point of departure was the supposition that while the hotel’s cultural significance was connected to the overall physicality of the building, it was also more closely tied to specific and often abstract qualities that were existent in the original hotel. Praksis therefore endeavored to curate a process which gave collective remembrance priority over pedantic replication, in an attempt to evoke the hotel’s qualities with meaning and authenticity.
Left - The original Svinkløv Badehotel, built in 1925 by Danish-American Carl Brix Kronborg and designed by Royal Building Inspector Einar Packness. Photograph by Torben Hjulmand Right - Visualization of the new Svinkløv Badehotel, Praksis and collaborators. Image by Praksis Arkitekter
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Praksis Arkitekter are characteristic of the more traditional contingent of Danish architects, committed to contextual relevance, historic continuity and human-centric design. While design may be ‘an inquiry into the future scenario of use’, Praksis contend that design speculation finds its relevance when built on a understanding of tradition and heritage, and that these historic qualities hold clues for solving today’s problems. They are ‘not looking for a nostalgic recreation of the past’, but rather for innovation that is relevant through cultural identification and an understanding of the genius loci of a place. ‘Perhaps innovation is also about bringing culture and history into the future’ suggests Mads Bjørn Hansen, director at Praksis Arkitekter.
During the design process of the new Svinkløv Badehotel, Praksis used their skills in creativity and visualization to not just imagine and produce spaces, but to facilitate an interdisciplinary and participatory approach to design. Financially supported by a number of philanthropic foundations including Realdania, Praksis were afforded the opportunity to supplement traditional research with extensive storytelling activities that sought to visualize memories and anecdotes from past guests, employees and locals. This process may have been time-consuming and arduous, but it allowed Praksis to get closer to the perceived essence of the original building and to decide which elements to emphasize or background in their proposal.
Praksis have searched for meaning in the seemingly mundane, creating a kind of architectural innovation through collective remembrance. Some of these recollections are presented in the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale; an assortment of sketches that depict remembered fragments such as an arrangement of windows or the framing of a view. The design methodologies exhibited are inclusive in their simplicity, including the delicate plan drawings that seem ambiguous and open to interpretation, or the ephemeral and accessible paper models of furniture and thresholds. The only assertive elements of the exhibition relate to the aspects of the project that cannot be contested; large format photographs of the dune landscape that surrounds the hotel, and dramatic video footage of the fire that
Right - proposed plan by Praksis Arkitekter Below - photograph Rasmus Hjortshøj – COAST
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Svinkløv Badehotel, as with all four projects presented at the Danish Pavilion, is a project in development and some parts therefore remain undefined. It is compelling in its methods of co-creation, and the exhibition therefore tries to reveal the particularities of this process rather than an abstracted representation of its result, as would typically be expected from an architectural exhibition. Praksis have searched for meaning in the seemingly mundane, creating a kind of architectural innovation through collective remembrance.
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destroyed it. Both the defined and ambiguous elements of the exhibition are brought together by a continuous yellow curtain that emulates one of the original hotel’s most cherished features – the curtains of the yellow dining room that was central to the hotel’s identity.
Praksis’ images of the final design appear strikingly similar to the original hotel, although the differences may be numerous. And this is of course the point – the new hotel ‘is at once all new and all the same as what was there before.’ It will still be a long wooden building with large windows, although there will be more windows opening views to the sea on one side and the dunes on the other. Svinkløv Badehotel will again be Denmark’s largest wooden building, but contemporary fabrication methods will enhance traditional Danish timber construction techniques. If continuously and properly maintained, this timber structure will have a lifespan of at least 250 years, allowing it to age as the original building did. A new basement will add a third level to the main building, maintaining its general proportions while transforming how the hotel functions and updating its back-of-house facilities.
33 Right - film of the fire is concealed behind yellow curtains. Photograph by Rasmus Hjortshøj – COAST Below - visualisation of the yellow dining room by Praksis Arkitekter
Praksis’ proposals adopt a progressive approach to built heritage under the premise that collective memory does not take on a single form. Their generous design process makes room for individual recollections and multiple past scenarios to be visualized, enabling the projection of a possible future that holds meaning for as many people as possible. Beyond the particularities of this project, Praksis argue that all architectural innovation must encompass history, tradition and cultural continuity if we are to be able to orientate and identify with rapidly transforming built environments. Their approach to the new Svinkløv Badehotel does just this. Rather than fixating on the precise replication of the original building, the project focuses on giving form to a remembered figure of the hotel, and to those carefree childhood summers spent amongst the dunes of the West Coast.
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Collective memory does not take on a single form.
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Hyper Innovation
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The hyperloop concept envisions a mobility infrastructure of unprecedented speed and efficiency, but its realization demands new forms of collaborative innovation. Bjarke Ingels Group have been working with Virgin Hyperloop One to design a system in the UAE, complete with autonomous pods and city portals.
Society is supported by a number of grand and interdependent systems that steadily evolve through incremental alteration, providing services like communication, energy, healthcare and transportation. The multitude of actors making these adjustments do not often operate in a coordinated way, but rather build on an accepted and shared base of knowledge that supports their actions. Transportation systems have evolved much in this way – conventional fuel-based transport has been steadily improving through many small and distributed innovations, ever since Karl Benz produced the first practical automobile in 1885. Electric vehicles now look set to make them obsolete, but these new engine systems are still largely under the chassis of the ‘car’ as we know it. This innovation in mobility has side-effects for energy systems and urban infrastructure, in turn initiating a new wave of additive innovation.
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The urgency of the sustainability challenge demands the invention of completely new systems, disrupting certain existing technologies with systemic and radical innovation.
The urgency of the sustainability challenge demands the invention of completely new systems, disrupting certain existing technologies with systemic and radical innovation. While full of uncertainty and risk, radical innovation can be transformative in its ability to rapidly shift embedded cultural practices in ways that incremental innovation cannot. The question is whether we can imagine these systems, and whether our processes of innovation can cope with the complexity of the challenge.
Left - visualization of a hyperloop pod by Bjarke Ingels Group
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While mobility innovation has sped up in recent years in an attempt to mitigate growing environmental concerns, it has remained largely incremental, reworking existing products to use less energy and resources. This process may be necessary, but often these adjustments only address a small part of a more complex problem. Norway’s enthusiastic adoption of Tesla electric vehicles is evidence of this – they may emit less emissions but their disproportionate weight damages roads and creates microparticles, they outsource environmental impact to other points of the production line (namely lithium mines), and they reinforce the culture of large, luxury car ownership that is inextricably linked to many urban problems. All inconvenient side-effects of a seemingly constructive innovation.
In 2013, business magnate and engineer Elon Musk proposed hyperloop – a system of pods moving through low-pressure, sealed electromagnetic tubes at speeds of 1,220 km/h. This ‘fifth mode of transport’ promised speed, able to connect cities faster than a plane (imagine Copenhagen to Berlin in 29 minutes), but also energy and cost efficiency. A compelling vision, but one so radical that it would require a multitude of collaborating disciplines, extensive financial investment, much legal and regulatory maneuvering, and political and public backing. Perhaps understanding that a challenge of this complexity would require an unprecedented collective effort, Elon Musk released a white paper outlining the concept, effectively open-sourcing the design and inviting anyone to have a go at developing it. With so many hurdles between invention and innovation, and even more before hyperloop could be embedded in societal use, the concept demands an organic collaboration of actors that are able to overcome disciplinary boundaries and operate outside of mainstream industrial activities. Radical innovation requires radical collaboration. A hyperloop industry soon emerged, with engineers across the globe beginning to work through the details. Virgin Hyperloop One has been the main player since the outset, with extensive financial and technical resources, but other companies like Hyperloop Transportation Technologies are making progress with their army of engineers working in their spare time. There’s even a Reddit-based organization, rLoop, who intend to decentralize the technology with their ‘network collaboration’ of 1,300 engineers (they idealistically declare that ‘for radical innovations to be truly radical, they
39 Left - visualization of a proposed hyperloop portal by Bjarke Ingels Group Below - Virgin Hyperloop One’s prototype in Nevada. Photograph by Bjarke Ingels Group Following page photograph by Rasmus Hjortshøj – COAST
Design has an important role to play in this process of radical innovation, in its ability to visualize nascent concepts and give form to abstract but emerging ideas. Virgin Hyperloop One invited architects Bjarke Ingels Group to join their team for obvious reasons – BIG have built their brand on designing and visualizing forms that are determinedly novel. While the vast majority of architectural innovations are incremental in nature, Bjarke Ingels has long favored the radical, channeling his love of science fiction into projects like the Mars Science City. BIG’s task was to study how urban and inter-city hyperloop networks would integrate with existing mobility infrastructure, and what implications this would have on urban planning, transport hubs and the experience of travel more broadly. BIG’s proposals are envisioned for the UAE, perhaps the only
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must be decoupled from profit motives’). Together these organizations have pushed the hyperloop technology further in five years than train travel evolved in a hundred.
place with the financial resources and political audacity to make hyperloop a reality, and initial routes have been selected by passenger density and proximity to existing hubs. The main objective of BIG’s proposals is to ‘eliminate waiting from the passenger experience’. They have drawn up proposals for the pods with various seating arrangements for passengers, but their primary focus has been on the hyperloop stations, or ‘portals’. These portals are cyclical as opposed to linear, allowing the ‘transporters’ to move uninterrupted in a continuous loop. The small unit-size of these pods (up to 6 people) allows for a high arrival and departure rate, and these pods will operate independently from the transporter so that they can move on regular roads as autonomous vehicles. ‘With Hyperloop One we have given form to a mobility ecosystem of pods and portals, where the waiting hall has vanished along with waiting itself … With Hyperloop we are not only designing a futuristic station or a very fast train – we are dealing with an entirely novel technology with the potential to completely transform how our existing cities will grow and evolve – and how new cities will be conceived and constructed’ proclaims Bjarke Ingels BIG’s involvement in the project goes far beyond the design of the system’s portals, as they bring an architectural perspective to the more fundamental questions that hyperloop raises. They are speculating on the exciting (and
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terrifying) implications for cities that don’t have the growth limits they have now and could be connected across territories in new ways. BIG were employed to design the system’s nodes, but also to imagine the many possible futures that hyperloop might enable. While a fully functional hyperloop is still some years away, BIG and the team at Virgin Hyperloop One are reflective on the impact that the collaboration has already had on their working practice. In a panel discussion on future mobility at the Venice Biennale vernissage, Bjarke Ingels and Josh Giegel (head of engineering at Virgin Hyperloop One) struggle to hide their mutual admiration, with Giegel describing his ‘butterflies’ when they first met and Ingels speaking of his ‘epiphany that mechanical engineers dream!’. The project has demanded a multidisciplinary approach that has challenged their traditional roles and with it their usual skepticism of each other’s profession. This has had a lasting on BIG, who have recently taken the ‘BIG LEAP’ of integrating Landscape, Engineering, Architecture and Product (LEAP) into their practice.
The hyperloop odyssey continues to raise many exciting questions about the future of urban design, challenging perceptions of time and distance while promising plenty of unforeseen side-effects. But it also reveals the radical potential of crowd-sourced, multidisciplinary, distributed innovation, in which BIG become just one actor within a vast network of collaborators. This collective effort is bringing hyperloop’s realization ever closer, innovating mobility at an unprecedented speed.
Innovation by Design
BIG’s contribution to the Danish pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale might not be as radical as the system it is representing, but it seeks to describe some of hyperloop’s abstract concepts and provoke questions about its urban implications. An illustration explains the various elements of the hyperloop infrastructure. Highly engineered components evidence the fragmentation and convergence of traditional disciplines. A collage of images depict both realized prototypes and imagined futures. And a ‘zoetrope’ explains how at full speed, windows placed in the hyperloop tube will allow ‘solid to melt into transparent’, negating the need for digital windows.
Collaborative Innovation
Each of the project’s presented at the Danish Pavilion are examples of innovation through collaboration. The following pages detail each project’s collaborators.
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Albertslund South Client: Boligselskabet BO-VEST, Albertslund Boligselskab SYD Area: 94,254m² Year: 2013-2022 Location: Albertslund, Denmark Architect: Vandkunsten / Vandkunsten Landscape Collaborators: Boligforeningen AB Syd, Boligforeningen Vridsløselille Andelsboligforening, afdeling 4 Nord, Boligforeningen Vridsløselille Andelsboligforening, afdeling 4 Syd, Bo-Vest, Landsbyggefonden, Wissenberg AS, Ecosistema Urbano , Transolar, Imagine Envelope, LCA, Lise Gamst, Daniel Vedel, Albertslund Kommune, NCC AS, Energistyrelsen, EUDP, Formas, Nordic Built, Genbyg AS, Asplan Viak AS, Hjellnes Consult AS , Malmö Tekniska, KADK, CINARK Architect’s team: Søren Nielsen, Tanja Nors Tardrup, Rasmus Olsen, Klaus Richter Gydesen, Anders Paw Jensen, Van Anh Nguyen, Rasmus Voss Nyborg, Julie Gjettermann Bergelin, Mirjam Hallin, Katrine West Kristensen, Sofie Peschardt, Henriette Nielsen, Thomas Hansen, Casper Phillip Ebbesen, Thomas Nybo Rasmussen, Martin Erik Andersen Venice Biennale installation: Arkitekt Julie Hunæus Reuther, Arkitekt Asbjørn Lund, Arkitekt Hans Becker, Arkitekt Rasmus Gulløv, Arkitekt Søren Nielsen, Carl Hansen og Søn AS (udlån af stole), Lokalhistorisk Samling Albertslund (film), Fabrikken for Kunst og Design (værksted).
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Svinkløv Badehotel Client: Svinkløv Badehotel Year: 2016-2020+ Location: Svinkløv, Denmark Architect: Praksis Arkitekter Collaborators: Fonden for Svinkløv Badehotel, Kenneth Toft-Hasen og Louise Toft-Hansen, Kristine Jensens Tegnestue, Henry Jensen A/S, Hundsbæk og Henriksen A/S, Martin Funch Rådgivende Ingeniørfirma ApS, Building Air Flow Technology, Gade og Mortensen Akustik A/S, Jammerbugt Kommune, Naturstyrelsen Venice Biennale installation: Arkitekt Christina Capetillo, Snedker Niels Henning Bystrup, Kvadrat, GK Kaysen, Rene Schütze
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Isoropia Year: 2016-2018 Location: Venice, Italy / Copenhagen, Denmark Architect: CITA studio Collaborators: Kangaroo / Daniel Piker, the Department of Structural Design and Technology (KET), University of Arts Berlin, Fosters + Partners, Robert McNeel & Associates, Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Format Engineers and Mule Studio Venice Biennale installation: AFF – A. Ferreira & Filhos, SA, Str.ucture, DSM Dyneema B.V, Alurays Sponsors: Top Glass S.p.A., SIKA, Sofistik Support: Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science – Sapere Aude
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Hyperloop One Client: Virgin Hyperloop One Year: 2016-2020+ Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates Architect: Bjarke Ingels Group Collaborators: BIG IDEAS, Virgin Hyperloop One, Virgin Group, Aecom, Amberg Group, Arcturan Sustainable Cargo, Arup, Cargo Sous Terrain, Deutsche Bahn Engineering & Consulting, FS Links, Grid, KPMG, and Systra, Squint/Opera, TOMORROW. Architect’s team: Bjarke Ingels, Jakob Lange, Sören Grünert, Erik Berg Kreider, Adi Krainer, Ashton Stare, Cheyenne Vandevoorde, Cristian Lera, Daniele Pronesti, Derek Wong, Domenic Schmid, Evan Wiskup, Francesca Portesine, Hugo Soo, Kristian Hindsberg, Lam Le Nguyen, Lasse Kristensen, Linda Halim, Maureen Rahman, Ovidiu Munteanu, Pei Pei Yang, Ryan Duval, Stephen Steckel, Terrence Chew, Thomas Christoffersen, Veronica Moretti Venice Biennale installation: Virgin Hyperloop One
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Innovation in Renovation Materialising Innovation Innovation through Collective Remembrance Hyper Innovation
Innovation by Design
Words Benjamin Wells Editors Robert Martin / Benjamin Wells Š Danish Architecture Center / Arcspace All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Danish Architecture Center arcspace.com The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (KADK)
Innovation by Design
1 Innovation in Renovation 2 Materialising Innovation 3 Innovation through Collective Remembrance 4 Hyper Innovation
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