Slowly more and more details of What Design Can Do’s program for 21 & 22 May 2015 are being revealed. Before the 2015 campaign will break loose next month, we start here to present the speakers and themes of the upcoming event. For starters, we’re proudly announcing renowned architect Ole Scheeren as speaker at WDCD2015.

In his native country Germany architect Ole Scheeren is known as Herr der Türme: Lord of Towers. As his Büro Ole Scheeren, with offices in Hong Kong and Beijing, is currently working on some of the tallest buildings in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Singapore, the image is quite understandable. But Scheeren is keen to tone down the idea.

‘Height cannot be the ultimate goal of a skyscraper because if that is its legitimisation then it will lose it very soon after,’ he said in an interview. ‘I think densification of this world is unavoidable. Density of cities is unavoidable. Therefore verticality will increase but the question is, what models we can develop to address that verticality?’

Prior to opening his own agency in 2010, Scheeren worked 15 years for Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the agency founded by Rem Koolhaas. Scheeren was simply driven to Rotterdam, he told earlier. ‘When I was 18, I thought I can’t possibly not work for Rem. It was a very impulsive moment, I just showed up there and asked for a job.’

His mentor never gave him advice, he says, ‘he gave opportunities’. At OMA Scheeren eventually was made responsible, as director and partner, for the design and realization of one of largest buildings in the world the China Central Television Station CCTV and the Television Cultural Centre TVCC in Beijing.

For this project Scheeren moved to China, where he stayed out of conviction that successfully working for Asia can’t be done by sending over drawings from the West. Living and working in Asia has influenced his work, he said. ‘It has given me a kind of freedom to think broader and maybe also sometimes a freedom to be more bold in my propositions.’

Top image: The Interlace (2013) in Singapore by Ole Scheeren / OMA (photo Iwan Baan)

Leave a Reply

Your e-mail address will not be published.