One of the big questions on architec t Lasse Lind’s mind is how to work with our history and “part of our building stock which is often unloved.”
These buildings are often referred to as being “ugly or unwanted somehow” he says, and there’s a lot that fit into that category from the 60s. We have to take that quite seriously he says and “try to work with them as resources for what we want to do in society now with those types of buildings.”
Lind, who is speaking at our Building/Unbuilding event is an architect and partner at GXN and 3XN Architects in Copenhagen which specialises in sustainability in the circular economy in the construction industry.
Watch this interview with Anders Sörman-Nilsson
This industry he says is often referred to as the “one third industry” because it’s responsible for around one third of waste and one third of energy consumption.
In a podcast interview with Anders Sörman-Nilsson of Sydney based Thinque Lind also revealed that one of the reasons his company won the competition to work on Quay Quarter in Sydney, which blended an existing and new tower, was at least partly because the firm had not done high rise before.
“It’s actually the first high-rise we’ve ever done as an office,” he says in the podcast.The reason why we got invited at that point was because we were not high-rise architects. We were competing against much larger international practices. But the client had seen a lot of our low-rise commercial buildings that had a heavy focus on community building through architecture, shared amenity spaces, and very social aspirations of architects and how architecture can bring people together. They liked that, and they basically asked us, ‘Can you do that in a high-rise?'”
GXN has won fame for its concept to design for disassembly, which is the idea that buildings can be reconstructed when they’ve reached their use-by date. So just a fraction of the resources are ever wasted.
His firm is also known for its interest in how people interact within buildings. Lind likes to quote fellow Dane architect Jan Gehl, who said that we actually know more about gorillas’ habitat in the jungle than we know about people in the urban environment, how we behave, what actually affects us.
“I think that’s kind of true. We actually don’t know that much about how the built environment affects us, affects our behaviour, affects our ability to either come together in social synergy or the opposite. We have quite a dedicated research approach to trying to understand what our projects do to people. We go back to the crime scene, you could say, and actually try to study if the ways that we designed the building are actually working as we thought they would.”
In commercial projects, that imperative becomes critical.
“It’s not enough to have a lot of desks anymore,” Lind says. “You need to have more, and a lot of that ‘more’ is people actually being together.”
People can work from a laptop anywhere, “but you cannot meet with your team, you cannot meet with people, you cannot have that kind of social interaction over Teams.”
We’re speaking with Lind soon to get our own deep dive on what he might be able to tell us on the day. Stay tuned.
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