In Asia, he stacks entire blocks of architecture on top of each other as if they were houses of cards, built the 314-meter-high skyscraper Maha Nakhon in 1018, at least the second tallest building in Bangkok, and in 2012, as a partner of Rem Koolhaas’ office OMA, created the headquarters of Chinese state television in Beijing. High time to make the “Lord of the Towers”, as Ole Scheeren is called, not necessarily to his delight, better known in Germany as well. The Center for Art and Media in his hometown of Karlsruhe now takes care of that. The “Spaces of Life” exhibition will open there on December 10th.
Of course, there will then be the presentation of the residential development “The Interlace”, which won the Urban Habitat Award in 2014 as the world’s best high-rise project for urban living, followed by the award “World Building of the Year” a year later. If you look around in the global architectural landscape, you will automatically come across buildings by the 51-year-old, who has had his own office since 2010. Today he has branches in Beijing, Hong Kong and Bangkok, the German headquarters are in Berlin-Moabit.
Scheeren thinks architecture differently. This is what makes his designs so exciting. If the clients of “The Interlace” actually expected that he would place twelve towers in a row for the 1040 planned residential units on 170,000 square meters, he instead thought of the building task horizontally and created courtyards with gardens. When asked by the art magazine Monopol, which recently featured him in a major interview, whether the high-rise still has a purely ecological future, he replied: “We have to vehemently question the high-rise as a pure multiplication of a small plot of land. In reality, the high-rise as a tool for densification still plays a major role.” And he pointed out that, alongside ecological sustainability, social sustainability should not be neglected.
An exciting master builder, who was already allowed to work in the office of his architect father, Dieter Scheeren, at the age of 14. The Karlsruhe exhibition illustrates the “historical dimension” of his work on the one hand, and the sculptural character of his buildings on the other.
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Source: Tagesspiegel
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