Lecture by David Chipperfield

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Lane Shanghai and Milan rapport a young CEO group early on thoughtful genome occasional music like in Sweden a news museum the burner the Sun camisa here the Libyan and architecture Devon is on the reduce the number pretty Lawton it is ok homes and architecture in event a intelligent but tonight our guests no introduction ladies and gentlemen please now give a warm welcome to Sir David Allen Chipperfield [Applause] thank you very much that was very dramatic I felt sorry yeah don't want to press the wrong things here try to put this well I'm short don't you have something better to do you could be watching brexit on TV it's happening now much more important well thank you very much for coming and thank you so much for this invitation as I get older I find it more difficult to talk about my work which is strange because I thought it would get easier and I think this is for a number of reasons firstly as a young architect you are very enthusiastic to privatise your you know in a way convince people of your intellectual credentials and your professional credentials and hope hopefully this gets you more work somehow these events don't get you any more work so and I know that but but you know there as a younger architect you somehow feel like you you're you've you've got to explain yourself and it's an opportunity and it's a fantastic opportunity to explain yourself and I think it's a very good discipline to explain yourself I think that has to be part of our craft or skill or actually you know the way we relate to others I don't mean to be ungrateful I'm very you know honored that you should come here but I'm just saying that it's more difficult for me as I get older and maybe this is just you know as we know more we know less there is an enthusiasm as a young architect that you think you know everything and of course as you get older you you you know this um I think there's another aspect which is that when you start your practice as an architect your vision your destination is the next building your achievement is defined by the project that's in your hand that's that's the next project the next idea that doesn't change on the other hand as you develop an office and a practice and as you move in away from a sort of adolescence to middle age and you you you sort of have another responsibility to practice which is in a way to demonstrate through the collective work the body of work an approach to architecture so whereas in the beginning in a way you're jumping like from rock to rock building to building once you get to a certain point in a practice I think you have another responsibility which is the responsibility of a stable practice which is first of all to us to secure stability but secondly to define the potential of the profession and not just the importance of our in-studio and that's a little bit what I want to talk about to begin with I will show some projects don't worry I'm going to show four projects but first I want to talk about the role of practice what is architectural practice so I've said that my discomfort or not discomfort but my way of talking about architecture in my opinion for me his has changed for two reasons one is an autobiographical and the second one is more siyul although I believe that both are intricately related and that is that as a profession I think we've we have a crisis of relevance I think increasingly we we are struggling to to understand how we can contribute and of course this relevance is in sharper focus given the challenges that society given the challenges to society that are you know in a sharper focus the profession has been focused on lavished commissions and aesthetically pleasing objects while as a society we increasingly and existentially are confronted by issues of environmental sustainability and social inequality we cannot ignore the need to reposition our profession and yet how can we do this while we are inevitably embedded as we will are in the framework of conventional practice and complicit in its problems as well as its potential contribution the practice of architecture could be described quite simply as a professional act when we bid when we build we are secured as is our client by a contract this contract defines our duties and responsibilities however our role the role of architecture is not so simply described so we have a simple professional responsibilities but I think we all know that that doesn't limit or define actually our cultural responsibility however our role the role of architecture is not so simply described while each project may be the way to realize or investigate years and responsibilities architectural practice requires or should require us to create or confirm our more general ambitions that should direct that should direct individual activities of practice here lies the real challenge of our profession we must address two forces that pull at us on the one hand we are expected to act individually and creatively to show our talents to demonstrate originality in order to be acknowledged on the other hand we must make work that is intelligible to the collective that must contribute to the good of society despite these apparent responsibilities we have seen over the last 40 years the role of the profession being isolated and our social engagement being reduced this process mirrors that of society itself an increasing emphasis on the individual and a reduction in the importance of the collective there are always exceptions thank God but as a why generation generalization we can we can say that there has been a gradual reduction in the role of the public sector as a force defining our built environment and a parallel increase in the power and influence of the private sector some years ago I was the director of the Venice Biennale and I tried to address this issue of practice of what is our responsibility as architects as a collective profession not as a group of individuals it was my assertion that both architects and architecture had become obsessed with image and identity that the market the architecture market if you want had encouraged and does encourage everybody to make identifiable objects I feel that I mean I'm often in a room sometimes after competitions late at night in a bar with five other competing architects talking about why we all lost the competition or who won the competition and inevitably we talk about the same issues we share the same frustrations we have the same concerns so in common ground which was my biennale thesis I wanted to I encouraged architects not to show why they were different from other architects but why they were similar to other architects not what separated us but what combined us my sense was that previously built the Biennale was like a sort of showroom of talent that each architect was like a market seller showing that they are better than the next one so I wanted to encourage architects to put their guns down as it were and to present our profession in a much more coherent way and secondly the common ground not just between us as a profession but the common ground between us and society which is maybe an even bigger issue and that's something I want to talk about at midpoint I insisted that no architect was allowed just to showcase their latest museum just to showcase their latest project in Abu Dhabi or wherever just a showcase their talent but every submission had to deal with an issue about the common the commonality things which we share professionally and this was I'm not going to go through this in-depth but I was really happy that in the end just about every architect tried to demonstrate how they are connected within something we might call an architectural culture I even got Zaha bless her soul may she rest in peace even gods are hard to demonstrate her [Music] debt to people that had taught her and in a way the the example student so she did a very beautiful room which was full of projects of architects and engineers which she admired her own project and then projects by students and people who had who had been influenced her which I felt was a very generous contribution this project is Hertzog and emeralds rum which they wear they showed the designs for the Philharmonia in in hamburg and they had a few models showing the spaces but the main part of the exhibition was all of the press these are all and few if you know about the Hamburg film I'm sure you know about the scandal of this project was that it was way over budget the city was in in big stress about it it was a very big argument in Hamburg and big enough to fill thousands of newspaper articles but of course in the end the project was built and successful they wanted to demonstrate in a way the dialogue the difficulty of of building a major project major public project although with private finances they wanted to show this the difficulty of communicating the ambitions of a project and the politics and the community issues that go behind such a project that was a very interesting process in Britain we have seen the most explicit in the most explicit manner the result of a softening of the planning structure a reluctance to prescribe in control development and rather C planning as a restricted discussion about singular buildings rather than setting out the proper city plan the convention of traditional city planning urban planning has not been able to adapt to the desire to encourage private investment which inevitably pushes against restriction planning requires commitment resource and political vision and you know this was the view from our office we've moved office recently but this was the view from our old office and in front of us you know every day we see the city developing we see buildings going up people will ask me in London you know who's living in these buildings what are they for who's who decides these things it's this is not the city I imagine I can't explain it as an architect so how the citizens come to terms with this problem how to how do you as a Londoner understand what's happened to your city as it changes in front of you not out of need these most of these buildings now are apartments they're not housing people they're housing investments this is global money finding a safe in London Londoners are not asking for this they're not demanding this these are the pressures of investment so how can we re orientate re coordinate economic pressures of the free market and the requirements and the expectations of citizens in London it's a it's a conflict the tendencies of the market are not towards collective action but towards efficient and uncomplicated realization the market doesn't build communities and if there isn't a vision then we get planning that is directed towards practicality of investment not a user or of society the problem is twofold firstly it moves focus and development into the soft territory of our cities the easily exploitable the maximum rewards with the least engagement this is a harvesting exercise of land value by the private sector and secondly the harder territory the difficult territory of our towns and cities of our built-in social environment is forgotten and sidelined areas that have been left behind the normal concerns of society of normal housing building community and a sense of place are not in this focus so if you don't have planning and you leave it to the market we get all of these different versions and at the same time we get places left behind if you don't know what bricks is about and I don't know what breaks is about but brexit is a lot about communities that feel left behind the communities that who have not benefited from the exploitation of land value have not benefited from the things which are happening in the parts of parts of the world where we're architects and and and planners are operating they are suffering in places where we're not operating I suppose again one of the reasons that I find it increasingly difficult to talk about architecture or our work is that I think as an architect you you you have to take on we have to take on you have to take on issues which are not necessarily precisely connected to our daily tasks we can you know in a way I'm sort of I miss the old days of being an architect where you just had to build a building we now have to really focus ourselves on societal and environmental issues we have to be able not to protect ourselves in our offices but we actually have to find a way of operating or at least stepping out of our office and finding ways to regain our societal value and importance and so I try to do that it's a it's a it's a it's a pathetic attempt in a way but there are a number of things that I've done so there's something that to be an ally as an attempt time and I will show you another attempt that we're making and this is another attempt as it were do things which I would like to do in in my office but actually we are never asked to do this so I was asked to buy the Rolex to do a mentor program I worked with a Swiss architect a planner Simon Kretz and we did a year-long program looking at the conflict the sort of conflict what I was talking about before about why why is our city being planned in ways that no one wants apart from investors so this is on the edge we took a sort of prototype we took an example an experiment so this is on the edge of the City of London here's the City of London coming here this is Brick Lane here so we're getting to the East End so you can see the sort of edge of the business district and the beginning of the more domestic and more real parts of the East End this is a project that's been fought about I think for more than ten years how could you possibly here's the limits of the site how could you possibly with a clean piece of paper design that I mean who would ever see that as a piece of City there is no excuse the only excuses investment the pressure of investment and the pressures of marketing and the only reason that it gets to this point is because the planning process is not in place so the developers argue that they need to make a certain amount of money they paid a certain amount of money for the land which is another problem and they need this amount of area and without that it doesn't work as if that's a sort of threat to anybody but that's what the threat is so we try to understand why how do you get there because by the way the reason it's ten years because these guys trying to make it done to make it happen and everybody around is trying to stop it happening so you have a conflict a confrontation which is just explicit and it's just a matter of who stops first you know who gives up first and in this case I suspect it will be the community so how come we can't find a way to determine to mold these concerns of investment because there's nothing wrong with investing I mean every city wants investment how can cities get investment but at the same time ensure that the investment is shaped towards the community towards us towards making a better city this has no aspirations to make a better city that's not it's not on the menu it's not part of their they will use the narrative of saying of course they're making public space and they're making greens meat but that's not the truth so we did an exercise with students in ETH in Zurich and we took the same areas the same square metres and we try to see if you started in a different way whether it was possible if you use criteria which was not just the criteria of profit but the criteria of what do you contribute to the city how can you make a new part of the city interestingly eleven eleven students managed to do projects which were surprisingly close to the area to the financial criteria but they had started with other criteria as well and that was that was an exercise that was an interesting thing to do before I show you the I'm going to show you four buildings but I want to show you one more exercise I suppose that I've been involved in for the last 35 years as I say we could if we take the last if we take this last project I could argue that this is an anxiety of an architect this is an architect saying why don't we plan better can't we make more beautiful cities but I think there's another aspect which is putting this into much more focus it's not an aesthetic decision anymore it's not even an urban planning problem it's a societal problem this why are we building in the ways that we are why given the environmental crisis that we have and it's not something that's on the horizon anymore it's with us why are we making such stupid projects that don't address don't even think about those issues all that's left at the end is to say well maybe we minimize the problem through the type of windows we choose well I'm sorry that is not tackling the problem secondly and just as importantly we are having a societal crisis of inequality in London people can't afford to live in the center of the city anymore so they are moving out they're moving way out because land values are going up so these projects increase the land value they're not increasing the quality of the city they're not increasing the quality of life for anybody who lives there nobody who lives here is going to go in there it has nothing to do with increasing quality of life and it has everything to do with increasing inequality of our society these are the two existential issues that confront us and these pro things like this decision like this are part of that problem but we don't solve it with solar panels and we don't solve it with brexit we don't say to everybody that's that's been left behind don't worry we're going out of the European community and everything's going to be good in the room because that is part of the story I will get off my hobby horse in a minute and just talk about architecture but bear with me it gets a bit better and it will get positive so parallel to this frustration 27 years ago well 30 32 years ago I fell in love with my wife 27 years ago I fell in love with a part of Spain called Galicia and as a family we started spending time there Galicia in case you don't know and I'm happy if you don't because we don't want anyone going there is here just in case do you feel that's Britain it's about to Britain thinks it's that big by the way but I think we're sort of the size of Sicily now it's a strange drawing but that's Ganesha that's the region of Galicia it sits above Portugal's separated by the the river Douro and the three main cities are La Coruna Santiago and Beagle it has a population of two and a half million people it's one of the poorest regions of Spain 70% of the land is forest and it time has left it behind it's it's somewhere between 1978 and 1982 it's being forgotten but there are some enormous advantage it is extraordinarily beautiful it has a beautiful landscape and a beautiful seascape so it has extraordinary coasts full of these flooded valleys and there is a big economy here to do with fishing with shellfish and the fishing economies of processing fish the three largest fish processing companies are located here three largest in in Spain and I think even in Europe are located here so there's a big fishing economy the landscape is spectacular the seascape is is spectacular it is a sort of paradise from that point of view it's not a metropolitan area the cities the three cities each only have about two hundred thousand people in two to three hundred thousand people each so there's no great metropolitan I was approached by the president a number of years ago to give some advice because one of the one of the beautiful things of this area it's very innocent it's very unsophisticated as I said before the farming is still unand us tree alized it's still you know four or five old people picking potatoes and milking cows and it's extremely famous for its food products because of that for a fish but also all of the food products on the other hand this innocence didn't prepare it for a [Music] development so there's been no planning so Wow there is probably the most spectacular landscape there is the most ugly town developments and extremely ugly there couldn't be more contrast between and it's if it's famous in Spain and Galicia is famous for having the ugliest modern buildings in in Spain so the president asked me whether I could you know contribute to this because I offered to help in some way and his idea was that I'm an architect and I'm a planner therefore what I'm gonna do is tell them how to build I guess you know to use different types of roof tiles or use different colors or something but we set up I set up a small foundation which has been now running for four years and we've been researching for the last four years about how we could work with this community and while the tendency has been to this extraordinary place is it's been one of trying to protect the real issue is that young people are leaving as they are in all of the rural areas of Europe so you protection in itself isn't going to secure the quality of life in this man we have to think not so much as environmentalists but ecologists we have to think that the balance between and we love this photograph it's extremely romantic and and you know yes picturesque but what you can see is the most beautiful relationship between nature between architecture and in a way the economy the way people lived and the quality of life and what we've seen over the last years has been in erosion of the we've lost the relationship to the water which was very direct and we've built pointlessly and in a very haphazard way into the country the economy is small scale but the industrialization of certain things and as everywhere else the bad traffic planning has destroyed the city so after a year I went back to the to them to the president said we have to control traffic we have to keep the quality of water better we have to encourage young people to stay we have to stop building on Greenland etc etc and he was sort of a little bit disappointed because he thought I would have some architectural ideas as opposed to vague ideas about society but what we've done I'm not going to explain this in depth but for the last four years we've been working a small team of architects Spanish young architects who have hardly used the word architecture for four years I apologized to them on a monthly basis that they were trained as architects but we don't work on architecture but we work on environment and it's been a very interesting process to understand that as architects when we are given the opportunity I mean fact we took the opportunity and we pay I pay for it myself so so it's not not difficult but we you realize that the quality of where we live I mean this is the thing I mean I'm jumping to the end of this particular story very quickly but what's important and what we've realized here is people are happy in a poor place which sounds a very patronizing way of saying it because of the quality of life which is given by the place itself therefore we feel that it amazed try and help them keep the quality of place the love that they have of the place which is based on the land but as we see the built environment deteriorating then we are worried that this will affect quality of life so a very nice fishing town where you know so we have problems like a fishing town where there used to be a nice street is destroyed by traffic the indiscriminate building of you know planning and dereliction the indiscriminate building on Greenland and so we've we've decided to operate in a very different way as architects not to deal with architecture but to deal with community and that's who we've been working with and of course we use our architectural tools and our skills to work on that but looking at all sorts of things including this is one of the workshops we did which was to promote those of you can read Spanish will see what we were doing we we we bought the community together to discuss new sustainable crops that could be grown in the water and see basically seaweed because if if a community if a town is empty because the young people are leaving you can you can restore the buildings but if you've lost the community what's the point so we realized in such a place that the software and the hardware are together and this is something we have to think about as architects it's something which I think is very interesting in the conservation discussion now I'm involved in a number of conversations and events to do with the protection of buildings increasingly the protection community is as concern now as by society and community as it is by the hardware by buildings I would say 15 years ago all the awards for projects which were about protecting buildings were for the facade of a Georgian house the restoration of a roof on a gothic building or whatever increasingly they are for buildings which have social purpose the the restoration of a train station and unused train station into a community center things like that so I think we have to as architects and planners find a better understanding between hardware and software between community and architecture architecture cannot solve anything on itself nobody needs architecture we need architecture to build community so very briefly on goodies I'm just going to finish it so this shows you the in a way tragic transformation from a town where the street was a social space through bad well bad traffic planning to the street which is no longer a socialist place place but a divisive place so our argument is what is the point of restoring buildings if you don't tackle these issues no mayor ever wants to tackle traffic or parking they said at the beginning please you can do anything you want but please don't discuss parking and traffic and of course we said that's the only thing that we think is going to change it so so we are I've raised the money now we've just managed to get one and a half million euros out of the local authority and about and out of the the regional administration and we are now planning a humanization as it were of the traffic reducing the impact of traffic and trying to humanize and and soften this as part of a process I mean we're not I'm not interested in traffic I'm only interested in the idea of protecting community and protecting positive of life and interestingly of course this is totally connected to environmental issues and and social inequality we have to think about quality of life as being the basis of everything and that's what we should be involved in and and so this is the road the 305 which we're working on we've now we started with this is the project we're now about to do now all the other mayor's because we have five mayor's on this area the other mayors are now asking us to do similar exercises so we're doing that and so you are it's very easy to get good press in Galicia and you just have to come from outside and but again I would say it's partly to do with leveraging our position as architects we are now working on a plan a sort of super municipal plan of public transportation so we've taken that first act and we're moving into a second act which is to plan clean air electric bus system took commute between all of these areas so to go to push this project to the next level where we will get rid of cars in these towns so and interestingly it's only architects that would bother to do this when I try to get the Minister of traffic to support us by reducing traffic speeds through the towns etc etc the technicians would say why why would you slow the traffic down our job is to keep traffic flowing and we said yeah but it it destroys the town it's not our problem so it's clearly not a traffic problem but in yet who who is going to stand up and say what it's a citizen problem and I think that's where architects can stand up that's where we can and I have to say this is a soft target in a way because I wouldn't like to try to do this in London it would be impossible but doing it with this community it shows you how how it is possible to think about the way that we find more relevance and it is interesting how a community starts that I mean it's it's frustrating as well and you end up having to sit in town halls with 80 old people persuading them that they're not going to be able to park their car anymore in front of their house and of course they're all upset they can't cross the road so they're upset with the traffic but as soon as they're in their car they're upset that they can't drive their cars and these these issues are things which we could contribute to as architects as as people the interest in environment and I think this is something which I think some very important part of the challenge in front of us which is linking together quality of life and quality of environment and accepting that this is a sort of discussion of ecology okay now I'm going to just talk about some projects but I'm going to try and see if there's some relationship between these these anxieties and concerns I have as a as a practicing architect of course I'd like to imagine that every aspect of our practice is embedded with the same sorts of contributions and concerns and let's say generosity as the other projects but of course they're not and let me also be very clear about another thing while we we and you I mean looking at a younger generation which i think is probably the pot the majority of people in this room while you are going to have to deal in a very genuine way with these issues we shouldn't underestimate the simple power of architecture itself you know I wouldn't want us to imagine that we abandoned our own territory because no one else is good in it and architecture the making of good buildings than making a you you know the actual craft is not invalidated by these larger concerns I think anything you know anything about architecture is still you know what we do I suppose what I'm saying is not that we should abandoned the poetics of architecture in any way anymore we should abandon you know other given the scale of crisis that's not the issue if anything we needed more than ever but we should is it will see how this can be better applied not just to the exploitation of land values of building office buildings of building expensive hotels etc etc which I'm not against but as long as this is and in a bigger view of what society is so I will just now just talk about four projects in the first project is the work we did in Berlin on the noise museum and again I want to talk about this project much more as an act of collaboration too I mean I'm very proud of it as a piece of architecture but I'm also interested in it and proud of it as a piece of collective action and why do I say that the building this is the museum Island the schloss is being built here the old castle is being built here now this is sinkholes altas museum the great in the way the first great public museum here's the National Gallery the old National Gallery noise museum the Pergamon boda Museum here's the spray and here's the canal so this is a sort of Island very much East Berlin when it was divided West Berlin is over here and the buildings of the museum Island were all bombed during the war they were all rebuilt except for this the noise museum and the noise museum stayed as a ruin until nineteen and well until the wall fell down all came down in 1989 and then there was a competition in 1994 and then a second competition 1997 in which we won so this building had sat as they ruin for 60 years so it had been a ruin nearly as long as it's been a building and time it was not only the bombs and the fire which ruined it but also then 60 years of weather and snow and all sorts of things it was the destruction was substantial I want to come back to okay I've got some okay I don't have quite the right images but the I decided that we should given that this building had was the last in a way the last unn restored an unrevealed bombed public building of berlin that to lose the quality that hitted somehow accumulated over the 60 years the sort of strangely poetic Pompeian quality that it had it had somehow had had a certain sort of dignity as a ruin and as architects you know that phase and a building where sometimes before a building is finished it's sort of more interesting than when all the stuff goes on the top of it you know when you see a concrete frame sometimes it's better than the office building that finally arrives it's the same with destruction a semi ruined building is very powerful because you see the the muscle the the structure of them the stuff it doesn't have the slick surface so we won the competition on the basis that I proposed that we would not rebuild it to imitate what was lost [Music] mostly because I didn't want to ruin what had survived I didn't want to damage what had survived but also we wanted to avoid a sort of copy so the thesis was protect everything which has survived and rather like a sort of Greek VARs you you complete it somehow but you never imitate the fabric has been lost it was a because it was so important within the community of Berlin - Berlin citizens it was a highly debated proposal I mean there was a huge conflict about it and this was a pamphlet that was used to try to promote an act of Parliament to stop it so this was how the building used to be I mean this is how the the staircase used to be you saw how it was after the war in fact it was even worse than this later and they showed this is you know this is this is what it was this is what Chipperfield wants to do what would you prefer this one or this one well that's a slightly unfair question you know even I would say that one but that one doesn't exist anymore so I had to try to explain to the question continuously to the question in a very violent way often why can't we just have our building back which is not such an easy question but what happened was that we it took it was a it was a 12-year project in the end five years of planning and it was a very discussed project it had to be and I had to explain and I had to bring people along and we had to engage with the head of conservation of the city with the museum directors with the head of the foundation with politicians and to really make this a shared discussion where we as it were led this process and despite the tension and protests we had we've we we managed to do it and this was the this was a soft opening where people queued for six hours - so there are 10,000 people standing in a snake queueing up to go and see it all the happy faces because there afterwards they didn't dislike it quite as much as they thought they might and then it became you know I'm again that shows you know enormous press always about it but I would say the fascination was the way that the the wild it was a very controversial way of doing things so you know why doesn't he just plaster this why do you keep you know if this is completely new we lost this whole wing this is partly new it's a very contrived process of restoration it's much more like a piece of archaeology you know if you have a broken piece of archaeology you don't repair it as if nothing had happened to it you try to stabilize it you clean it you stabilize it you try and protect it of course a building has to be waterproof and it has to have air conditioning and it has to have staircases has that fire escape since day so it's a much more complicated thing than repairing of us but simply that was the strategy and and this shows you the process that we went through so here's a ruined space we had to do tests on the columns because we wanted all the columns to become used again structurally you can see that there are some existing pot clay clay pot domes you can see there's some decoration still a whole piece of the building the whole northeast corner totally sorry southeast corner totally missing then you we sort of gradually sort of find a way back and find find a new room in out of the old now to to manage that is not something that you do on a drawing board or a series of decisions you make yourself this was the most you can imagine in a public german project that the process of approval that this had to go through and therefore the collaboration that was required the trust that was required to be able to make make a project which was not a picture there was we never had an image of this project we never did a rendered at rendering no one knew what it was going to look like therefore it was it was a journey of trust and it did forth us me especially in terms of the public our team in terms of the the rest of the professional team to engage and to make this a shared project and to make sure that the decisions that we made were well understood by everybody otherwise they wouldn't be able to be done so you know to achieve sorts of repair where you don't repair everything but you softened damage was incredibly complicated but it required I think you know I think the point I'm trying to make I suppose is is another aspect that I think architecture is not just a formal question is not a matter of of course I would say you know I hope and I think it is I think this is a very beautiful project I mean aesthetically it's incredibly pleasing and people were rather surprised that something which was supposed to be in their worst imagination and a homage to ruin homage to damage actually is exceptionally beautiful because the ruins can be beautiful I I don't underestimate at all the search for beauty but I also think that we have a search for meaning as well and that requires us to find common language common ideas in shed since I'm now just going to go through four projects very quickly I promise because I'm over running but there's an expansion or an extension of the noise museum project we were appointed to be master planner and we did a master plan for the whole Museum Island how this complex of buildings would be regarded together that required a new building here because the original concept of the competition was noise museum would be a sort of because it's a ruin it would have a lot of opportunity to have restaurants and lecture halls and things and we insisted that this was impossible so we had to find another place so a site came here we this was this was a building by Shenko which this is before the war this is the south side sorry the west side of noise museum before the war here's outers shingles out is building and shingle built warehouse is down here this is before think this is before Pergamon or just what pokermans being built we did a number of formal studies to try to see whether a infrastructure building would fit there we it was a really uncomfortable thing because what is it is it another museum it actually has to become an entrance has to connect into the Pergamon it has to connect into the lower levels of the noise museum and we tried all sorts of formalistic shapes and presented to be fair it wasn't the proper Commission at this point it was a feasibility however there was a sort of negativity about these excercises people weren't that convinced and so we sort of went backwards and then when we did get the Commission we we sort of started again and the idea was to think about this building not as a museum but to think about what is real purpose was and its purpose was as a place as a social place as a an orientation hall for the museum island and we we took inspiration from this is joined by Schinkel of the altars Museum you're on the balcony looking out here's the loose garden here's the castle and these people are inside a building and yet they haven't gone through a door so there is this idea of space held by a building but yet it's somehow public and this was sort of extraordinary quality in my opinion of this building and you have to think that this is nearly one of the first public museums so this idea of creating a threshold with architecture but not with enclosure property enclosure was something that inspired us and then that led onto the idea of integrating the project with the landscape of the architectural landscape of the museum Island taking the base of the Pergamon through take the colonnade of the Noize museum through and take this idea of a giant portico as a symbol of publicness and collectiveness this is not the computer image this is a real photograph so that's it built now it sits on the edge of the river you can enter it there's cafes and book shops and exhibition spaces there's a auditorium but you can also enter into the Pergamon you can go downstairs and enter into the the basement level Holden museum says it won't happen and this shows how the building sort of connects and of course it has a sort of formal we we were that shows you how connects at the basement level through to the Pergamon and to the noise museum so we when we completed this build and we we built this in anticipation of this and how it sort of sits as a new architecture in the very sensitive you know so that I'm not talking about this at all about the language of the architecture and how we dealt with that but that's clearly I know another important thing this is another building that we built next and also in fact these are three buildings that's the noise museum that's the kind of bastion gallery which we completed before this and then this is the James Simon new entrance building and in a way it's about making a place as much as it is about being a building so we gave and in a way a priority as much priority too as in Schinkel of the idea that you know the building creates public space around it and as well as the so this is the auditorium inside and then these are the spaces inside so the space inside of course is also part of that public offer but but the generosity of the building begins outside Mexico I'm just so I'm sorry I'll be very quick now I'm showing three other buildings so this is a complete change of location here we are in in Mexico in the credibly dense environment with towers everywhere and a small site for a private museum the private museum is for a private collector okay new Lopez is a whom X collection previously this was in a building outside of the city and he wanted to bring it to the center of the city this is a development and a project owned by Carlos Slim and Carlos Slim gave my client this piece of land to build a museum my client was very anxious that it shouldn't look like a private museum he was anxious that it should be very public he was anxious that young people should want to go there and be attracted to it should be an offer to young people it wasn't an exclusive building and it should yes have the sort of publicness the problem with Mexico City is that public space is not something very easy to manage because it becomes abused the site was a very complicated one in terms of how we would put a building and you can see you know this is the another museum the samaya done by mexican architect and we're struggling here with this you know tiny little building to not look like we're drowning so and how to deal with the geometry so these are just iterations of trying to think so it's getting a bit better I think you know sort of it's got a little bit more punch and it's starting to stand up better but it's got no public space it's just you enter and you know you've got to make a decision here to enter an institution so gradually then we decided that there should be a raised Square and this would be the more generous offer for the public and and that while this street is quite famous for everybody just having food trucks and food stands here by being raised it would stop them as it were being able to colonize that so this was the first idea the second idea was that museums tend to want to be closed things for very good reasons but we wanted to try to make the building permeable visually permeable and physically permeable so we thought about different ways of trying to create that to hold them the galleries that is where the protected galleries up here and then try make the lower levels much more public and then we had to deal with the issue of top light it started to change our idea of how do we do a top light on a triangular site I was interested of course with the idea of lifting the building this is corporal Smith but they're much better Mexican versions so we started a thing what about making a space which is the square so this is becomes a public offer but also if you lift the building up then everybody can just walk under the building so this is we've we've seen this before in South America obviously but given the climate in Mexico which is completely in Mexico City is completely benign you can have sort of insight outside situations very usually this shows you now the section with this fantastic room at the top this is two levels of gallery and to public floors and the first public floor is completely open to that so this square there you can see it in its place and there you can see the square the opening directly into the lobby and then here there's a performance multifunctional space and then two floors of Museum so the space gets used by the museum they do all sorts of activities and participate r-e you know events there which tries to create this the place and then this is sort of showing you how so that's the square and this is the entrance and during the day these huge doors just open the cafe's under the building but outside the building so that's the door that's one of the doors that's the other door so that the whole ground floor is permeable so this is an idea of trying to make a private institution into a public place and in a way it's it's part of the discussion about how can architecture if we've been if we'd been deprived of increasingly deprived of ability to participate within community how do we regain that you know how do we subversively regret begin that and persuade in the case of the James Simon building to try to make public space as part of a public building in this trying to make private institution part of a public offer and this was a part of the program that I insisted on was the idea that we should have a room that was sort of multifunctional and sort of wasn't good for anything that was sort of good for everything so if you try to turn it into a lecture hall you've got too much anxiety about seating and/or acoustics etc etcetera so it's a space which is much more visible from outside and then these other normal galleries and top floor yeah [Music] sorry Korea so I lost myself a minute um they're getting to the end I'm getting to the end as well so we're going east now we were invited to a competition in a huge master plan Libeskind did the master plan hundreds of towers and we were asked to do a tower for a very nice company who had very strong ideas about the the community of their company as a cosmetic company is still in essentially in private ownership the client is I would say one of the nicest clients we've ever had and what everyone else did towers we said a tower never has a community in it because you you go into the base there's a lobby then maybe there's a cafe and then you get into an elevator and you get out then maybe you've stick a terrace here somewhere and you say well it's wonderful because you can go there so we said why don't we make a block why don't we just squash the tower down and it's a hundred meter by 100 meter block and he and we won the competition with this to say that you've got much more chance of making community for your company if you have a bigger foot footprint and if you can then start to do things in that so here's the project there's a ground there's a huge basement there's a connection to the subway there's a raised square here and you know light from the top the ventilation through this is a wonderful courtyard and these three levels all public spaces so there's an auditorium here there's a kindergarten there's a restaurant there's a canteen for the staff so this is really like a social thing of course there was a strong architectural concept as well about you have a volume but I would say the engagement with the street and the way that the building could could then make some offer that was more than a normal tower lobby interestingly Saturdays and Sundays are busier here than during the week because people specifically come yeah there's no shopping there's a small florist here and a small tea shop there's a library which is sort of open library not if not a bookshop library there is a little Museum here there's a museum and there's a lecture hall but on the weekend is packed so it's just company AmorePacific who are in the way giving this space so here's a library but it's a it's a you go in there and read it you don't buy books so incredibly interesting client that was again I would say we managed to work with him to consider what could be the social offer of the building albeit it's a giant big office building I mean there's this Nani but there is a community which is the people that work in it and as it tries to offer something to the community around he you know so there are there's a there's a big museum which is now this Jenny halts the show at the moment I mean it has really international level exhibitions it has this lecture hall I think is 500 people it is a real commitment okay last building this is this is a very public project it's a cemetery in Japan and this rather beautiful sir private its cemeteries in Japan tend to be owned by temples or privately this is a private owned cemetery it's a commercial business it's incredibly clever business and because you always have customers and the it's organized in this bamboo forest with a big axis down it's actually beautifully done it looks a bit not so well from here but there was then a sort of arrival place in a place where you could families could just have a cup of tea a small canteen and workshops it was a sort of amenity building and our client wanted to replace this and make a chapel and make a more proper entrance for this so that's sort of just showing you the topography and we did all sorts of versions you can see the idea that you know maybe here was the chapel here was going to be the offices and maybe these are meeting spaces and and whatever we did lots of different iterations gradually trying to develop again not a building but a series of buildings making a space and making a sort of place I sort of way by which people would enter and feel that this was a sort of a way of coming to see their you know the tomb of their their parents or whatever here you again so you can start to see that we became interested in the relationship between making a number of buildings one which is a chapel and the other which is more supportive and a fan a common space in the middle so we moved to this and then I was sort of worried that this looked like a religious building and then this looked like a support building so then we became more and more interested in and of course the whole idea is we had to set up this axis and gradually the project developed in this way acknowledging I guess the the slope here's the entrance and then this is the chapel this is the canteen these are private meeting rooms this is the car pass the private offices are here so it gradually so the shape the building form started to respond to the topographic issues trying to get a character out of the building and it started developing I would say in a slightly I mean I started my whole career in Japan my first three buildings were in Japan in 1985 to 92 and it was a very nice experience if you're back in the last 2 or 3 years to work on this and of course I'm sort of pulling some Japanese strings here in the sense of you know using courtyards and framing views and all the things that I love so much when I was working in Japan and so this is the evolution of the project sculpturally and then materially how we're going to build it we wanted to build it monolithically in concrete it's a port in concrete which is then sandblasted it gets a sort of softness immaculately built this is the final project with a garden in the middle and the different spaces and that's the final project which is is a building in one hand it's it's buildings around a space on the other hand and it's a series of you know spatial experiences which to do with you know the architectural experience is just as much made by the buildings has been inside the buildings and of course the the materiality the architecture itself I mean forgive me but I you know I'm I talk less about the hardware I in a way I just presumed that the hardware is something that we all love and we do and that's us those are the words that we we write our stories with but for me it's always the issue it's you know what are you trying to - what is the story you're trying to write so you know the idea that this is a sort of but you know I would say in the noise museum and at least last four projects without the of the architecture I think the authority of the idea disappears so these two things are related without this you know exquisite monolithic architecture because we could one of the reasons we used this was that a lot of the spaces like the chapel don't need to be heated so we could expose a certain sort of rawness of the building so here's the chapel so this none of this you know that's an outside wall this is an inside wall but we we have some heating on the floor just to take the temperature down temperature up there nothing more so it's as I say it's putting a little bit on the Japanese picturesque it's something that's rather beautiful so just last bare with me last few words and then you can escape so what's my conclusion you probably you probably got it already but so we cannot and should not betray our responsibilities to the making of buildings developing our craft in searching for beauty in the physical and spatial potential of architecture which is what I've just been trying to say we cannot abandon our post as no one else will guard it you know its architecture is our territory and we must you know concern ourselves with with beauty and and the poetry of architecture rather we must regain territory where our perspective is needed where qualities can be achieved not seriusly or subversively but through a more committed engagement through leadership collaboration and demanding good governance we have been educated to expect to contribute and trained to understand the importance of precision and focus within the general aspirations of humanity and civilization we are not anthropologists or artists we are not engineers or environmentalists nor sociologists or politicians but we can speak with them all and when we can be part of the collaboration indeed we can connect them together in order to confront the crisis in front of us we need to deal not only with architecture but with environment but not only with environment but with ecology to ensure that the consequences consequences of our efforts don't look to future generations like the misguided indulgence of a civilization so driven by comfort and luxury that had forgotten that had had forgotten the importance of community and the real responsibilities that define what we call civilization [Applause] sorry one important thing I've just seen yes Boris Johnson lost the vote [Applause] so let's celebrate and that's

Channel: A+ Architecture In Belgium

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Keywords: david chipperfiled, lecture, bozar, david chipperfield architects, brussels, neues museum

Id: DDFbJPfws68

Length: 84min 6sec (5046 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 11 2019