7 BUILT
9 For the City by Michael Speaks
16 Police Department, Antwerp
20 Gateway, Hangzhou
28 Premier Campus Office, Kagithane, Istanbul
35 Skating Without a Skateboard by Karen Wong
40 Harbor Bath, Copenhagen
42 Maritime Youth House, Copenhagen
46 Psychiatric Hospital, Elsinore
52 ‘The Gang’ School, Copenhagen
62 Holmenkollen Ski Jump, Oslo
72 Seabath, Faaborg
78 Kalvebod Waves, Copenhagen
86 Maison Stéphane Hessel, Lille
98 Pull-Pong 100 Stoop
103 Conceptual Housing by Karsten Ifversen 108 VM Houses, Copenhagen
191 UNBUILT
114 The Mountain, Copenhagen
124 Casa Jura, Bois d’Amont
134 Gangnam Gwell Officetel, Seoul
142 Hedonistic Rooftop Penthouses, Copenhagen
150 Ziggurat Housing N4, Paris
156 The Invader S4, Paris
158 The Iceberg, Aarhus
172 Secret House, Brussels
182 Crushed Bowls
182 Bat Lamp
184 Bone Chair
185 T.4.2
186 Accordion Trestles
188 Stacked Shelving
189 Flatable
193 50 Shades of Trace Unbuilt Projects, 2001–2017 by Julien De Smedt
257 Introspections by JDSA
323 Biographies
324 Project Data
326 Image Credits
327 Acknowledgments
FOR THE CITY   MICHAEL SPEAKS
Julien De Smedt exudes skater casual, an easy but serious attitude that suffuses all the work designed and made by JDSA and Makers with Agendas (MWA), the product design company he co-founded in 2013. Skateboarding is a rigorous, active form of urban engagement that trains the body and mind to scan, register and catalogue materials, surfaces, shapes, colors, terrain and urban space, and it provided the foundation curriculum that De Smedt completed before studying architecture more formally in Europe and North America. Which is to say that he was an urbanist before he was an architect. Given this formation, it is not surprising that the first and only architect De Smedt worked for before starting his own firm was Rem Koolhaas, an architect whose architectural ambitions are shaped by almost everything but architecture. As De Smedt observed about Koolhaas in a recent interview, ‘He was not dealing with architecture, he was engaging with society on a political, cultural and financial level, and that is his great contribution to architecture.’ This is also true for De Smedt whose focus is never on any single architecture or design solution but rather on the ‘agendas’ he sets to confront larger societal problems. ‘Nomadic Living’, one of four agendas identified by MWA, embraces the fact that we all live in smaller spaces for shorter periods of time, surrounded by fewer things. Eschewing the ‘smart cities’ approach that is today the default high-tech solution to seemingly every urban problem, MWA prefers a low-tech approach and has designed a series of products that enable more flexible, healthy and sustainable ways of living. All of the designs, from the zippy, urban commuter-focused Mike Bike and the T42 tea set, to the various furniture pieces – the Accordion Trestles, the Stacked Shelving – are responses to demands of movement, flexibility and economy. The Flat Table, a simple wooden table with recessed channels where the legs fit when folded, and which can be used for dining, office and display, is emblematic of the entire MWA collection. The products, especially the furniture, are light but durable and are easily assembled and (unlike IKEA products) disassembled, making them ideal for small spaces occupied for short durations. MWA products are well-designed and they are mobile, but they are also beautiful. And yet, for De Smedt, that is not the point. As he remarked in a lecture at the Syracuse University School of Architecture, ‘I am sensitive to beauty but not interested in it.’ De Smedt frequently insists that his products are ‘made’ not ‘designed’, meaning that they are not designed for aesthetic appreciation but are made for real life. Their attraction does not derive from their beauty but rather from their declaration as ‘just’ bikes, tables and teapots that you want to use. As if invoking the skater casual attitude of their maker, they seem to ask, ‘What else would you expect of a bike, table or teapot?’ The best contemporary design analogue are Vetements, the re-stitched DHL T-Shirts and Walmart-inspired sweat pants and hoodies ‘made’ by Demna Gvasalia, which assert nothing more than that they are ‘just clothes.’ Gvasalia, who heads the fashion collective Vetements, and who is also the artistic director of renowned Parisian fashion house Balenciaga, has led the effort among fashion designers to break with the prevailing theme-and-look-saturated, seasonally-driven, fashion ecosystem in favor of designing real, ordinary, often ugly, clothes. Like De Smedt’s MWA products (which, incidentally, are beautiful while Vetements are quite ugly), Gvasalia’s Vetements are compelling precisely 10
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Martin Margiela 1989 show in Paris. Photograph by Jean-Claude Couteausse.
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because they refuse to play the game in purely aesthetic terms. Like De Smedt, Gvasalia argues that his designs are not fashion items but are instead ‘just’ clothes that one chooses to wear. Of course, the danger is that the anti-aesthetic, ‘ugly look’ of Vetements will become just another fashionable style. Indeed, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that this is already occurring. Gvasalia studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and by training and lineage owes a great deal to designer Martin Margiela, a Belgian, like De Smedt, who revolutionized fashion in the late 1980s. Margiela deconstructed ordinary clothes, plastic grocery bags, and haute couture items, and reconstructed them all together to create garments that were so fresh they made everything at the time seem outdated and beside the point. His shows, especially the fall 1989 show, staged on a derelict playground in an immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris, were also revolutionary. In the 1989 show, neighborhood children walked with models (most of whom were friends rather than professionals) along an unfinished, uneven runway between dilapidated, graffitied buildings, with the Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks and classical music blasting in the background. One fashion writer described the scene as ‘a strange kind of bleak fairyland,’ where models wearing tailored jackets, tunics and dresses made from dry cleaning bags, mixed easily with North African and Indian locals and fashion press luminaries decked out in fur and stilettos. More interested in scripting reality than showcasing fashion, Margiela delivered – in the garments and in the shows – shock to a fashion system that had become formulaic and self-satisfied. For De Smedt agendas define the rules of design engagement. And that engagement is always with the urban, with the ‘exterior’ of architecture, product, and fashion design. Agendas are not styles
Mike (My Bike), 2013. Mike incorporates all the required features that make a bike allowed to hit the road, in its original design. No more awkward mismatch of lamps, lock, basket, etc. It also adds a few key functions such as gender neutral, a two seater saddle, a pill shape handle for cruising or speeding, etc. Every function of the bike is integrated into the bike’s DNA and a specially designed tray makes it possible to bike to an airport with your luggage.
SMARTPHONE DOCKING STATION PILL SHAPE HANDLE
COMFY 2 SEATER
CARRY-ALL TRAY
BACKBASKET
TAIL / HEAD LIGHTS WITH BLINKERS
CONVERTIBLE TO E-BIKE
REFLECTIVE WHEEL STRIPS
SHAFT-DRIVEN
EASY HOP ON / HOP OFF FRAME
INTEGRATED LOCK INTEGRATED KICKSTAND
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and they are not ideologies, and De Smedt’s insistence on them aligns him with what has become a generational rejection of the ‘isms’ that have dominated architecture since the 1980s – post-modernism, deconstructivism, minimalism, parametricism – in favor of approaches that, like Margiela’s, are more real and more procedural. Indeed, this turn toward the real, which began to take shape in the aftermath of the global economic crisis of 2008, the year Margiela retired, might actually be said to have begun twenty years earlier at the beginning of his career, with his 1989 show in Paris. No matter its beginnings, this turn to the real has become even more pronounced with the displacement of ideological ‘left vs right’ by more pragmatic ‘open vs closed’ categories now driving contemporary politics and culture. Open vs. closed very precisely defines the city against the hinterland, the inclusive against the exclusive, and the amateur against the professional, all of which can be traced to Margiela’s 1989 show. Gvasalia’s Vetements are part of this turn towards the real but, like the work of so many contemporary fashion designers, they reference and sometimes copy Margiela’s garments without understanding or even expressing interest in the rules of his design engagement. While Gvasalia’s vetements are ‘just clothes,’ they are clothes as fashion objects and are no less stylized than deconstructivist architecture, the vanguard style that held sway in the 1990s. Margiela, by contrast, refused to design fashion objects choosing instead to design garments with the conceptual and societal purpose of literally and figuratively opening fashion to the city and the city to fashion. Like skateboarding, the foundational grammar of De Smedt’s own procedural design approach, Margiela’s procedural deconstruction and reconstruction actively engages the high and the low, the luxury boutique and the urban detritus of the street, scanning, registering and cataloging its colors, surfaces and terrains, all to better facilitate this exchange and opening. Perhaps Margiela, too, was an urbanist before he became a famous designer. With PLOT, the office he co-founded with Bjarke Ingels in 2001, De Smedt pioneered a design approach that was decidedly realistic and procedural. The animations and illustration boards for projects like the Superharbor proposal for Denmark and Germany, and the VM Houses and the Mountain in Copenhagen, introduced a diagrammatic-narrative design and presentation idiom so fresh, realistic and easy to understand, that the proposals appealed to students and developers alike. Living up to their office name, there was a confidence, especially in the way these projects were presented (and perhaps designed), that made them seem almost inevitable. That is, if you followed the plot. It was surely this confidence and clear and determined sense of purpose that animated JDSA’s competition entry for the Holmenkollen Ski Jump, shrine to the pinnacle of Norwegian sport, overlooking Oslo. The proposal narrates the story of a design so simple and yet so singular that the jury awarded JDSA the commission even though they had never before designed anything of that scale and complexity, let alone that typology. Completed in 2011, the Holmenkollen Ski Jump was the first major built work by JDSA. Since then, JDSA has designed and built a surprising number of large projects, including the Iceberg (2014) in Aarhus, the Maison Stéphane Hessel (2016) in Lille, and most recently the Hangzhou Gateway, or Project H (2017), in Hangzhou, to name only a few. Though these projects, like all the built and unbuilt projects designed by JDSA, from the urban Stoop 13
street furniture now on Times Square in New York City, to the massive, 1,111 meters tall, Logistic City, in Shenzhen, are unique in the way each is made to respond to the rules of engagement set out by De Smedt, they are not ‘just’ architecture, like the MWA products are not ‘just’ bikes, tables and teapots, because all serve the larger societal ambition, shared by Koolhaas, Margiela and De Smedt, of creating more open, more inclusive, more sustainable forms of urbanity. This is perhaps most clear in two JDSA projects, one built, one unbuilt. The project description for the unbuilt Shenzhen Logistic City sums it up very well: ‘Is it about making the biggest building ever or understanding that at such a scale it is no longer about designing a building, but really an entire city.’ After many attempts to design the former, JDSA realized they needed to take on the latter. The project required a level of speculative ambition more commonly found in near future literature than architecture, and could only have been articulated and taken seriously in Shenzhen, and perhaps only before the 2008 crash. The brief called for the design of a super diverse and super dense vertical world, with shopping malls, markets, hotels, housing, parks, even weather – all the typologies associated with any city. It is hard to design a building and even harder to design a big building and almost impossible to design an entire city with the kind of finely grained urban detail of a Margiela show or a conversation between friends sitting on Stoop furniture near a basketball court. And yet, De Smedt decided to take on the task. As he remarked to me in an interview conducted earlier this year, ‘this was the most insane project we ever took on.’ Ultimately, however, the 2008 crash came, drawing a hard and thick line in Shenzhen between unbuilt and built. That same line was crossed in the other direction earlier this year, from unbuilt to built, when the H project was completed in Hangzhou. The ambition was to design a sustainable building that housed the primary client but that also connected market areas situated on either side of the building. Employing a simple, procedural design approach, De Smedt carved a gateway path through the building and twisted the volumes to form an ‘H’ which, serendipitously, was the first letter of the client’s company name. The move was simple, elegant, and good enough to gain entry into several prestigious building design prize competitions. It is a beautiful building, and it is not ‘just architecture.’ Perhaps that is the highest compliment one can pay to any JDSA building. Indeed, perhaps the highest compliment one can pay to De Smedt himself is to say that his most important contribution to architecture and design is that, like Rem Koolhaas, he is ultimately not dealing with architecture or design, but rather with society, with the city, and thus with people. These two projects also reveal another way in which De Smedt’s work, at least that collected in this monograph, is procedural. In this essay, I have used procedural in its adjectival form, meaning ‘of and related to procedure,’ in this case, the procedure of designing garments, products, buildings, and cities. But procedural is also a noun, used to refer to any realist crime novel or television drama with a specific focus that unfolds in episodes over time. Two good examples are Law and Order and CSI. In both of these popular American television serials, the drama of daily life is revealed in episodes that are connected by a legal or investigatory narrative thread which weaves them together to create the series. Drawing on this definition of procedural, one could, in fact, 14
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view this entire volume as part of a procedural of urbanity. Every project, whether built or unbuilt, contributes to an episode in the JDSA Agenda series, each season of which is collected in a monograph, this one being season two. Some episodes are set in Paris, some in Taipei, and some in Lexington, Kentucky; some feature single buildings, some urban plans, some commercial projects, while others reveal the details of everyday life, like swimming, eating, smoking or biking. In the procedural, however, all is fiction – story, scenes, and characters – and that is a good thing for De Smedt who seems very often to forget or not to consider the line between built and unbuilt. In his lectures, and in casual conversation, he treats the distinction with indifference, perhaps because the sheer quantity of projects in so many different locations, in so many different stages of conceptualization and development, makes it difficult to draw such lines. One could certainly come to that conclusion after visiting the JDSA website which catalogues a diz zying array of work. Or, perhaps it is because the diagrammatic-narrative design and presentation idiom invented at PLOT, and refined at JDSA, renders the projects so real and so inevitable that their status as built or unbuilt loses all meaning, even for De Smedt. What is more likely, however, is that for the skateboarding urbanist that lives deep inside the body and mind of architect and designer Julien De Smedt, distinctions between built and unbuilt, between products and architecture, even bet ween the fictional world of this monograph and the reality of the city, are conventions which are to be taken seriously but treated casually, to be maintained as part of his rules of design engagement, all in the service of urbanity. All for the city.
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Police Department, Antwerp 2014 In the heart of Oud-Berchem, in Antwerp – on the crossroad of two important axis – Statiestraat and Victor Jacobslei – the city needed a new police station. The outline of the project’s brief was intriguing at first: to design a facility for the police department
of Antwerp that would be able, in time, to convert to housing. The idea of isolating the main volume away from its neighbors is as much a desire to enter into a constructive contextual dialogue with the historical scenery as it is to emancipate its purpose as a potential transgender building.
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Gateway, Hangzhou  2016 This 16-floor office building is the size of its site with two voids traversing the building diagonally in plan, creating an H shape. The void through the bottom floors becomes an arch that serves as a covered plaza and
is oriented to create a pathway between two historic public spaces on either side. The top void creates a stepped park reminiscent of ancient Chinese rice-fields. It serves as rainwater retainer which re-uses water and cools down the building. It is oriented to provide views to the offices. Sunlight, access
to fresh air and outdoor space create a quality work environment. Structurally, the building is simple and economical. Two cores serve as supports, bracing the lower floor plates. The middle floor plates span the cores, acting as a beam, creating a stable platform to support the upper floors.
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Premier Campus Office in Kagithane, Istanbul 2017 The Kagithane project is formed to interact with its environment. It opens up to the neighborhood and offers plazas, intimate gardens and generous terraces. The volume of the block is literally carved out to invite the surroundings in. The local hilly
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landscape, characteristic of Istanbul, is continued in the meandering of the volume both in plan, adapting to the site’s edges, and in section, weaving a series of gentle curving slopes. The vibrant commercial life on the ground floor bursts out onto the plazas and the landscape. Upstairs, the offices open out onto terraces.
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SKATING WITHOUT A SKATEBOARD  KAREN WONG
Julien De Smedt quotes Bruce Lee, watches South Park and skates the streets he grew up on. At face value, these activities have little to do with the practice of architecture. Yet the poetry of a tragic martial arts icon figures prominently in De Smedt’s monograph Agenda (Actar Publishers) proposing a philosophy of his work as a continuum of Lee’s belief, ‘formless, shapeless like water. Put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. Put water into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or creep, or drip, or crash. Be water my friend.’ De Smedt moves from the meditative to the absurdist when he imagines each of his staff members not as super heroes but as part of the large ensemble cast of South Park. In equal parts of humility and humor, De Smedt envisions himself as a dishevelled everyman (albeit in a beaten up Fedora) clutching in one hand, a cell phone and in the other, his trusted skateboard. And what of skating? Somewhere between sport and art, skateboarding’s West Coast origin is rooted in surfing (what am I to do when the weather is cold?). It has worn a number of guises over the decades; first recreational, then rebellious, moving to commercial success as an extreme sport, and now global recognition – an Olympian first-timer in Tokyo 2020. De Smedt grew up skating in the late 80s, an era defined by risk takers like Mark Gonzalez and Rodney Mullen who reinvented skating for the streets. It was simple and provocative – plazas, curbs, street furniture, railings and stairs were all opportunities to co-opt public space as their own. Viewed by many as a menace, street skating has often been characterized as a disruptive sport as it laid bare prejudices of government and community. Philosopher Michel de Certeau describes skateboarding as a spatial practice, a certain play within a system of defined places. Skating’s misuse of architecture is daringly playful and it remains shapeless (like water) until you define its intentionality by creating a trick. Its bipolar nature of intense physicality of jumping and flipping, and the informal elegance of fluid lines drifting and curving is well documented in thousands of YouTube videos spanning the last forty years. Street skaters have often been characterized as actors in a city. They immerse themselves in their respective environments, in search of a performance that is marked both by an attitude of defiance and the beauty of dance. Skaters disobey gravity and bend rules resulting in an unexpected relationship with municipal infrastructure. Their exploration and interaction with a city form a multiplicity of duets, translating a lonely park bench into a springboard for a jump up and a jump down, or having a defensive barrier become a sustained partner in a long fluid grind. De Smedt’s unbridled passion for skateboarding resonates as a collection of subliminal tactics in his architectural practice. As a skater, he has explored what forms and functions make a city click. As an architect he creates structures that encourage performative actions. Many of his projects question the status quo and yield built work that highlights spaces for social exchange. In 2002, not yet 30 (in architectural years a teenager), De Smedt’s studio, PLOT, took first prize with their design for the Maritime Youth House on the edge of the Øresund Stray in Copenhagen. They had to satisfy two clients, a youth center that wanted play areas and a sailing club that required space to moor their boats. The quandary, what to 36
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do with a site with polluted soil where the clean up would eat away your budget? With a skater’s mentality, De Smedt flipped the problem into a solution by focusing on a new surface condition. He took the double brief of play and mooring and divided it into what’s on the underside and what’s on top. A wooden deck was designed over the site in which ‘wave’ ramps resulted in spaces under the roof for boats while the surface above translated into a miniature park for kids to roll, run and even bike. One rarely has the opportunity to iterate upon a built work in the same town on a different body of water, but that’s exactly what happened in 2014 when JDSA launched the project Kalvebod Waves. This more ambitious project is an interloper. On a once gloomy harborfront, two plazas now stretch onto the waterfront with diagonal piers and connect back to an uninviting office complex. The intervention is now a lively communal hub of waterfront activity. If one didn’t know any better, the aerial perspective of Kalvebod Waves appears to be a skater’s paradise of long sinuous lines that dip back in and out. De Smedt has mapped out a generous layered program of water and recreational activities that include kayaking, diving, water polo, biking, rollerblading and sunbathing. This active public engagement revels in a solution that takes care to avoid the office buildings’ long shadows, thus maximizing time spent in the sun. This shared pedestrian boardwalk bridges public to private; water to land; and formal to informal. With these two sister projects, De Smedt has relied on a fundamental of street skating, creating content that is shaped by context. He relies on basic materials that generate a dexterous solution – connecting communities with the harbor. De Smedt makes public space synonymous with play, providing performative architecture that encourages city dwellers to become actors in their own backyard. Informality and play are constant riffs in De Smedt’s projects large and small. These include Stoop, a public bench that takes the form of three tiered steps that double as seating and table. In skateboarding, stairs are a favorite conquest in the urban landscape – a rite of passage is to ollie down a set of stairs. This wedged shaped object works best in multiple, as in a ring of Stoops that sets the stage of an urban auditorium. The Stoop can animate public space for two people who want to sit for a picnic, or better yet accommodate a larger group for an informal town hall. While the Stoop lives outdoors in parks, basketball courts and plazas, Pull-Pong sits comfortably in homes and offices. There is no better mascot of a tech start-up than a ping-pong table. The recreational equipment is a justified office expense because it doubles as conference table, but it never quite works because the scale is too big, the dimensions rather awkward. De Smedt resolves this like a kick-flip by simply folding the ping pong table in half and sliding two legs closer to the other pair to fit the slimmer proportions of a dining table for eight. The dual solution is a hallmark of De Smedt’s designs on whatever scale. The Maritime Youth House surfaces are both floor and roof while the Kalvebod Waves are both boardwalks and frames for urban pools. Shifting scales again, the Maison Stéphane Hessel in Lille, France is 7,000 square meters of an imaginatively carved-out concrete building that employs a number of visual tricks. This imposing form on a difficult triangular site at first glance resembles a contemporary fortress. 37
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And that’s not entirely inaccurate as it’s a protective space for three social programs that include nursery, youth hostel and incubator involving three generations of user groups. De Smedt sites the programs at the tips of the triangle and lifts the volume, creating generous entranceways into the building. The various communities literally and metaphorically meet in the middle where an expansive courtyard has been excavated. Glass is used effectively throughout the building and the interior, bringing in maximum light and creating an abundance of sight lines so activities generate connectivity. Circulation is treated in a similar manner; sculptural stairwells zigzag, creating moments of respite for benching or overhangs to peer onto other floors. At the building’s top, De Smedt continues to shave and scoop. The nursery funnels into a roof garden for children activities; the youth hostel steps back, making way for balconies; while the incubator space maximizes square footage with a dramatic sloping ceiling. De Smedt skilfully pairs two principal attributes of a skater, muscularity and elegance, into a powerful building form that hosts a myriad of strategies for a mixed-use brief. Dynamism and performance are interlocked in the Holmenkollen Ski Jump in Oslo, Norway. There are several typologies within the architectural canon that though obscure are highly desirable commissions, including parking garages, fire stations and yes, ski jumps. Ski jumps come with an intrinsic burden – there are a number of regulations and predetermined details that make them both safe and officially competitive for major championships. De Smedt and his team digested the information and then started to hack it. It’s a mentality that De Smedt often assumes; to push boundaries, find loopholes, test variations in order to derive a better, more creative outcome. By its nature, a ski jump is monumental and iconic. It rises up into the sky – a platform for mere mortals to defy gravity. The form of the ski run, to conjure flight, is just one of many components of a world championship ski jump. From the skier’s lounge to the public viewing areas, from the souvenir shop to the existing museum, from the judges’ and commentator booths to the Royal Family box, it’s a complicated brief that De Smedt gallantly coalesces into a shape resembling a Brontosaurus. This robust dinosaur has a small head and long neck emerging from a stout belly that gives the animal its commanding identity. The diagram of the ski jump is similarly set up – the top of the run is long and skinny and transitions at the knoll to form a wider dimension for landings that finish in a deep girth accommodating thousands of spectators. It’s a broad spectrum of work – youth centers, board walks, intergenerational community hub and a ski jump that embeds retail, cultural and entertainment – that De Smedt handles with equal deftness and clarity. Like his skating mentors Mullen and Gonzalez, he delves into and absorbs context to then deliver content. Street skating and architecture seek to re-envision the mundane by evoking community and social engagement.
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The design of Copenhagen's Harbor Bath emerged out of a desire to extend the surrounding park onto the water while also adhering to practical needs of public acces sibility and safety. People come to the Harbor
Bath to socialise, swim, play and enjoy the sun. This means that not only should the water be able to accommodate interactive and playful activities but the decks should also be generous. The bath is constructed of renewable indigenous wood from Scandinavian forests
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Harbor Bath, Copenhagen  2002
and is easily removable, as it is built upon floating pontoons. Unlike a swimming hall, the Harbor Bath consumes very little utility energy for operation and maintenance: it is instead dependent on the exertion of human energy.
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their boats. Cleaning the polluted soil on the site was seen as a necessity but would cost one quarter of the overall project budget. We proposed to cover the entire site with a wooden deck, thus protecting kids from the heavy metals in the soil while making pockets
Maritime Youth House, Copenhagen 2004 Two functions are joined in this facility: a sailing club and a youth house. The youth house wants outdoor space for children to play while the sailing club needs space to park
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of spaces for storing the boats as the deck undulates. Our concept allows for storage and indoor functions underneath and playground above. The roof of the interior spaces doubles as walkable, playable, usable space on the exterior.
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50 SHADES OF TRACE UNBUILT PROJECTS, 2001–2017 BY JULIEN DE SMEDT
The work that hasn’t made it to the built world might be imagined as a sort of architectural cemetery. Yet, in these coming pages, I’ll be telling tales of the projects that remain unrealized, the many bends and humps in the road that bumped some projects out of the realm of possibility. Why bother doing this – some kind of masochistic indulgence? Actually, it feels like the opposite. At a time when ideology and idealism is being challenged more than ever, the realm of ideas and concepts as a possible path to progress is worthy of exploration, revisiting and even recovering those beams of optimism which, even if they fell by the wayside, lit up the road along the way. So, that being said: It all started with a movie.
‘Shortcut’ Research 2001.
In 1997, Bjarke [Ingels] and I were working at OMA 24/7. In our short breaks from the endless foam and cardboard modeling and the spiraling research familiar to anyone who has entered the hallowed Heer Bokelweg block, we would discuss ideas. All sorts of ideas. After our first encounter – an intense one year internship in Rem Koolhaas’ Rotterdam HQ – I moved to London to study at the Bartlett, while Bjarke went back to do the same in Copenhagen. We stayed in touch. The Bartlett system was such that I was stuck in school for an extra year. That meant I finished a year after Bjarke – who had returned to OMA right after school – and when the time came, I invited him to join my final review panel. I thought that an OMA mindset would create an interesting clash with Peter Cook. That trip allowed us to develop various ideas, including some movie-related projects that I’d been working on as part of my thesis. Shortly after that, on a weekend trip to visit Bjarke in Rotterdam, I passed by OMA on Saturday and got hijacked by my friend Dan Wood (a former colleague, with whom I worked on OMA’s McCormick Tribune IIT Campus Center). He invited me to come back to the practice for a pro ject in collaboration with the New York-based practice Diller + Scofidio (Renfro was a project leader at the time). It sounded interesting. I met up with Rem on Sunday; by Monday I was on a plane to New York. The project was to develop, together with Diller + Scofidio, the neighborhood around the Brooklyn Academy of Music; the two teams would act as one, moving between Rotterdam and New York every two weeks.
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That gave me plenty of time to get acquainted with the team members, especially Charles [Renfro], who remains a very close friend to this day, as well as Matthias Hollwich, another OMA alumni. But it also gave Bjarke and I the opportunity to resume our discussions as I moved into the apartment he shared in Rotterdam. It led to both of us quitting OMA six months later. We started PLOT the next day. For the first month, we crashed at my mom’s place in Brussels. Our plan was to make a movie, a mash-up, assembling a film from existing footage. We worked on it for a few weeks and when Zentropa (Lars Von Trier’s production company) showed some interest, we quickly shifted operations to Copenhagen. There, we got ourselves a tiny live-work studio and shared a teaching position in architecture at the Art Academy. During that period we worked further on the movie concept, constantly applying for grants and funding from various foundations. And while we waited to hear back, we began to enter a series of open competitions, the kind that really started to fuel international architecture at the time. Six months down the line, the movie had received little funding – but together, we had won nearly all competitions we entered. It seemed that we were architects, after all.
Etecture, 2001.
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Our first win was on an interesting and at the time, highly pertinent question: ’What is the relationship of architecture to information technology?’ Our proposal was to set up an online platform where architects could upload and sell house designs to a large and public audience. The projects would be curated (by the platform) and their features could be adapted, using various tools from parametric design to chat rooms and menus to customize almost everything. Our target was to address the single-family housing market, especially in the US where 95 percent of homes are built by providers motivated by the lowest common denominator, and in pursuit of profits. Nothing wrong with making a buck, but architecture simply gets lost in that particular set-up. Our platform was a way to empower architects to engage directly with the market.
Photograph by Michael Foran of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
The last of our competition wins was also the first to turn into a bona fide commission, for the Aalborg Aqua Center. That project was pivotal in many ways: for one, we started hiring staff – we were joined by a couple of our students, Gudjon Kjartansson and Thomas Christoffersen – and set up shop in a corner of a ‘collective studio’ in Vesterbro, Copenhagen – this being the social-democratic wonderland of Denmark. It was the summer of 9–11 and we sat together in front of the TV, absorbing with horror the events in New York City. The city was scarred forever. The bizarre vanishing of two buildings I had held a fascination for since I visi ted them in the freezing New York winter, for the first time, when I was thirteen. Our office came into existence at the birth of an era of terror. One that has only been gaining momentum since. Reeling from shock, we moved to a proper office space nearby – to be able to present ourselves properly to our first real client. We hired an experienced project manager, Finn Nørkjær, and discussed with him the terms of the contract as well as the needs of the team. We had next to no clue about what it takes to realize such a large project – even though it was only 5,000 square meters. We furnished our new offices with newly acquired computers and a half dozen ‘extras’ – newly hired interns and architects – to reassure our prospective client. As they entered, the main guy’s first question to Finn was, ’Where are the toilets?’ Finn’s honest answer: ’I don’t know’. Finn hadn’t visited our freshly-painted office before. We were unmasked. But that didn’t stop us from eventually closing the deal.
Aalborg Aqua Center, 2001. The water is used as the defining element for the building’s architecture.
Our main take on pool culture was to allow the water element to be the guiding force of design. Firstly, we inverted the idea of a pool as being a hole dug into the ground with water in it: our program was a lake surrounding an island of dry space. All other programmatic elements were subordinate to the presence of water, contained in a pragmatic set of beams floating above the lake and linking back to the adjacent sports center. Work continued at a high pace for the next year and a half. Through multiple revisions, explorations, losses and improvements, we brought the project to its final detailed phase. Contractors were chosen; nearly 20 million Danish Crowns were spent on all the necessary consultants to reach the point of starting construction. Two weeks prior to breaking ground, there was an election and the political leadership changed hands. One of the new mayor’s first decisions was to can the project, even as the cranes and workers’ barracks were being erected. We had just had our first real experience of the negative influence of politics on architecture and for the city.
Aalborg Aqua Center, 2001. Model photographs. Programmatic beams float above the water, containing the changing rooms, the spa and connecting the Aqua Center to the neighboring sports center.
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However, by then the project had acquired a fair amount of notoriety, both nationally and internationally. We had often concluded our lec tures with a description of it. We decided to bet on that bit of visibility, starting a campaign to try to sell the project to another municipality. During the course of the next year, we literally dragged that lake across the breadth of Denmark, knocking on doors, and often receiving an enthusiastic response. We eventually landed in Odense where the project was accepted in an ongoing urban development and adapted to fit the local conditions. But once again politics turned sour. The project was forever canned. Happily, throughout that lengthy process, other things had moved along back at the office: the Copenhagen harbor bath was completed and the Maritime youth house and VM Houses were well on the way.
Dogville Cannes Party Design, 2004. Above Model photographs of mirrored ceiling. Below Floor plan organization.
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About the time when Lars Von Trier’s Dogville was nominated for Cannes, in 2003, our relationship with Zentropa suddenly rebooted. The com pany decided to throw a party on the Croisette and my friends Jonas Hartz, Jacob Wildschiødtz and Satoru Hinoue were hired to arrange the event. They reached out to me to design the setting. It was an hilarious, exciting and somehow disturbing experience to work on such a frivolous event. But we had seen the movie at a private screening and we loved it. We all started brainstorming about the party and quite quickly it became clear that the movie itself was the answer to a low-budget, one-off event: we decided to arrange the room using white markings delineating where the various spaces were laid out. The ceiling would be a huge mirror, allowing partygoers to read the layout of the place. As we approached deadline, we heard that the event was canceled. The rumor was that Nicole Kidman had insisted on Zentropa flying her to Cannes in a private jet, a cost equivalent to the party’s whole budget. We never found out the truth (I hold no grudge against Nicole Kidman. She deserved it. Though we’re pretty sure she’d rather have had the party we had planned for her.)
Grand Museum of Cairo, 2002.
This little extravaganza happened as we were moving into a new phase of entering competitions. The Grand Egyptian Museum of Cairo was an open international competition with 1,300+ entrants and we had no budget to pay anyone to work on it at the office. So Bjarke and I decided to turn this into a holiday trip and went to visit the site, climbing Mount Sinai, scuba-diving in the blue hole and getting ripped off in Cairo’s markets. Upon return we formed a team and dove deeper into the project, into the exhilarating and seemingly endless mass of artefacts this museum would have to organize and display. In our proposal, artefacts and exhibitions were organized along a chronological timeline, which wrapped into a continuous spiral ramp. The ramp began with the prehistoric, widening at each turn to accommodate the increasing body of knowledge and artefacts as the timeline approached modern-day Egypt, ending in a roof oasis with spectacular views of present-day Cairo and the Giza pyramids. With geometric inevitability, the building took the shape of an inverted pyramid. The narrative of the exhibit could be experienced chronologically or as a ‘best-of’ overview. The voided center would allow visitors to look across time at past events and future episodes. Five themes offered a series of separate routes moving irregularly across the interior of the pyramid, and each thematic route was visually coded with guardrails of the same material texture and design. For the impatient visitor, a ‘Greatest Hits’ route presented highlights from Egyptian history, arranged around a grand staircase that covered one internal face of the inverted pyramid in its entirety. This was made possible by shifting the apex of the inverted pyramid, thus allowing for the right rise for the stairs – as a bonus, it also provided an amazing shaded space in the outside entrance area, cooling the queues of tourists and passers-by. Another project that stands out from that intense initial period, is the Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen. When the competition was announced, PLOT was approached by Nikolaj Cederholm – then the ‘enfant terrible’ of Danish theater – to team up and create a coup, a critical proposal for the future of the national stage. Needless to say, we were thrilled at the prospect. 198
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Nikolaj marshalled an entire army of theater consultants, actors and other local celebrities of stagecraft. It was grandiose. Our meetings often counted 20 or more people. What was common to all was a desire to innovate, break the rules and turn their own discipline upside down. Each aspect of the project was subject to our typically critical and constructive approach. The project’s core principle was clear: the budget was to be prioritized for maximum artistic experience over invisible technical prowess. The site for the project was a shabby pier that needed a lot of reinforcement and attention. Additionally, the parking area would involve tremendous expense as it would have to be sunk and therefore protected from the surrounding harbor waters. We discovered that for a fraction of the cost, we could build a huge barge in Poland to contain the parking program and then ship it to Copenhagen. That barge could then simply be placed alongside the pier. The 400 meters-long concrete pier had formerly been the docking site of massive cruise ships. What better way to maintain the drama of vast open spaces with grand moving structures than to create a floating theater? Or better yet, a hovering theater, built on a floating platform whose volume is suspended above the water. The Royal Danish Theater could fulfil its stately role by accompanying the royal family on their annual summer boat tour around Denmark, or by giving special guest performances in other cities in the region. A floating theater required a similarly dynamic, fluid and expressive interior. No more dead corridors. No more time wasted in changing sets. For the staff: maximum creativity. For the audience: an immersive performative and scenographic experience. Inspired by the orchestration
Royal Theater of Copenhagen, 2002.
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of moving parts in the industrial harbor, the performance spaces were designed to maximize flexibility, allowing for new possibilities to engage background, audience and performers. Moving elements allowed stages to expand and contract both vertically and horizontally. The theater could even admit the harbor into its scenery by opening the back of the stage onto the skyline, opening the roof to form an open-air stage, and sliding away parts of the floor to reveal the water below. After a long judging process, we lost the project. It turned out to be an example of when the rationale goes too far and scares people off; the jury apparently thought we had the best theater but simply didn’t dare to have it float, even though all our research showed it would be more pragmatic. Kent Martinussen, CEO of the Danish Architecture Center, who headed the jury, told us: ‘If only you had kept it on land…’ Our answer was heartbrokenly simple: ‘You could have just asked!’ Around that time, construction had begun on our Elsinore psychiatric hospital, and the PLOT office had grown to 50 strong. Bjarke and I were already spending a lot of time on the road, still mostly together, piloting teams remotely.
Vejle harborfront housing, 2003.
In 2003 we worked on an entirely new harbor masterplan for the city of Vejle. One of the first tasks of this project was to address a harbor-front site facing the flying bridge connecting Copenhagen and Aarhus. The site truly had the potential, and almost a duty, to become the city’s new picture-postcard image as it sat firmly in the view finder frame from the bridge’s road. The program was to be housing; our masterplan proposed five individual buildings along the waterfront, separated by sufficient space to view the city between them. The five buildings together spelled the city’s name: VEJLE. As if the Hollywood sign could become a real place of use and life, a true token of local identity, growth and culture.
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As we neared the closing of the bid, two projects remained in the competition: ours and the Wave by Henning Larsen Architects. In the end the municipality, probably rightly, thought that they wouldn’t reach sufficient capacity to immediately need all five buildings and possibly felt that spelling their own name would in time be a strange communication of the city’s development. And what if they never finished the project? ‘VEJ…’
Mixed-use tower in Namur, 2014.
OSLO harborfront housing, 2006. Diagramatic model.
Proposal to convert parts of the exi sting Brussels administrative city with two housing towers, 2007.
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Since then, buildings in the shape of letters have appeared several times in our work. Fast forward a few years, and we’re in Brussels, my hometown, working on one of our first major projects. Not as PLOT but as JDSA. Belgium is at that moment in a state of political crisis, making headline news across the world for not having a government at all. (Our stateless state is actually revealed to be doing better financially without governance. But of course, money isn’t everything; eventually our political con flicts are resolved and a new government is formed.) In this precarious and shivering state of uncertainty, we entered a large scale housing competition on the prominent site of Brussels’ Administrative City. Our project is to make two towers, each with two elevated gardens to allow for intimate outdoor space in a site of grandiose yet agoraphobic emptiness. The buildings take the shape of a B and an E. It felt right at the time. The country needed signs of stability. In retro spect, it was too literal – but the fact that the project would sit on a plinth, overlooking the city, paradoxically made it more digestible: a sort of monument to Belgium, one which allowed for inhabitation, even making its inhabitants become the monument, in their day-to-day life. Thinking about it, it’s not so different from the Atomium, one of the only two other real monuments in Belgium. The second one being the Manneken Pis, a 61cm tall toddler busy peeing (and also known as Le Petit Julien). So in Belgium, apparently, we like tiny human figures or massive inhabited symbols – or using letters of the alphabet as monuments. Years later, this theme was readdressed in a waterfront proposal spelling OSLO and then again, in a more subtle tower project for the city of Namur, where only the capital ‘N’ was retained.
BUILT UNBUILT by Julien De Smedt and Julien Lanoo
© 2017 Frame Publishers, Amsterdam, 2017
Publisher Frame Publishers
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