The Architects Series Ep. 13 - A documentary on: Werner Sobek

[Music] i'm still convinced that you do not need an intelligent machine but an intelligent designer and i will never never accept that one of those tools is telling me how the architecture of the venezuela branch offices should look like never [Music] venezobek is an interdisciplinary group of people spread all over the world which has been founded in 1992 as a one-man company now in the meantime we are about 350 to 380 people all around the world i founded the company a couple of years after finishing my academic studies becoming a doctor of engineering science because there was always the intention to create buildings in a total another way than my competitors or the other ones did and the company stands for design architecture and engineering in all its aspects as an entity of work [Music] [Music] [Laughter] the main office and the first office is here in stuttgart in the southern part of germany the automotive town of germany where we have mercedes-benz and porsche and since during the last 27 years i also founded offices in new york and moscow in istanbul in dubai in buenos aires hamburg berlin and so on my name is wolfgang zunderman i'm working since 25 years together with rana zobek in 1994 i came to the office and when we started we were very small small people working in one room there were four engineers working in one room and so we had a very very small stuff when we started [Music] i was i indeed started studying engineering i was not sure whether to study architecture or engineering this was a little bit a critical time in the mid of the 70s in the last century when we had those two oil crises and the markets in germany were difficult for young people so i initially wanted to become a stage designer but becoming a stage designer at that time was too difficult so i decided to study architecture then i switched to engineering i studied engineering and after two or three weeks i decided that this is not the right thing i had to also add architecture so i applied for an architectural study place which i then got in stuttgart to and then i studied both disciplines the engineering professors which always told the students how to analyze something i said i'm not analyzing such stupid stuff on the other side the architects they were mostly synthesizing they were on the creation of things but their capability to analyze the product from a more scientific standpoint was limited so i thought if the ones are able to synthesize and the other ones are capable to analyze if i do both then i'm capable to run this iterative process between sketching something correcting it redoing it correcting it which is the basis of our work and to cut that into two disciplines and two different people at the end does in my opinion not make any sense so i decided to study a little bit of textile engineering car body design aircraft engineering this is how i became a multi-disciplinary person i don't feel as an architect i don't feel as an engineer yeah i myself got the very big chance from verna sobek in in 1998 to take over the project leading for the post tower in bonn it's a high-rise building one of the 60 meter high foster born came up out of a competition which was won by helmut yan and his team dana zobek and hermodyan they invented the so-called archineering which means the very early collaboration between the architect on the one side and the engineers on the other side and this leads to a very good and sophisticated ability for instance the post tower [Music] and then the cooperation we do in our teaching as well in our research fields is with other institutions other faculty members from aircraft engineering textile machine etc etc and for us this is a very self-understanding way to call the professor for aircraft engineering and to make an appointment in order to discuss a know-how transfer or technological transfer or just to ask a question what he would do in my position facing a question or a problem but there are so many know how which you can combined and there's tools and methods which are so precious and which are so advantageous if you combine them in order to create something new something never seen before that i asked myself the questions in decades why aren't these people doing this so we do it the post hour was was opened in spring 2003 and i think in this to this time he was one of the most innovative buildings which have been done in the world and finally this leads also to some awards what the post hour finally got for instance in the ctboh award for the most important 50 buildings in the world and of course the the post at the client was very proud of this and i think this is a very good result and we're very happy about this this award i think in total actually we are between 350 380 something like this it is quite clear since we are doing about 60 to 70 percent of our turnover outside germany that we need a basis in other countries where we love to work which are typically composed of 50 local people and about 50 percent of stuttgart people are student got educated people so to transfer the philosophy and the attitude on how we work to those locations and i myself i love to work worldwide at least in a certain number of countries and this is what we do successfully since many years hello i'm frank heinlein i'm in charge of public relations and communication here at venezuela so i'm covering all the offices we have in germany and abroad i'm charged with books the internet our intranet and whatever else there is regarding public relations when i started we were 42 we're 370 now we had in the beginning we had one office only in stuttgart and now we have offices in new york moscow istanbul dubai and many other places so that is very exciting we have a christmas party we have a summer outing for all employees and their families we have a walking tour we do once a year or some some of our people cycle so it's actually two groups so we're trying to do as many activities as possible so there's a sports team etc the table tennis team [Music] michaela tillman is actually this is my casual friday so otherwise i would have to wear a white shirt or a light blue shirt and as you've seen black is our preferred color so yes this is there's a certain color code but it's not too too strong so you have to be well that is most important that was my decision this morning because it was so cool i felt i needed some color in my dress christian architects [Music] my name is angelica schmidt i'm structural engineer and principal at werner sobek and right now i'm the responsible project manager for the new underground railway station here in stuttgart it's really a pleasure and very important to collaborate with colleagues to get all their ideas discuss it and everybody can can learn from each other and it helps for the project you're working on but of course also for the future for all the other projects we will work on in future so the new railway station here in stuttgart is a part of a huge infrastructure project which will influence the city of stuttgart but also the public traffic in the area around here it is designed by the architects engenhofen and we from buenos aires are doing the structural engineering collaboration is a very very big issue in this project because we need a lot of colleagues a lot of specialists there are the engineers to draft men but also 3d specialists facade engineers and architects [Music] i mean such a structure has never been built before and all the planning is done in 3d which mean between all the partners the architects and us but also other planners the exchange the work was done in 3d and of course also this influenced the sign in a special way because you have much more possibilities to go deeper into design if you have it in 3d in front of you it is 3d printed here in our office we have a small machine where we can do models in this size and this is half of one of these columns so you can think here the other half mirrored around and this is so one of 28 columns of the main of the station that support here the roof at least where people walk on at the park beside on the one hand it's a huge project for our office up to 40 people were walking time-wise at this project so collaboration within venosaur sobek but also with external partners was every time very very important and also fruitful i think [Music] the most difficult is the beginning to come up with the idea and then the other very important part is the transformation from the drawing into the built environment because there it is a conflictual situation with many many interests especially from the contractors they want to make money so they make it more simple they make it another way then you want to have it they don't deliver the quality you are asking for and this is where you really have to carefully look at and control them and double check them and work really hard in order to achieve what you intend to get why are the clients approaching us because we supply perfect quality in time in budget and very often never seen before [Music] solutions so my name is lucio blendini i'm a partner and board member of panasobic with a special focus on innovation and knowledge management i've been working with venezuela since 19 years now so we got for the kuwait international project we started around three years ago with a team of around 40 people so that was going behind my own team people from different offices have been collaborating so the great airport the terminal 2 of the kuwait airport is actually a new terminal for around 25 million passengers it has to be one of the next hub in the middle east and the particularity of it is that it is the design is parametric completely parametric the architect is norman foster and instead of using a modular approach to the airport as it is of the case they changed the geometry according to certain rules parametric rules and that leads to to a different approach in terms of engineering so you don't calculate one element and it's the same for 20 different cases but every single element is changing geometries there are different components and this is part of the challenge we've been facing a lot of prefabrication on the concrete and on the steel elements and they bring these elements directly from site to the construction field and they are erected and this is actually a pretty innovative for the middle east because they can achieve high degree of precision the interesting thing was in the strategy that we didn't work with one platform so we decided to pick because we are working with concrete we are working with with steel with different treatment we have aluminum spraying on the steel for corrosions and all of that means we have to use always the right the right software the right platform for the right use [Music] i'm still convinced that you do not need an intelligent machine but an intelligent designer and i'm still convinced that the best way to solve to create something which we call a build piece of the environment you also can talk call it architecture but the built environment is more than we typically call architecture it also includes bridges and whatever i think this has to be created by the humans themselves this is not something we should offer to the machine because otherwise at the end you don't need the humans anymore and this is also the fun part it is the toughest part because it makes you sleepless and it makes you unhappy unless you have the perfect situation but once you have it it is also the most lucky and satisfying part the other things you mentioned bim and blabla this is tools it is very good that we have those developments like let's call it digital processes but i consider even the most complicated digital processes which we need for our own work in order to enable ourselves to realize what came out of our brain as tools and methods and i will never never accept that one of those tools is telling me how the architecture of the venezuela branch offices or offices should look like never so my name is romero rios and i work here as a project manager at warner sobek i was originally born in mexico but i actually grew up in the us so i grew up in chicago and and worked mostly in in new york new york city and then i came here to this office in germany i think it's very good place where you come and and learn and you're always going to be trying to do something new and it's always something that is not going to be boring it's definitely going to be challenging so that's that's the reason i think you should come here and apply [Music] there's a couple of different topics to be discussed one which is probably the more important one is this not really precisely discussed question on how should we build tomorrow if we understand building as an entity of course there's the functional there is the aesthetic the sociological qualities etc which has to be treated but where we have already sets of tools and methods and solutions there's another issue which has been neglected for a very long time and i think we are one of the very first ones which finger pointed on those effects and this is the fact that the net increase of the world's population is 2.6 people per second and if we want to supply those people with a built environment which enables them to have buildings for cultural buildings for health for education their own whatever house etc means which enables them to live in dignity and to have the ability of fresh water supply of wastewater treatment of garbage treatment of health and whatever then you minimal need about 200 tons maybe even 300 tons of building material per person to supply the person with that that means 2.6 people increase per second multiplied by 300 tons is around 800 tons of building material per second which we have to scratch out of the earth of the surface of the globe and make houses out of it and these 800 turns if we produce them in a traditional way we need plenty of energy and the energy is typically fossil based so we produce plenty of emissions which are unfortunately in most cases transparent like co2 so you don't see the problem but the problem is out there and those emissions they heat up the climate and this is the huge problem and the building industry if you just take the what i call the embodied and the gray emissions the emissions done during the production of the building until the first second when you move in that 20 percent of the entire worldwide emissions nobody talks about it people talk about emissions caused by aircrafts and by big cruising ships in venezia and whatever and whatever this is all critical and problematic or ambitions caused by cars but 20 is caused by building the built environment plus another 15 to 20 percent comes from running the buildings so the contribution of the building industry or the built environment where architects and engineers are in a certain way responsible for is huge and the tragedy is that most of the architects and engineers even don't have an idea what they are responsible for [Music] [Applause] how much kilogram co2 are you producing when you create one cubic meter of concrete nobody knows about if this co2 is in the atmosphere how long is it lasting there no one knows about it it lasts there for 800 for 1 000 years there is no mechanism which breaks the molecules into parts they are just there so the only chance to extract this co2 from the atmosphere is planting trees and the question is how many trees do you have to plant to compensate the emission for a residential building nobody knows and this is the research we are doing and now in the meantime we are offering we are designing co2 free or zero co2 apartments or zero co2 office buildings and we reduce the amount of material we make the building recyclable we use recycled materials and then we tell the client okay you have to buy 25 000 trees plant them somewhere in those trees they grow and they bind co2 and after 10 years they have binded all the co2 emitted by the production of your house there is no education of the people in these topics how many trees do you need per kilometer in order to compensated co2 emissions of the cars what does it mean if i drive with my car one kilometer okay everyone knows there is 200 grams 300 grams of co2 per kilometer but what does it mean i cannot see it so that's the problem and i tell the people if you have a 50 year old tree the maximum per day the tree can compensate co2 is between 60 and 100 grams so driving with your suv for one kilometer necessitates three to five trees to breathe one day long and if you don't have enough trees the emissions will cause a global warming in addition to what we already have and this is what needs to be outspoken out this is what has to be placed on the table and these relation between the facts what is the co2 binding capacity of a tree what is the co2 emission of a car what is the grey emission of a house how can i bring that all together and what is the compensation quality of grass and flowers and trees it's a very simple at the end lecture but nobody is giving that lecture and this is where we engage ourselves heavily and very intensively in talks in lectures and podiums discussions or in publications or tv interviews or whatever it is a self-understanding basis of our work we know those numbers we know how to combine them and we know how they influence our architecture and our architecture and our engineering is influenced by it and this is the big difference to other ones [Music] my name is anastasia sakulin and i'm working as a constructional engineer it's a pretty cool office actually we have very interesting projects here the team is very young and the atmosphere is very friendly i always can ask my colleagues if i have a question it's very very easy here i'm valentina um um a bellow [Music] my name is dania torakai i work here as a structural engineer i'm a project manager and i work on national and international projects flood 15 is a high-rise building in moscow city it is 275 meters tall it is a twin tower both towers are sitting on a podium structure we are building on an existing basement structure and it's very complicated in terms of the structural engineering but we were responsible for the general planning for design structural engineering as i said and also for the construction itself i'm personally involved in the structural engineering and the most futuristic part is probably the transfer structure as we are building a new tower two new towers on an existing basement structure the column position on the top part and the lower part are different so we had to transfer the loads we had widespan slabs so we had a very high ratio of reinforcement and bringing all these pieces together nowadays everybody is talking about computational tools that we have but in the end we always start with a piece of paper where we bring our ideas to paper and we think through all the concepts that we have and then we move forward to the computer what was really outstanding in this project was the interdisciplinary workflow between our different companies in russia in germany the different disciplines the engineering and the architecture and we develop tools digital tools [Music] [Music] what we are searching for is nothing else than beauty [Music] but a beauty you can take the responsibility for because the beauty evolves out of a number of processes using materials and energy and creating emissions and you have to take the responsibility for this and you have to optimize all that stuff and when at the very end beauty is evolving out of that then you are at the goal then you have it [Music] [Music] um [Music] foreign you

Channel: Iris Ceramica Group

Views: 5,653

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Keywords: spaziofmg, webinar architettura, architecture webinar, werner sobek, the architects series

Id: lYYEnaOmyHo

Length: 31min 19sec (1879 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020