Why great architecture should tell a story

For much of the past century,

architecture was under the spell
of a famous doctrine.

"Form Follows Function" had become
modernity's ambitious manifesto

and detrimental strait jacket,

as it liberated architecture
from the decorative

but condemned it to utilitarian rigor
and restrained purpose.

Of course, architecture is about function,

but I want to remember a rewriting
of this phrase by Bernard Tschumi,

and I want to propose
a completely different quality.

If form follows fiction,

we could think of architecture
and buildings a space of stories:

stories of the people that live there, of
the people that work in these buildings,

and we could start to imagine
the experiences our buildings create.

In this sense, I'm interested in fiction

not as the implausible but as the real,

as the reality of what architecture means

for the people that live
in it and with it.

Our buildings are prototypes,
ideas for how the space of living

or how the space of working
could be different,

and how a space of culture
or a space of media could look like today.

Our buildings are real.
They are being built.

They are an explicit engagement
in physical reality

and conceptual possibility.

I think of our architecture
as organizational structures.

At their core is indeeds
structural thinking, like a system:

how can we arrange things
in both a functional

and experiential way?

How can we create structures
that generate a series

of relationships and narratives?

And how can fictive stories of
the inhabitants and users of our buildings

script the architecture,

while the architecture scripts
those stories at the same time?

And here comes the second term into play,

what I call narrative hybrids,

structures of multiple
simultaneous stories

that unfold throughout
the buildings we create.

So we could think of architecture
as complex systems of relationships,

both on a programmatic and functional way

and in an experiential
and emotive or social way.

This is the headquarters
for China's national broadcaster,

which I designed together
with Rem Koolhaas at OMA.

When I first arrived in Beijing in 2002,
the city planners showed us this image:

a forest of several hundred skyscrapers to
emerge in the central business district,

except at that time,
only a handful of them existed.

So we had to design in the context
that we knew almost nothing about,

except one thing: it would all
be about verticality.

Of course, the skyscraper is vertical.

It's a profoundly hierarchical structure,

the top always the best,
the bottom the worst,

and the taller you are,
the better so it seems.

And we wanted to ask ourselves,

could a building be about
a completely different quality?

Could it undo this hierarchy

and it could it be about a system
that is more about collaboration

rather than isolation?

So we took this needle and bent it
back into itself,

back into a loop
of interconnected activities.

Our idea was to bring all aspects
of television-making

into one single structure:
news, program production, broadcasting,

research and training, administration,

all into a circuit
of interconnected activities

where people would meet in a process
of exchange and collaboration.

I still very much like this image.

It reminds of biology classes,
if you remember the human body

with all its organs
and circulatory systems, like at school.

And suddenly you think of architecture
no long as built substance,

but as an organism, as a life form.

And as you start to dissect this organism,

you can identify a series
of primary technical clusters.

Program production
broadcasting center and news:

those are tightly intertwined
with social clusters,

meeting rooms, canteens, chat areas,

informal spaces for people
to meet and exchange.

So the organizational structure
of this building was a hybrid

between the technical and the social,

the human and the performative.

And of course, we used the loop
of the building as a circulatory system,

to thread everything together
and to allow both visitors and staff

to experience all these different
functions in a great unity.

With 473,000 square meters,

it is one of the largest buildings
ever built in the world.

It has a population of over 10,000 people

and of course this is a scale that exceeds
the comprehension of many things,

and the scale of typical architecture,

so we stopped work for a while
and sat down and cut

10,000 little sticks and glued them
on to a model,

just simply to confront ourselves
with what that quantity actually meant.

But of course, it's not a number,

it is the people, it is a community
that inhabits the building,

and in order to both comprehend this
but also script this architecture,

we identified five characters,
hypothetical characters,

and we followed them throughout their day
in a life in this building,

thought of where they would meet,
what they would experience.

So it was a way to script
and design the building,

but of course also to communicate
its experiences.

This was part of an exhibition
with the Museum of Modern Art

in both New York and Beijing.

This is the main broadcast control room,

a technical installation so large

it can broadcast over 200 channels
simultaneously.

And this is how the building stands
in Beijing today.

Its first broadcast live,
the London Olympics 2012,

after it had been completed
from the outside for the Beijing Olympics.

And you can see at the very tip
of this 75-meter cantilever,

those three little circles, and they're
indeed part of a public loop

that goes through the building,

and they're a piece of glass
that you can stand on

and watch the city pass by
below you in slow motion.

The building has become
part of everyday life in Beijing.

It is there.

It has also become a very popular backdrop
for wedding photography.

(Laughter)

But its most important moment
is maybe sill this one.

That's Beijing. It's similar to Time Out,

a magazine that broadcasts
what is happening in town

during the week,

and suddenly you see the building
portrayed no longer as physical matter,

but actually as an urban actor,

as part of a series of personas
that define the life of the city.

So architecture suddenly
assumes the quality of a player,

of something that writes stories
and performs stories,

and I think that could be
one of its primary meanings

that we believe in.

But of course, there's
another story to this building.

It is the story of the people
that made it:

400 engineers and architects
that I was guiding

over almost a decade
of collaborative work

that we spent together
in scripting this building,

in imagining its reality,

and ultimately getting it built in China.

This is a residential development
in Singapore, large scale.

If we look at Singapore like most of Asia
and more and more of the world,

of course it is dominated by the tower,

a typology that indeed creates
more isolation and connectedness,

and I wanted to ask, how could we think
about living not only in terms of

the privacy and individuality
of ourselves and our apartment,

but in an idea of a collective?

How could we think about
creating a communal environment

in which sharing things was as great
as having your own?

The typical answer to the question --
we had to design 1,040 apartments --

would have looked like this:
24-story height limit

given by the planning authorities,

12 towers with nothing
but residual in between,

a very tight system that,
although the tower isolates you,

it doesn't even give you privacy
because you're so close to the next one

that it is very questionable
what the qualities of this would be.

So I proposed to topple the towers,

throw the vertical into the horizontal
and stack them up,

and what looks like
a bit random from the side,

if you look from the viewpoint
of the helicopter,

you can see its organizational structure

is actually a hexagonal grid
in which these horizontal building blocks

are stacked up to create
huge outdoor courtyards,

central spaces for the community,

programmed with a variety
of amenities and functions.

And you see that these courtyards
are not hermetically sealed spaces.

They are open, permeable.
They are interconnected.

We called the project the Interlace,

thinking that we interlace
and interconnect

the human beings and the spaces alike.

And the detailed quality
of everything we designed

was about animating the space
and giving the space to the inhabitants,

and in fact it was a system
where we would layer

primarily communal spaces,

stacked to more and more
individual and private spaces.

So we would open up a spectrum

between the collective and the individual.

A little piece of math: if we count
all the green that we left on the ground,

minus the footprint of the building,

and we would add back the green
of all the terraces,

we have 112 percent green space,

so more nature than not
having built a building.

And of course this little piece of math
shows you that we are multiplying

the space available
to those who live there.

This is, in fact, the 13th floor
of one of these terraces.

So you see new datum plains,
new grounds plains for social activity.

We paid a lot of attention
to sustainability.

In the tropics, the sun is the most
important thing to pay attention to,

and in fact it is seeking
protection from the sun.

We first proved that all apartments
would have sufficient daylight

through the year.

We then went on to optimize
the glazing of the facades

to minimize the energy consumption
of the building.

But most importantly, we could prove
that through the geometry

of the building design,

the building itself would provide
sufficient shading to the courtyards

so that those would be usable
throughout the entire year.

We further placed water bodies
along the prevailing wind corridors

so that evaporative cooling
would create microclimates

that again would enhance
the quality of those space available

for the inhabitants.

And it was the idea of creating
this variety of choices,

of freedom to think
where you would want to be,

where you would want to escape, maybe,

within the complexity of the complex
in which you live.

But coming from Asia to Europe,

a building for a German media company
based in Berlin

transitioning from the traditional
print media to the digital media.

And its CEO asked a few
very pertinent questions.

Why would anyone today
still want to go to the office,

because you can actually work anywhere?

And how could a digital identity
of a company be embodied

in a building?

We created not only an object
but at the center of this object,

we created a giant space,

and this space was about
the experience of a collective,

the experience of collaboration
and of togetherness,

communication, interaction,
as the center of a space

that in itself would float

like what we called
the collaborative cloud

in the middle of the building,

surrounded by an envelope
of standard modular offices.

So with only a few steps
from your quiet work desk,

you could participate
in the giant collective experience

of the central space.

Finally, we come to London,

a project commissioned by the
London Legacy Development Corporation

of the Mayor of London.

We were asked to undertake a study
and investigate the potential

of a site out in a Stratford
in the Olympic Park.

In the 19th century, Prince Albert
had created Albertopolis,

and Boris Johnson thought
of creating Olympicopolis.

The idea was to bring together
some of Britain's greatest institutions,

some international ones,
and to create a new system of synergies.

Prince Albert, as yet,
created Albertopolis in the 19th century,

thought of showcasing
all achievements of mankind,

bringing arts and science closer together.

And he built Exhibition Road,
a linear sequence of those institutions.

But of course, today's society
has moved on from there.

We no longer live in a world
in which everything

is as clearly delineated
or separated from each other.

We live in a world in which
boundaries start to blur

between the different domains,
and in which collaboration and interaction

becomes far more important
than keeping separations.

So we wanted to think of
a giant culture machine,

a building that would orchestrate
and animate the various domains,

but allow them to interact
and collaborate.

At the base of it is a very simple module,
a ring module.

It can function
as a double-loaded corridor.

It has daylight. It has ventilation.

It can be glazed over and turned

into a giant exhibitional
performance space.

These modules were stacked together
with the idea that almost any function

could over time,
occupy any of these modules.

So institutions could shrink or contract,

as of course the future of culture

is in a way the most uncertain of all.

This is how the building sits,
adjacent to the Aquatics Centre

opposite the Olympic Stadium.

And you can see how its
cantilevering volumes

project out and engage the public space

and how its courtyards
animate the public inside.

The idea was to create

a complex system in which

institutional entities
could maintain their own identity,

in which they would not be subsumed
in a singular volume.

here's a scale comparison
to the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

It both shows the enormous scale
and potential of the project,

but also the difference.

here it is a multiplicity
of a heterogenous structure

in which different entities can interact
without losing their own identity.

And it was this thought
to create an organization structure

that would allow for multiple
narratives to be scripted:

for those in the educational parts
that create and think culture;

for those that present
the visual arts, the dance;

and for the public to be
admitted into all of this

with a series of possible trajectories

to script their own reading
of these narratives

and their own experience.

And I want to end on a project

that is very small,
in a way very different,

a floating cinema
in the ocean of Thailand.

Friends of mine had founded
a film festival,

and I thought,

if we think of the stories
and narratives of movies,

we should also think of the narratives
of the people that watch it.

So I designed a small
modular floating platform

based on the techniques
of local fishermen,

how they built their lobster
and fish farms.

We collaborated with the local community

and built out of recycled
materials of their own

this fantastical floating platform

that gently moved in the ocean

as we watched films
from the British film archive,

1904, "Alice in Wonderland," for example.

The most primordial experiences
of the audience

that merged with the stories
of the movies.

So I believe that architecture
exceeds the domain of physical matter,

of the built environment,

but is really about
how we want to live our lives,

how we script our own stories,
and those of others.

Thank you.

(Applause)