The detail is dead - long live the detail

Published by / The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design & Conservation, School of Architecture / KADK Edited by / Simon Sköld, Anne Beim and Ulrik Stylsvig Madsen Line Kjær Frederiksen: editor of videos Contributors / Steen Nepper-Larsen, Vincent Kersten, Kim Dahlgaard, Horst Günther, Pil Thielst, Marcel Bilow, Stig Mikkelsen, Odilo Schoch and Vibeke Grube Larsen Graphic design / Jens V. Nielsen Photos and illustrations / See individual references Printed by / Production Facilities First Edition / 500 pcs.

ISBN / 978-87-7830-979-2 ©️ CINARK The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture 2017

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The detail is dead – long live the detail 5

Foreword

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Introduction

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PART 1 /

The ethics of industrialized architecture

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Steen Nepper Larsen / Aarhus University

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PART 2 /

No money no detail

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Vincent Kerstens /

OMA

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Kim Dalgaard /

Vandkunsten Architects

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Horst Günther /

Scandibyg A/S

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Pil Thielst /

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Debate / Part 2

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PART 3 /

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Marcel Bilow /

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Stig Mikkelsen /

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Vibeke Grupe Larsen /

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Odilo Schoch /

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Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects

Digital vs Physical

TU Delft Mikkelsen Architects NCC A/S

ETH Zürich

Debate / Part 3

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FOREWORD 4

/ Anne Beim Professor, architect CINARK, KADK Copenhagen

This book has emerged from the collaboration with Villum Visiting Professor; Dr. Ulrich

Knaack, from Department of Architectural Engineering + Technology, at TU Delft and researchers from CINARK – Center for Industrialized Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy

of Fine Arts School of Architecture. During a two year exchange of visits, meetings, seminars

and lot of discussions we decided to launch an international symposium about the ethics of industrialised architecture and its making – with a particular focus on the architectural

/ Ulrich Knaack Professor, Dr.ing.

TU Delft

detail.

Preparations through meetings, the symposium and the editing of book have been

made possible by funding from the VILLUM Visiting Professor programme 2015/2016 and KADK – the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design & Conservation. We are grateful for the support and thank everyone, who has been involved and made it all happen. In particular, we want to thank all the speakers: Steen Nepper-Larsen,

Associate Professor at Aarhus University; Vincent Kersten, Architect, Associate, OMA; Kim Dahlgaard, Managing Architect at Vandkunsten Architects; Horst Günther, Technical Director,

Scandibyg A/S; Pil Thielst, Project Leader, Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects; Marcel Bilow, Dr. Associate Professor, The Bucky Lab, TU Delft; Stig MIkkelsen, Architect, Founding

partner, Mikkelsen Architects; Odilo Schoch, Dr., researcher, ETH Zurich; and Vibeke Grupe Larsen, Architect, Head of Sustainability, NCC Building – who represent some of the most

knowledgeable people in their different fields. We believe that their ideas and projects give a broad picture of the state of things in a North European context.

The book represents the condensed version of the lectures presented at the symposium

held at KADK in May 2017. We have tried to extract some of the most important points and examples in order to emphasize the different positions and how details in architecture are

understood and framed by formal matters and institutions. As such the book is considered as an independent statement. However, if one wants to hear the full version of the lectures

they have been filmed and are available at YouTube and at KADK’s homepage: https:// kadk.dk/case/cinark-symposium-detail-dead-long-live-detail.

The theme of the symposium is grounded in common experiences from research,

teaching and professional collaborations across many topics in the field of architectural

practice and building design. Our mutual interests are material innovation, improvement of building technology and the nature of tectonics. Over the years we have noted that powerful industrial business models and new digital tools have influenced the architectural design processes transforming it into more linear, standardized and confirmative processes.

Today, architectural detailing – particularly in everyday architecture – is suffering by use of

poor materials, insufficient construction design (or skills?) resulting in ‘atectonic’ solutions without any long-lasting aesthetic qualities.

How will tendencies like these evolve in the future? How does this affect our under-

standing and experience of architecture? How can the ethics of industrialized architecture and its making be considered as part of an environmental movement? And how can future

architectural detailing be pushed towards an ecology of tectonics? These questions and

series of problems have been discussed as part of the symposium and we hope that the book will inspire to see the importance of detailing in architecture and to reflect upon the ethical dimension of this matter.

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A series of questions and paradoxes form the backdrop for the symposium; The Detail is Dead - Long Live the Detail - the ethics of industrialized architecture and its making.

These are among others; why does everything always have to be ‘new’ – when dealing

with technology?! New waves of Industrial Revolutions come and go – and today they are

titled version: 2.0, 4.0, 5.0 etc… But, how does these fluctuations and ideas about radical

evolutionary steps influence the general state of architectural practice and project making?

At the same time one could wonder: are we in a state of post craftsmanship, post

‘industry’, post financial crises, post sustainability, post waste, post product and post factual

– only guided by an orientation towards digitally based design and parametric driven per-

formance? The idea that ‘new sorts of advanced intelligent technologies will save mankind from all our troubles’ represents tendencies we see expanding in other industries and businesses. However, buildings and architecture can be claimed to be ‘stationary technologies’, they stay put, rooted in a specific context, and they are usually designed and made to last

for generations. As such, architecture calls for different ideas concerning how to cope with technology, time, value and ethics - than technologies based in pure digital worlds.

INTRODUCTION 6

To specify, two of the present discussions are 3D printing and BIM. 3D printing can be the future in building construction and full scale experiments of printing a whole building have

already been tested. A natural question here could be – why is this a way to go? Do we

need that and how will it add quality to architecture? When we compare 3D printing to an

ancient Chinese roof tile it really pushes the point. The Chinese roof tile is true craftsmanship deeply rooted in a specific cultural context – yet it is an efficiently mass-produced building component. How does new technologies – in this case automatized manufacturing

processes (CAD/CAM) – and cultural traditions relate? This is an ongoing discussion and what has ethics to do with 3D printing or Chinese roof tiles?

BIM can serve as another type of example. It is a kind of architectural project organi-

sation tool – or an ‘Amazon for architects’. BIM provides all the building components. The designing architect picks them and then he/ she is trapped by being linked to a certain

supplier, because you are given all the data files. One can get rid of them and in the end the tender is the same. So who is now corrupting the architectural profession?

This change in design practice is present in Dutch, German, and Danish architecture

and affects how the buildings details are designed in the end. They are ruled by market mechanisms and there is a need to identify what is the real truth behind. What is the ethics?

This book and the symposium held in May 2017 seek to raise a critical discussion

about the current means of industrialized manufacturing, construction and making. The

object is to look at how architectural practices, building industry and research address the

present challenges when linking ethics and social responsibility to contemporary means of production / construction. In order to do so the ‘architectural detail’ has been chosen. In architecture the details prove the level of knowledge and skill of both the architect, the

manufacturer and the craftsman – and they are REAL! Details are determined by the material qualities, the technologies applied and by the cultural understanding of their purpose and

meaning. Details determine the essence, durability and vitality of the building in the present

situation and over time. Details supply new perceptions and findings long after the idiomatic treatment of the building has been exhausted.

Looking at how architecture is presently determined by industrialization and how new

manufacturing processes change the architectural design process – raises a number of fundamental ethical questions:

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What is the role (importance) of detailing in today’s building practices?

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Now when everything is becoming more digitally dependent, globally available and deliv-

Has the need for thoroughly designed and refined details made for the specific project faded?

ered in no time – will future architects only have to configure simplified ready-mades and products that are disconnected from local cultures?

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Are we facing a digital driven redevelopment of craftsmanship that will reinvent custom

made architectural details? Do the details of today serve the needs of tomorrow – and who defines the properties and longevity of the ‘good solutions’?

Please reflect over these questions they are addressing reality – they are now!

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PART 1

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The ethics of industrialized architecture The following chapter presents the first lecture of the symposium. It is intended to frame questions of morality and ethics in the world today in regard to architecture. How can we in a world where things are getting more abstract and digitalised embed meaning in the way we construct and perceive our physical surroundings? Architecture is a result of complex processes of selecting and developing physical solutions that respond to ideas about how we want to live in this world.

Posing a general question that addresses today’s theme; how do we design “proper details” for a particular context and situation? When speaking about “proper details” we are often arguing out of our personal experience. Is it possible to judge the ethical dimensions of a current problem – since the complexity of construction and the world is constantly in flux and always too vast?

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INTRODUCTION

Reflections on the gravity of details Details in architecture can be considered physical gestures that shows the intention of the architect – his or her technical and rhetorical skills in expressing the nuances of architectural meaning. Details in architecture often ‘speaks to you’ quite directly, due to the fact that most users usually get in close physical contact and can relate to this scale of the building no matter how grand it is. In the details of a building one can read not only the physical state of the construction, but also the intellectual state of the people, who ordered it, designed or built it. Also, one can read the dominating ideas that ruled in society at the time, its wealth or its poverty, and the cultural characteristics.

To ask a philosopher or sociologist to talk about the meaning of details in architecture brings new dimensions into the understanding of how questions of ethics are embedded in the making of things. Why is one material chosen over another? Or why are certain design features considered more correct? Or why are specific qualities valued higher than others? What can be generally accepted as right or wrong in architecture is difficult to say - and maybe the fact that it is not very interesting to point at what is ‘true architecture’, happens to be the very essence of its nature. As part of cultural movements, architecture appears to change both physically, functionally and aesthetically over time and its role in society differ accordingly. Architecture cannot be exhaustively explained or defined by a single formula. Yet, the ethics of architecture can no doubt be addressed, studied and unfolded. And in times of global climate change and material scarcity the ethical dimension of architecture calls for great attention.

Steen Nepper Larsen has a background in; German philosophy, Critical Theory, philosophy of language, philosophy of the body, time, space and place concepts, philosophy of work and technology, theory of sciences, metaphysics, ontology, theories on Modernity, theory of knowledge, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. Next to his job as Associated Professor at the Danish School of Education under University of Aarhus, he is a highly appreciated lecturer and scientific reviewer.

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HEART MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART HERNING, DENMARK Steven Holl Architects Photo: Jens V. Nielsen

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Reflections on the gravity of details

STEEN NEPPER LARSEN

/ Steen Nepper Larsen Philosopher, sociologist, educationalist / Aarhus University Copenhagen

“Yes. Okay, hello, wow. I will try to go directly to the theme: Reflections on the gravity of details. I am no architect. This [lecture] comes from sociology, history and educationalist thinking. Basically, I will present something to irritate you. Maybe to let you wonder.

First of all, let us try to grasp capitalism. Well, it is a big thing. Or as my sister, she is

an architect, says; “it is economy, stupid”. Let us begin with a historical overview.

First, we had capitalism based on trade. Imperialism. Adventure ships. Merchants.

States and missionaries around the globe. Slaves and gold. A triangular trade with weapons one way, slaves the other. Cotton the third. And we have Schimmelmann’s [A Danish mer-

chant and slave trader] big palace in Klampenborg and on Kongens Nytorv. Denmark was a slave nation [1650-1848]. We had moneymakers, people that built giant houses based on trade capitalism.

Then in the second period, industrial capitalism. Machines, oil, exportation of skilled

and unskilled labour. Fordism. Big production lines. Big assembly lines. We had humans

and animals placed in factories, from chickens to wage labors. We got international gold standards and we had industrialised capitalism all around the globe. It is still here, is not over and done.

In the third period, we have digital capitalism. We have World Wide Web. We have

CAD/CAM, we have Silicon Valley, post-fordism. We try to get away from the restrictive

gold standard and we create the realisation of economy and since 1971 we have not really understood what can go wrong. Big crises can be produced for financialisation, realisation of capital.

Now we are at the threshold to our present era and this era is about cognitive capitalism.

You could say that one primarily sells their ideas, their creative ways of thinking. Not their

craft, or their wage labor in the conventional sense. They invent things. They create things.

In cognitive capitalism, we have of course huge amounts of Big Data, we have printed ­elements for buildings. We have all kinds of oxymorons we come to live by. Bio-political

management and, at the same time, realisation or creative freedom. It is free and mandatory

at the same time. That is why the headline of this lecture is an oxymoron as well. We have the gravity of details. Details seem to have no gravity, no weight at all. But we still have to reflect upon what is actually respect of a detail. The rest of my lecture will debate this.

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Bruce Mau

“Design is everything” as Bruce Mau once wrote. We are on the threshold to be able to design [manufacturing systems for] whole buildings, whole houses, and this lecture dwells upon this apparent power and maybe also the apparent failures, or traps, hidden in this

process. We are in the midst of a transformation on macro scale from different types of capitalisms and they are all still present. We still have capitalism based on trade. Some kind

of a modern form of slavery. We still have industrial capitalism. We still have digital capitalism and we have cognitive capitalism.

We are living in the midst of these transformative macro scales. What some would

call, this is a word that you cannot really explain or express, non-comtemporaneities. It is better in German; ungleichzeitigkeiten or in Danish; usamtidigheder. The architect has to

find his or her way right in the midst of this. Some architects line up with for example expe-

rience economy to describe their work. Branding economy. Branding architecture. They are trying to set a sign in the traffic of signs. But I have a few other ones.

Theodor Adorno

My way is going with Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and critical theory. Some of you may

have read a little bit about; Ästhetische Theorie, Aesthetic Theory, or maybe Dialectic of Enlightenment. There is a very good concept of Adorno’s:

“Die Utopie der Erkenntnis wäre, das Begriffslose mit Begriffe aufzutun, ohne es ihnen

gleichzumachen.”

For those of you idiots who do not understand German, of course you have to have it

in English. “The cognitive utopia would be to use concepts to unseal the non-conceptual with concept without making it their equal.”

Which is interesting, because there is a tension between conceptualisation and a

non-conceptual. My idea is now to think about the detail as non-conceptual. Something that is waiting for us out there to be respected, but we do not really know how to grasp it without classifying it and without putting it into ‘a prison’ you could say.

Great expectations, in the zeitgeist of today we have bleak ideas such as; ‘the robots

will take over’, ‘Big Data will destroy science’. Then there’s for example Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine, who writes:

“This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace

every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.”

That is in 2008. So why wonder? Why think about science, why think about philosophy?

Everything is out there. We have great expectations to this idea of creating well being,

happiness measurements, all kinds of ideas on how to build the ideal city for people. The whole idea with my quote from Adorno is that this non-conceptual could be like togetherness, happiness and individual perspective. It can never be construed or designed from an

architectural standpoint. So, I ask for modesty in this profession. You can never ever construe the code to Denmark, the happy Denmark, the well-being Denmark. So people think we are

standing on the threshold to fuse and reconcile ontology, which is being – or how the world is, and epistemology. Acknowledgement theory. How the world could be thought of as an object.

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I have this idea that this bodiless 3D design is really easy accessible and it is also technologically possible, but it is never the ‘world’ one-to-one. It will never be able to be a one-to-

one reflection of ontology, epistemology and technological possibilities. That is my basic philosophical standpoint. In another quote of Adorno, which is really great he writes:

“If the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the object, not on its

category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye”. Or in German, which

is better: ”Entäußerte wirklich der Gedanke sich an die Sache, gälte er dieser, nicht ihrer Kategorie, so begänne das Objekt unter dem verweilenden Blick des Gedankens selber zu reden.”

This is my dream that we could have the objects speak for themselves and talk to us. They

stand against us with a certain power. We have to reflect upon how objects cannot be

objects under the sovereignty of a subject doing something that is written in a technological way. You could also say it in this way:

“Do not classify a complex case to something simple and controllable and fail to obtain

exactly that which could have taught you something new. We know it from encounters with

art. To meet art & architecture - one must actively endure, fight and negate the noise one brings.“

If you start out with an’ ism’ or a classification logic, you will never see the artwork!

You have to start out with certain respect of this Gegenstand, the gravity of detail. It

restricts your technological ambition, or perhaps irritates your ambition, when it becomes too much in love with itself.

Now, on the threshold to ethics. Academic and architectural craftsmanship. You

could talk about craftsmanship and careful professionalism. Not only as a high profiled

word, or a buzzword, but as an inventive craftsmanship. The conceptualising and inventive craftsmanship is the salt of professionalism. Craftsmanship is a lifelong unsettled matter with challenges and importunate duties that thoughtful and active people are occupied with, while they are engaged with equal parts of dedication to the world and its enigmas

and not the least: self transcendence. In German, it is actually well expressed in the word; Dezentrierungskunst. That you cannot ‘decenter’ yourself from a central perspective and economical perspectives.

It is basically a kind of thought of formation that is related to the grand words and

heritage of the Enlightenment. My idea is that also architects, have to be language-critical people. Not only running for the newest buzzwords. And you run for buzzwords like; ‘learn-

ing’, ‘competences’, ‘empowerment’, ‘recovery’ or whatever is at stake. You try to linger

with these in order to address politicians or building people with money, and whatever can foster your buildings becoming true.

They were once, some of them, protest-words or maybe coming from bottom-up like

the ‘concept learning’. When I was in school, there was not something called learning.

Learning was ‘indlæring’, learning top-down from teachers and learning (Da. læring) was a protest associated with self-management of learning strategies from bottom-up.

Today, we have ‘learning goals’ defined by the state. They actually inherited it and

transformed it to the bad opposite. And the same can happen to architects.

So now come ethics – ten short presentations for you.

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Firstly, ethics. It is a part of our language. We actually have two words. Ethics and moral.

That makes it more complicated. What makes an action right or wrong? What is the is/

ought? That is the big problem. Can we go from is to ought. That is called the naturalist

fallacy. Can we in an example say there were six million people killed in German concen-

tration camps, therefore people should be not killed. Or is norm, moral, something completely different than positive addition of killings? Can we relate a pure positivist view to an ethical view or are they two different worlds? It is what you divide into theoretical and practical philosophy.

Basically we have from the very beginning a problem; reconciling. What is out there in

the world and how do we deal with the world when it comes to normative structures. So how do we regulate social bonds, interactions, expectations, socialization, patterns, d ­ estined and doomed to contain values and ideas of what is better and what is wrong?

So the question is, how can we ever deal with these big questions? Also, as archi-

tects, and I will try to outline, as brief as I can, ten different dilemmas or ten different views

on ethics. And they are there with 2500 years of history and philosophy and I will go through them in a quarter of an hour and then you are done with Westernised philosophy.

Of course you are not. Then you are invited in to at least to think about these very

different ways of thinking about ethics. So the first one you know it is still out there; it is

ethics as enforced law. In example, the law of the Ten Commandments, Torah or Sharia or

whatever, it is the idea, that we can state something because God said it. Or we can make strict differences between duties and the forbidden.

We can say God’s will, the holy book. The holy written things in the stones or whatever.

It has of course, if we start questioning it, the problem that it is inscribed as an eternal

sanction and power logic in theocracies, which is not really something that we want to live in probably, and most of us would have been fired in Turkey. Or my head would have disappeared somewhere in Iran, I guess. So ethics as enforced law. It is maybe too much of an ethical standard for most architects.

Therefore, you can jump to position two. Duty-based ethics. It of course, comes from the Max Weber Emmanuel Kant

very inventive and fantastic sociology’s grounding father, Max Weber. I will make it simple.

Duty-based ethic is his terminology from 1919 - it is 100 years old. Also expressed by Kant, it is the categorical imperative that you should act only on the maxims which you can, at

the same time, will to be universal laws. It can also be labelled the universalizability principle.

The other way Kant expressed this, and Max Weber also quotes him is: “treat other people as entities themselves never solely as means to an end. Respect humanity in and of the

other.” This is the fundamental idea - you have an obligation, a duty, to never ever use the other person as an exchangeable something. He is an end for himself.

I guess that it touches upon something for architects, because you think act under the

maximum, which could be a universal law. If you make a building, can you then accept that all other architects in the world do the same building and still be fond of it?

Or would you say; well, this is just my exception and I really do not like it, but I had to

build it. So if you are really self-critical you end up in Kantian speculations about your own building logic. Or with duty-based ethics, I guess.

The problem here is, of course, that you are never ever tolerated to lie. If you hide a

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freedom fighter in your basement and the Gestapo asks; “do you have a freedom fighter in

your home?”, you say; “of course, he is under the carpet”. So, if you are supposed to be always telling the truth, you will end up never be able to give a white lie to save other lives.

There is no, what Germans call neigungen, which is inclinations in English or tilbøjeligheder in Danish, to ever accept any kind of an exception.

So there is no flesh, no blood, no embeddedness, no embodiment, soul sympathy, no

Adolf Eichmann

compassion, no pity, they are all kind of wrong ways of arguing.

Adolf Eichmann was the logistics chief of Auschwitz and when he was imprisoned

after the Second World War. He said that: “I did my obligation due to Kantian ethics.” Act to kill the most Jews possible. To live up to the Führer’s word. He perverted to the categorical imperative. In a way, you could argue that Adolf Eichmann was incarnating a kind of ­perverse duty-based ethics. But at the least, I think, duty-based ethics is something that you have to think about as architects.

The next one is ethics of the conscience. Conscience is the other big word in this tradition.

Samvittighedsetik in Danish. Here you do not think about the duty-based or the law-based Le Corbusier

stuff, but focus more on the intention. “I intended these people to have a great life” exemplified by Le Corbusier in his city plans for the suburbs of Paris.

So, here you talk about pure conscience, the good will. You are never interested pri-

marily in the effect or the consequence. He tried to save it, he tried to do his best.

I think this has something to do with an architectural approach. You focus on the

­intention. And you can never tell where we will be in a hundred years. We will become wiser, but who could know that by that time functionalists will end out in bla bla...

Ethics of the conscience, the problem is here a kind of a dream-like, non-pragmatic

approach, religious self-adoring ivory tower people that we kind of end up just talking about intentions. No effect. That of course cannot stand alone, this principle.

I think it is also getting closer to the architecture brands. Ethics of conscience. You

have some bonds in that company I would say.

The next one is consequentialist ethics. That is probably the most dominant that you can Jeremy Bentham

think. It is also called ‘utilitarianism’ and in Danish nytteetik. Applied ethics, you call it in

American. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). And it is the greatest happiness principle – or the

principle of utility. Here you should do whatever you can to bring about the greatest total

happiness. That is what modern structural community based, macro national, competitive based ideas are about. Do the best you can to make the most people happy.

The utilitarian principle has of course a negative version, which is to strive for the least

overall amount of unhappiness. Negative, but it is the same principle. The problem here is of course, as it was always debated for at least 200 years, that to compare Socrates and

happy pig, you can say, well, it is better to have a sad Socrates than a happy pig. So maybe you have to differentiate here.

Can we have a generalised, universalised utility principle? Yes, actually that is what

people are thinking right now. If it is good for patients to have a green roof with plants, they get it, because there is evidence that it will be saving lives. So actually, you are tricking the

architects, because they are also to live up to utilitarian principles for necessity and for

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measurement and whatever. Logic and economic autism; as I call it in my writings. In Danish;

økonomisk autisme. Here in a way, you try to refer everything in ethics to economy. And that is probably ‘the economy, stupid’. It is the state of architecture today. It is really

­dominated by what is possible from an economic perspective. It is much more important than what is possible in an aesthetic – or even a technological vision you might have.

Then we jump to the fifth principle in ethics – Virtue-based ethics. It is a very old principle and we still haven’t finished studying it. In example reading Aristotle. Virtue-based ethics is where you list up a set of virtues. It could be patterns or behaviours like benevolence,

courage, honesty, strength, whatever. You end up debating these as virtue based ideas of character building that you have to incarnate in your person and in your approach to things, to be able to be a good person. The good citizen incarnates in principle virtues. The virtues

are principles that you should try bring into society. Honesty, courage, benevolence and so on.

The Greeks were rich and free white men plus 35. They had a democracy with no

slaves, no women, no kids. So of course, it was a kind of a privileged elite logic of this virtue ethics.

In Denmark, we see this in the Danish school systems with Østre Borgerdyd and Vestre

Borgerdyd [‘Da. ‘dyd’ meaning virtue]. Virtues are here built into the very structure of educational systems. We had them until recently. Now they have changed their names. Now Østre Borgerdyd is named Gefion so they do not want dyder any longer. They do not want virtues no more. Basically this idea has a problem, tribal ethics, only among peers. Can it

be universalised? Can you find a set of ten or fifteen or twenty principles of virtues and then you say it is all about them. They are beyond history.

In these days more and more architects are interested in body phenomenology. They

are inspired by, not so much Martin Heidegger, but Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, Hermann Schmitz or Ole Fogh Kirkeby. I do not know if that tells you anything, but a lot of writers Gernot Böhme

these days, Gernot Böhme in Logic of Atmosphere, and also Levinas are starting to write about ethics of the body.

Here you can in example say that anybody you can think of has its own value, in itself

as something, talking even to people who want to rape this body, kill it or manipulate it, put it in prison. Do not violate me, do not kill me, do not rape me. It comes out of ‘the power of Emmanuel Levina

the eyes’ – in Emmanuel Levinas’ writing, the ethics of the eyes. It comes out of the body

perspective as Løgstrup the danish philosopher says; “we always hold a part of the other’s life in our hands.”

So, there is the respect of the human body, the human body should live in freedom

and be able to express itself, live in harmony, in freedom without being tortured or suppressed. And I think architects are really running after this idea these days. They try to build a secure town for women, at night, with lights, how people should deal with traffic and how we should build, violating the social bonds between human beings.

Then you have ethics of the event. Who knew that the breakdown of the Berlin Wall in 1989 would happen? A lot of social scientists, skilled and highly accomplished researchers, met in the summer of ’89 and said: The iron curtain will be here for many years to come, d ­ ecades

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to come. Three months later the world was different. The power of the event can both be a catastrophe, it can also be a good thing or it could be whatever.

Ethics of the event is something French philosophers explore extensively. Many archi-

Gilles Deleuze

tects read authors like; Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Guattari. An example from Gilles

Deleuze, who jumped out the window when he was 75 and ill with lung cancer, he writes in;

The Logic of Sense. Colombia State University Press 1969, and here it is, a really beautiful quote – Logique du Sens. I think it is one of the best quotes about ethics you can find in philosophy: “not to be unworthy of what happens to us.”

I think architects are close to that. Whatever happens to my company, whatever

­happens to my brand, whatever happens to my way of thinking architecture, do not ever let

me do something that is not on my level. That makes me become a person without dignity.

A person without self-respect. The idea not to be unworthy of what happens to us, could be a baseline for saying how far will I go, with ‘economy, stupid’.

How far will I go with the state, how far will I go with the developer. If you violate that

as an architect, you get punished by your own self-critique the next morning. Even though, you become twice as rich. Not to be unworthy of what happens to us, respect that we

never control – the event. Who could know? Suddenly, we print buildings and we could make data amounts of whatever, feeding our way of thinking about happiness, measuring

it or whatever. So it happens. It is a part of a logic of development and all kind of micro axes that we never control. Ethics of the event is getting closer to your profession I think.

Karl-Otto Apel

The planetary macroscopic ethics. You know these Germans, they are really great at this.

Karl-Otto Apel is these days 95 years old and he worked together with Habermas. You

should read his book, Diskurs und Verantwortung (1990). Discourse and responsibility. In this book he talks about the anthropocene responsibility. Mankind only has one planet to inhabit, or to destroy, there are absolute limits to economic growth.

This anthropocene, all of you work with that now. Sustainability. Limits to growth and

whatever. That is ’72 Rome club, but now it is really getting embedded in all architectural logic. I heard yesterday, the Danish architect and founder of COBE Architects, Dan Stubber-

gaard talk about Papirøen [a popular warehouse used for food market at a central harbor site in Copenhagen]. “We have to get rid of Papirøen, because we are wasting energy, it is

not sustainable this building. We have to tear it down to build a New Papirøen.” So, basically

you argue with sustainability, limits to growth, respect for national resources. You ­argue with macroscopic sustainability ethical arguments.

The next thing is more in the German tradition of critical theory and left Marxism.

Ernst Block

Here you talk about negative ethics, utopian ethics or ethics of the not yet. And here

you could read Ernst Block; Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1954). In Danish; Håbets princip.

You defend a non-identical between the ‘gegenstand identity’ concept and you say

that there can always be another world out there. You can also defend something against

the motor drive of normal society. In example, you defend deceleration against acceleration.

You defend atmosphere against supermarket. Forced commercialisation. You start to bring

all kinds of ethics of the not yet and work on behalf of something that should be realised if

people are supposed to be happy. So, you work for the not yet ethics. Bigger than what is possible in a utilitarian perspective.

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/ REFLECTIONS ON THE GRAVITY OF DETAILS

Friedrich Nietzche

In the very end there is Nietzsche. Because, you could also say, let us try to jump out of all

this stupid bullshit, all these dualisms. And Nietzsche wrote back in 1888; Beyond Good and Evil. Because he said that this good and evil logic, it was both with Plato and in

Christian­ity and in basic metaphysics a kind of trap that we were embedded in. Powerful people, they do not need to be there. They could go beyond good and evil. They can install

a principle and they could try to build up a freedom that is without ethical consideration or dualism. I do not know if you as architects can succeed in this and I have not seen an

­architect really protecting or saying, “I’m a Nietzschean architect, I go beyond good and evil” – and then tell it to people at Ground Zero or something. They would probably kill you...

So, I end up here in the last part concluding that there are tensions. I guess we have inherited all ten different ways of thinking. Some of them are on the axis between absolutism and

relativism. Some are closer to one end of this spectre than others. Others are close to ­universalist ways of arguing. Others are closer to historicists. There are also people right

now talking about something called a natural ethics among small apes and humanoids six Michael Tomasello

million years ago. That has been very criticised by many philosophers.

You can read Michael Tomasello, Natural History of Human Morality (2016). Where he

places morality within the biological sphere.

Then you can talk about rational ethic. That is something you can argue for. Or extra

Jean-Paul Sartre

rational or even irrational ethics. Try to build a stronger argument so the other one will say,

yes, you are right. On the other hand you have Sartre saying; “ethic has nothing to do with rationale.” It is helping another person trying to enter a bus. Just stretching out your hand.

The same is actually heard from Shoppenhauer in beginning of 1800. Where he stated

Arthur Schopenhauer

that; “ethics is not something that you argue for in a rational way. It is spontaneous. Or it is not.”

You always use discourse-based ethics to come up with your best arguments. So you

are in a way Habermasians when you are opening an office and you are arguing with one

another with arguments. Then you cannot escape the discourse ethics probably. You have of course this very tricky thing, that moral and ethics is not the same in all languages. In example we tend to think in Denmark that moral is being practised. Ethics is second-order

reflections in a theoretical perspective. At the same time we have in Danish something you

call dobbeltmoralsk – double moral. But you cannot be double ethics. You cannot have a dobbeltetik (Da.). So, how do we use the words in different languages? Not exactly in the same way. I just want to state that this is maybe also something to debate when you are

here from Holland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and whatever. We do not use the words in the same way. Maybe, my ten ideas of ethics will look very different if you invite a philosopher from Holland, Spain or Italy – I do not know. This was my take – bye bye.”

Next pages SKUESPILHUSET COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects Photo: Jens V. Nielsen

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PART 2

22

No money no detail

When designing the Kunsthal in Rotterdam 25 years ago the Dutch architectural office OMA proclaimed their focus on architecture as storytelling by the famous quote ‘No Money – No Detail!’. In the recent work by the office their attitude towards the value of the detail has changed. Is this a common tendency within architecture? Is there a shift from the focus on architecture as storytelling to the focus of the making or tectonics of the buildings? In part 2 – four speakers across Holland and Denmark who represent different positions within the field will discuss how they see the value of detailing in their architectural practices and in the world of construction in general.

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/ WHO IS THE OWNER OF THE DETAIL DETAIL?

24

INTRODUCTION

Who is the owner of the detail?

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CASE DI MUSICA PORTO, PORTUGAL OMA Photo: Ulrik Stylsvig Madsen

The book Super Dutch – New Architecture in the Netherlands from year 2000 featured a range of key figures in Dutch architecture whose work was characterized by; ‘invention, a blunt creative use of materials, and dynamic formal experimentation’. Amongst them were Rem Koolhaas, founder of OMA, presenting the influential work of the office.

The architectural understanding of the Super Dutch influenced the detailing and final finish of the buildings and some critics have referred to this era in Dutch architecture as; ‘shoot and run’. The details were claimed to be so poorly made – that you had to take a picture when the building was just finished and run away...

However, in 2014 Rem Koolhaas/OMA/AMO directed the Venice Biennale and for this chose the theme Fundamentals. This exhibition showed a thorough and deep interest in the building elements from formal, historical, functional, cultural and technical perspectives. A similar attitude has also grown in the work of OMA in the past years and there is clear interest in how the architectural details inform the whole of the building and how advanced use of materials and new technologies can improve the construction design.

Vincent Kersten graduated from TU Delft in 1985 and is senior architect at OMA. He has been a leading part of many prominent international projects and he also ­lectures about OMA’s work at international universities.

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Who is the owner of the detail?

VINCENT KERSTEN

/ Vincent Kersten Architect, Associate / OMA Netherlands

“The framing text of the symposium was quite triggering for me.

First of all, the detail is not dead, the detail is more alive than ever, due to the Internet.

We can find anything on the Internet, all the information about details, about material, about research. You can find it all. But I have to tell you that we are losing control over the

detail so I will give this lecture a sub-title called: Who is the owner of the detail at the ­moment? I think that is where we are struggling. I will focus on two themes in this talk: The concept versus the detailing.

The two themes have been chosen because I think – and we at OMA think – that the

detailing always has to serve the concept. Then I will tell you something about the competitions, versus direct commissioning, which has influence on the control of the detail.

In control over the detail, we have OMA (Office of Metropolitan Architecture), but also

AMO (Architecture Media Organization). This is a research component next to our architect­

ural practice. You see under OMA we are building. But AMO is not building and with this

counter component of OMA we can have more research projects. Writing books, doing research, also material research. These two offices influence each other.

The last ten years we have had a huge - what we call; business development component.

People in the office that are searching the Internet for tenders, they prepare tenders, you

give all your financial information, you give the staffing, the skills of the staffing. You do your

fee proposals and with this you try to get projects all over the world. It is all in competition so you have to compete. And you are glad after having sent a tender out to be selected.

After that you can start the competition, alongside ten other architectural offices.

In the competition phase people work day and night for a very small fee. You have to

deliver models, you have to deliver Revit-models (BIM). You have to deliver images. So this

takes a lot of work. You don’t have time for detailing. Then, if you are the lucky, you win the competition and you start sketching the design. In the contract, normally there is mentioned

that you have to work together with a local design institute [that is in international competitions/projects]. This local design institute takes over your design already during design

/

development. You have to work together. After that you are losing control, because the CASE DI MUSICA PORTO, PORTUGAL OMA Photo: Ulrik Stylsvig Madsen

construction document phase, is done by the local design institute. You do not know

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/ WHO IS THE OWNER OF THE DETAIL DETAIL?

­exactly what is going on. During the whole site administration/ site supervision phase, you do not know what is happening. You are not involved anymore. If you are lucky, the client

says, okay, you can come on site, you can have a look, you can do a little bit site control, but only under the flag of the local design institute.

Are we today a company who has a strong design component? No, because all the

efforts go into the first phases. To give some examples of this, I’ll go through several projects.

First, I will tell you about the scheme for the first two examples. We see our client. We, OMA, do an architectural design. After that, nothing. In the end, we do some aesthetical supervision. It is all about concept in OMA. Seattle Library

The Seattle Library is a concept of a library and you see the fixed parts are monolith

elements, you cannot change them, and it is just linked together by escalators and all the

spaces around are flexible. Just wrapped in a skin. All around. That is the concept. It is a

weird building to see but it is just following the concept. The fixed part and the flexible part.

Casa de Musica

If we go to Casa de Música, Porto, we did there the same, but we wrapped it in con-

crete. The concept was so strong that making this building became incredibly complex, causing the contractor to run out of money. Actually, our fee was also gone. So, they

­decided that we could work with the contractor and the leftover budget to fix this building.

That is why you see this more industrialised interior, because we were creative in finding

materials, which were cheap but also very outstanding. We used a kind of perforated steel.

We used very cheap illumination. In the end it was quite an interesting building. I revisited the building last year and if you look closely, you’ll see the bad details of the building. In

architectural, glossy papers, you do not see this. Despite this, the overall experience is nice. The contractor and the owner are very happy with the building.

We were very creative in the end, because we could only use plywood, so what we

did was just using silver paint on the plywood and this is the interior of the main hall. You see just plywood. But actually outstanding and surprisingly it still works fantastic. That was Casa de Música.

Taipei Performing Arts Center

In Taipei, we designed Taipei Performing Arts Center (TPAC), a building with three auditoria ‘plugged in’. They ‘plug in’ with their stages into the cube. Two backstages and two flight

towers are connected to each other. This means that you can connect these two auditoria when you need to create a huge theatre. You can even put the audience on the stage itself.

It is quite unique.

Again it is a strong concept and everything has to follow the concept. All the tech-

nique – all the detailing has to follow the concept. On top we ‘plug in’ another theatre, so we have three auditoria ‘plugged in’.

It was so complex that a year ago the contractor happened to go bankrupt. So different

from Porto, where we could help the contractor, here the City of Taipei decided to let him go bankrupt and try to find another contractor. Until now the bids are too high. So quite depressing for us it is still not finished.

What often happens with OMA is that the concept is so strong and they [clients, con-

tractors] underestimate the complexity. But it can also happen in another way.

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/ WHO IS THE OWNER OF THE DETAIL DETAIL?

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CASE DI MUSICA PORTO, PORTUGAL OMA Photo: Ulrik Stylsvig Madsen and Philippe Ruault

TAIPEI PERFORMING ARTS CENTER TAIPEI, TAIWAN OMA

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/ WHO IS THE OWNER OF THE DETAIL DETAIL?

Prada pavillon

There is another model where we have more influence on the project. When we work with

Prada we do the architectural design. But we also have a fee for material research. We have a fee for prototype production, for lighting consultants, for audio/visual consultants and cost consultants. That means the whole project is more under control.

We do a lot of fashion shows for Prada and once a pavilion in South Korea.

Because we had a lot of fees for research, the final result was more based on the initial

idea and on research. I believe that, if the industry is more flexible on the smaller scale the more you can realise with them.

The final result is a pavilion that can turn over to four sides. We could have a special

event; an art exhibition, a cinema or a fashion exhibition and after one month the whole pavilion rotated. We had to work very close together with engineers, because every time

the structural forces work differently. We had to do research with some crane companies.

How do you turn over such an element? And of course, we had to study the internal envi-

ronment. How fresh is the air? Is it not too hot inside? What is the foundation? Where do you enter? Is it waterproof?

The whole process was serving the initial idea, the intentions. We had fees to control

all the parties involved. So in this case, I think we were more successful with the details.

Detailing was part of our work.

Qatar National Library

Another project is located in Qatar, the Qatar National Library - it is just finished. Here we

could control everything because everything was under the scope of OMA. We were lead consultant. We did the architectural design, but under our scope was Arup, with all the engineering. Cost consultants and even a company in China that did the construction

­documents. All these guys were under the scope of OMA. This meant we could completely control the quality of the detail serving the initial concept.

Actually, it [resemblances the image of] two folded papers. It is also a strong concept

- and a very complicated project. I will tell you about the bookshelves. Everything had to be incorporated in the bookshelves. What did we incorporate? We wanted to have a bookshelf

as a part of the floor. All of the furniture is just raised out of the floor. No ‘loose’ furniture and for this we incorporated the books for the system. They are part of the bookshelves.

We had to work with all these engineers together and because they were under our scope we could squeeze them and we had to do it. We made very precise design drawings and went very deep into the process. You see the elevator, the light everything is incorporated in the bookshelf itself. Even the opening door, the entire bookshelf is cladded with marble.

White marble. We made special light details. That means that all the light is coming from the bookshelf itself. The ambient light comes out of the bookshelves and it works.

Everything was meant to keep the monumentality and the dignity of the space was incorporated into the bookshelves. I think we were quite successful, because of the contract and because we could really control the detail.

We have some experience now with ‘design and build’, which means that we work

under the scope of a contractor. We were very scared in the beginning, because we are

very strong in conceptual design and we maybe would lose the control. But actually it has

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not happened. We have now worked two times in a ‘design and build’ configuration and I QATAR NATIONAL LIBRARY QATAR OMA Photos: ©Qatar National Library and OMA

have to say, we also learnt from the contractor. We did research together with the contractor.

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We made prototypes together with the contractor. Feasibility studies, education, even the building technology. Our office enrich themselves with the knowledge from the contractor.

It was very successful to work with the contractor in the end, which for me was quite

an eye-opener. Maybe we were too scared and too dogmatic to lose the strength of the concept.

Lastly, I will tell you few things about China, because I worked a long time in China. It is so

different from what is happening in Europe. I will talk about the quality versus the speed.

You see in China the quality of the details is still very bad. But there is something in return.

They are very eager to learn and they do it in such a high speed. It is really an eye-opener to see how pragmatic they are. They learn incredibly fast and they are very open-minded.

They learn from you, but the danger is that they are copying and pasting. They are not

so creative and they immediately take over your attitude. So we have to be keen about the copyright of our ideas.

Shenzhen Stock Exchange

I will tell you about a building in Shenzhen. It is just above Hong Kong. I worked for

some years on this building and it is incredible what is happening there. It is a stock ­exchange and we said; ‘stocks are speculating with money, this building is speculating

with gravity’ and because of this sentence we won the competition. It is huge and it is such

a large scale and such a great ambition. Because it is in Shenzhen it is a part of the Pearl River Delta, which is the factory of the world. So every time you ask them to do something with complexity they always say - Yes! They are so open-minded. Everything is possible

there. It is going so fast that I think within ten years they are overruling us or we have to find an attitude to deal with it.

BLOX

At the moment, we are working on the Bryghus Project (BLOX) nearby. I visited this morning and actually we are quite happy. In this project, OMA has a kind of sub-consultant under

our scope. The quality of the details is super high and I am quite satisfied with what is going

on here. The world is a little bit engineer-based, I have to say. So I hope that we [architects] can maintain the concept as the leading partner and all what is coming next to serve this

[the concept]. I hope that we are not overruled in the end – by the business development staff of our office, that is only focused on tendering or doing initial designs and winning competitions. We must have time for detailing.”

BLOX COPENHAGEN, DENMARK OMA Photo: Jens V. Nielsen

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INTRODUCTION

Affordable details SOCIAL HOUSING LISBJERG, DENMARK Vandkunsten Architects Photo: Vandkunsten Architects

How to design for building affordable houses and not to compromise with architectural quality at any level can be claimed to be the hallmark of Vandkunsten Architects.

Since the first housing projects way back in the early 1970’ies the people behind Vandkunsten Architects have shown a sincere interest in the social strength of creating strong communities through architectural design. This approach has always been based on a fine balance between defining material quality, giving character to the spatial layout, proportioning of the scale and thorough reading of the landscape of the site.

In 2001 the Architectural Board of the Danish Art Foundation launched a national competition about affordable building concepts1. The square meter price was not to exceed 4.000 DKK (540 EUR). Amongst the winning projects were Vandkunsten Architects concept for prefabricated affordable housing, which was based on a basic spatial building module of a 5×5 m square. The home plot was 10×10 m consisting of a series of 5 modules (a living module, a courtyard module, a small entrance module and a storage module). 171 housing units were built in Kvistgaard between 2004-2007 in the northern part of Sealand.2 Similar to this concept many other housing projects focus on bringing down the cost for the tenants. But also social integration by user participation and architectural design features that enhance sustainability are central to these new housing concept.

Kim Dalgaard, graduated in 1996 from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts – School of Architecture. In 2006 he joined Vandkunsten Architects and over the years he has been in charge of several innovative projects and their construction design.

Besides great knowledge about sustainability he is a specialist in wood architecture and wood construction.

Notes 1. Bedre, Billigere Boliger, 2001; Statens Kunstfond and the client DFE collaborated on this competition brief.

2. http://vandkunsten.com/en/projects/better-cheaper-housing.

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• facade cladding allowed to weather

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SOCIAL HOUSING LISBJERG, DENMARK Vandkunsten Architects

A_BX_539 462 200

262

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søjle, iht. ing. projekt

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12

afstandsliste lodret, Type A vindspærre

loftsbeklædning, Type A bæreprofil

fuge, Type H

• Steel joints prevents perpendicula Afd.squeezing 128 Lisbjerg Bakke v/Al2bolig Lodret snitetc - gennembrydning facade v. altan nede • Joints prepared for ‘add-ons’ - balconies without compromising the ‘skin’ layer 36 Emne

Fase

Tegner RO Godkendt KD

Mål

1:5

Dato

01.02.2016

Bygherre AI2bolig Ark Landskab MOE A/S Ingeniør

Langekjærvej 2F, 8381 Tilst - info@AL2bolig.dk - tel. 87459191

Sagsnr

Udbudsprojekt

20144410

(Aarhus kommune)

Krudtløbsvej 14, 1439 København K - vandkunsten@vandkunst.dk - tel. 32542111 Krudtløbsvej 14, 1439 København K - vandkunsten@vandkunst.dk - tel. 32542111 Buddingevej 272, 2860 Søborg - info@moe.dk - tel. 4457 6000

Tegn. nr.

A_BX_539 Papirformat: A3

Affordable KIM DALGAARD details

/ Kim Dalgaard Architect, Project Leader, / Vandkunsten Architects Denmark

“I am going to take you through two projects, which both are social housing projects or almene boliger, as you say in Danish. A growing problem has been that the workers of the Welfare State have been pushed outside the city borders [due to high living expenses]. This means there has been a tremendous demand for trying to bring down the rent, to house these workers inside the center, or the vicinity of the city.

When I have been thinking about the theme for this symposium – one of the main

conclusions I’ve made is that there is a growing awareness of what we call Life Cycle Costing

(LCC). This means that we have to define the costing seen in a fifty years perspective.

Apart from the energy demands and the water demands, it [LCC], also takes into account

the replacement of building parts in a continual cycle as well as the cost of replacing the building parts. In the social housing schemes we have to do this type of analysis of the building envelope to keep the cost low.

I will also talk about social housing with a DGNB pre-certification aim. That of course,

points to a kind of utopian solution, where we have complete circular economy, with building paths growing into the biological and technical system.

Almen+

The first project is the Almen+. I think about fifteen housing schemes have been built by

now. Out of these I think half of them have been designed by Vandkunsten Architects and

half of them by ONV Architects with the housing manufacturing company - Scandibyg. We have been developing our projects with BM Building Industry. The aim was to bring down the rent to approximately 8,000 DKK (1,075 €), for a family unit of four or five rooms equi­ valent to 115 square meters. To do this, the first thing they they wanted to get rid of was all these spaces between the buildings where you need a caretaker to take care of lawns and

public amenities. We had to privatise the outside spaces, influenced, or inspired, by the working-class housing of the 19th century that had small front gardens and small back gardens. They were very popular back then and still are.

Modules consist basically of timber frame or timber panel constructions that are

­assembled into a box. The project has been built without elevators of course, with as little technology as possible and built by means of mass production and 2020 energy require-

ments to bring down the running costs. The basic principle is taken from factory line

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­production as known from the Ford factories. The manufacturing process is very fast and

actually very precise. Usually, the boxes are delivered on site and assembled extremely fast and the façades are mounted after that. As it is a concept that can be applied to different

situations, it usually comes with some degree of customization, for example different façade claddings. This you can discuss with the client and they can choose this and that

and maybe the economy will be a little bit better or a little bit worse depending on what is

chosen. We, as architects, have little influence on the details since main parts of the façade

have standard detailing. Then we have a little bit of finishing of course, around the windows

and maybe dealing with the connections around corners and framing of windows. I would say that around 90 % are standard details in these projects.

In social housing we have to avoid risk of course. This is very critical since the running

expenses are very important. We have building inspection after 1 year and then again after

5 years. So, we have to take care that the details of the building parts can be easily assembled, disassembled or replaced. If we do anything apart from the proven details of the

SBi-anvisninger [The formal Danish building instructions] and similar regulations, we have

to make a risk rapport explaining the details. So, it is a very controlled building in a way. A

lot of these buildings were made with slate cladding, because I think it is a nice material and it is also quite cheap at the moment.

We have influence on certain details that make small gestures, small generous

­gestures like eaves above the doors. Basically, very practical details that allow the façade to ‘shed’ its layers and to replace the layers quite easily.

The houses are all very popular. Long waiting list for all these housing developments.

I think it is primarily due to the very low rent, but also because of the user participation. The

inhabitants have to take care of the outside areas, because there is no caretaker as in ­traditional social housing. Of course, one of the main priorities of Vandkunsten Architects has always been; if we cannot control the details completely we have to make the spaces

between the buildings function well socially and of course practically. I think this is the main focus in many of these building developments apart from of course the design quality. Ørestad Syd

The next examples were built during the financial crisis. Again, it is a ‘box building’ concept where the emphasis is on the spaces between the buildings and the particular volumetric design more than on the details. Of course, there are small details that show some kind of

generosity. Catching the morning sun, for instance, with the bay windows or making a little gesture above the door, but the main façades are quite standard. It is another very low-cost project with only few details, maybe 10 details or something like that in the whole project.

Almen+ 5

In the latest project development of the Almen+ housing system, we took a different

approach trying to make the project less box-like in a way. We tried to make it more like

traditional roofs, but we also defined a much clearer hierarchy between the living spaces.

Perturbing the ground level box and designing the two boxes on top of that a little bit smaller, makes for much better light distribution overall in the settlement.

The basic premise is that these are dense settlements, about 120-130 percent, so

that is the reason why we are building row houses in three stories.

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Lisbjerg social housing

Then there is a completely different project that is also social housing, but we took a different approach. We won this open competition [Lisbjerg outside Aarhus] in 2010 about housing

that was going to be DGNB-certified. Personally, I was a bit tired of all of these wooden projects that had no wood in them at all and the material honesty was sort of gone. So, we

tried to give it fuld skrue [full power] as we say in Danish. We tried to make a project that

emphasized the quality of wood as much as possible. The building system is basically a hybrid system that mixes wood beams and columns with a concrete core and concrete foundations. It is not all made of wood. We have a kind of practical approach to the building

system with an in-fill structure that completely separates the load bearing structure from the skin of the building. What you would call; the space plan in Stewart Brand’s terms1.

That of course, makes it extremely adaptable, because it is made of wood, but also ­because it is a column-based structure.

We even pushed it further and made the whole building consist of untreated wood. It

is practically untreated planks from Sweden, which are just put up as a very traditional ‘one on two’ façade cladding. We are doing all we can to protect the façade in a traditional

manner instead of painting it. The main focus is to open for replacement of the building parts instead of treating them. Life cycle calculations show it is much better for the envi-

ronment and it allows wood constructions to go into the biological system again. You can also see it on the inside. We have three layer boards on the inside that only have been treated with white lye2 to make it a little bit lighter and also to stop the yellowing of the

wood. Of course we use all the wisdom of the traditional wooden house to show water

away, to put the board in such a way that the root ends of the wood are pointing up, which expel the water downwards. We make sure to take all the precautions we know of in

­advance. The water expelling eaves we tend to make a little bit bigger than what they need to be, because we are concerned about the scale of the building here. We had problems in

making the contractor do this, but they managed in the end. We made renderings trying to show this kind of weathering that we cannot quite control, because it is a very hard selling point.

We have also designed steel joints that prevent perpendicular squeezing of the wood

fibers. So you do not have the problem of the building structure settling3, but also the steel

joints allow us to have flexibility of placing balconies, other kinds of add-ons or structural elements on the façade without compromising the skin structure. Again, a feature that kind

Notes 1. How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, Penguin,1995; Brand defines buildings physical qualities as ‘layers’ that have different lifespans and values - which opens for buildings to be designed accordingly.

2. Lye or potassium hydroxide, is made of white ashes from hard wood.

It provides a lighter finish and reduces the yellowing process of the wood.

3. wood structures have a tendency to ‘settle’ due to drying out and the compression of the organic fibers due to the weight of the structure.

of takes its cue from the Steward Brand theory of separating the layers of the building.

I think the whole building structure is built in four days. It is going up very fast, ­because

the elements are kept quite small.

Finally, we made some life cycle calculation comparisons between these three projects. We made life cycle calculation where the blue columns are the global greenhouse emissions of the materials and also calculations of the building operation – the heating and so on. The grey columns are the total energy consumption. The dark parts are the embodied energy

from the materials. It is very interesting that the energy consumption related to the materials, construction or making of the materials, is actually three times higher than the running of

the building in 50 years! This is strange when we think about the extreme focus we have on

reducing the operational energy in buildings and all the appliances we use in buildings right

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ment and maintainance connections / SOCIAL HOUSING LISBJERG, DENMARK CONSTRUCTION DETAIL Vandkunsten Architects

: eaves, gutters etc. s

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now to minimize the running expenditure of energy. What is also interesting is that we can see that the Lisbjerg project, in fact, has three times less energy consumption in 50 years.

The big difference in the numbers shows a very strong argument for using wood, I

think.

It evidently shows that you have to look much more at materials, but of course, you

Note 4. Ørestad is a developing city area in Copenhagen, Denmark, on the island of Amager. The planning and development of this part of the city began in 1992

also have to take into account how the building parts are assembled. There is a growing focus on Life Cycle Costing (LCC), both from the social housing companies, but also from the municipalities. For instance, I have heard that in the Ørestad4 all the houses are being

DGNB certified, which means they are going to make Life Cycling Costing (LCC) and Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of all the buildings in the coming stages. This enhanced focus will have quite a big impact in the coming years I think. Thank you.”

Next pages SOCIAL HOUSING LISBJERG, DENMARK COMPETITION PROJECT Vandkunsten Architects Photo: Vandkunsten Architects

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INTRODUCTION

Details of the details /

ALMEN+ ISHØJ, DENMARK JAJA Architects Scandibyg A/S Photos: Jan Tanaka

The building manufacturer Scandibyg A/S has existed in 40 years and over the years the company has grown into one of the largest and technically most powerful modular prefab construction companies in the Danish building industry. Growing out of ­traditional craftsmanship, originally the Midtfjord Træindustri aps the production has moved from controlled craftsmanship under roof (industrial production) and stepped into the future with automated manufacturing by use of flat-bed robots.

In the beginning the prefabricated modular building units were primarily used for short term structures, such as pavilions for temporary classrooms in renovation projects of schools or as sheds for construction workers at construction sites. Due to a general demand for speeding up the production time of buildings and the need for higher quality in the execution of building constructions, prefabricated building modules made in factories have become more accepted for other purposes than ­pavilions, and today it is one of most commonly used construction methods in social housing up to 2-3 stories. However, one could fear that the industrialised manufacturing processes are challenging or rather limiting the architectural vocabulary, due to the standardised processes and cost efficiency.

During the past decades Scandibyg A/S has collaborated with a number of ­talented architects in some of the most challenging housing projects with extremely low prices. In these projects they have been willing to try new solutions that could serve the intentions of the architects.

Since 2007 Horst Günther has been part of the technical development of the prefabricated construction modules at Scandibyg A/S. Also, he has collaborated closely with architects in many of the affordable housing schemes now built across Denmark.

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Details of the details

HORST GÜNTHER

/ Horst Günther Engineer, Technical Director / Scandibyg A/S Denmark

I am employed at Scandibyg A/S as technical manager. Scandibyg is one of the largest companies in Denmark producing prefabricated modular buildings. Scandi byg is part of the MTH Group, which consists of different companies and our main company – our ‘mother’ is MT Højgaard. We are among the subsidiaries and work together with most of the other

companies on a daily basis. Scandi byg was founded in ‘78 and it grew fast in the first 5-6 years.

In ‘84 Scandi byg were bought by the contractor Højgaard & Schultz (which later

turned into the MTH Group). In ‘92 we reached the first major milestone, when we won a

contract for 51 cellular refugees centers all over Denmark. This was the jump from being a small indoor carpenter company to becoming more industrial. In 2002 the company changed its name and in 2009 we won the first big AlmenBolig+ framework agreement concerning 520 apartments, mostly to be built in the area of Copenhagen. In 2013, we won

another one for approximately 460 apartments. Today, we are still moving forward, now

employing around 360 people and we are at the moment occupied with installing a ‘one of

a kind’ robot in our production. As we speak, the robot is slowly running into production

and the plan is that in the end of May 2017 the robot will be at full speed, producing about 20 wooden elements per day. That makes about 1000 modules per year using this robot.

We have helped developing the robot and production layout in order to reach maximum speed and quality.

However, when I was invited for this symposium, Anne Beim was nice enough to send

me some questions, which I will try to answer:

What is the primary driver when you develop details?

How does the industrial production setup affect your choice of details?

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What does the quality of the material mean for the details?

SCANDIBYG A/S PRODUCTION HALL Photo: Scandibyg A/S KRONEN, VANLØSE Polyform Architects Scandibyg A/S Photos: Jens V. Nielsen NØRREBRO, COPENHAGEN ONV Architects Scandibyg A/S Photos: Jens V. Nielsen

What do the construction technical requirements mean and the financial budgets?

Few and simple details, is it equally cheap solutions?

Where is the limit of detail in your production setup?

To understand the procedure from our point of view: We build the houses/modules and finish 80-90 percent at the factory, transport it to the building site, mount it on the building

site and after assembly and installations work, we deliver the key to the owner. This is ­basically the procedure each time.

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From my point of view; we have three types of details that we work with every day:

The first one, is the architectural detail. The architect, of course, draws the design and

defines the architectural quality, the functionality of the building, the interior design and perhaps even the artistic expression. That is maybe a bit difficult in the way we build, but they try as hard as they can. Secondly, we have the functional and technical details. It could

be the window, the ceiling, the drip glance or the vapor barrier. Do the details meet requirements of the building codes of 2020 or 2015 and so on? We have to make sure that the durability and quality is under control. Finally, we have the construction details, the structural components, the stability, and the structural design.

The parameters in all three kinds of details are the sustainability in term of choice of

materials and resources. We also work with DGNB certification and BREEAM and in 2018 also svanemærke.

I hope that the concept of ‘circular economy’ will be much more used forwardly. I believe that

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the little extra money the builders put in the project from the start, will help to make better ALMEN+ SOCIAL HOUSING MÅRSLET, DENMARK ONV Architects Scandibyg A/S Photo: Jens V. Nielsen

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buildings and better architecture, as long as we prove that the cycle is the same – or maybe even a better return on investment. Also, we work hard, on ‘design for disassembly’ (DfD), because we have the opportunity, and we are lucky, in that sense, that we build the way we do. The architectural details are carried out by the architect in close cooperation with us.

/ DETAILS OF THE DETAILS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DETAIL

Architectural solutions usually do not have a major impact on our standard details. The architect concentrates on the façade expression, the accessories, the balconies, the roofing,

colors, stairs, and so on. Then there are the functional, technical and constructional details.

We are quite an old company and over a number of years we have developed details solving

the functional aspects and the construction. In our daily work, we have two types of ­technical details. We have perhaps 60-70 ‘basic details’ that solves how to connect the corners, roof, floors and so on. Also, we have what we call ‘extended details’. That is when

the money’s there and the architect have the opportunity to ‘play’ with the expression,

maybe to push back a module a little or extend it, a little more money and room work with.

We have solutions and details to solve that too.

The durability of the detail is required not only by law, but also from the builders – the

companies that buy the building. We try to do the same detail every day, so we are certain

that the quality is met and that we do not have any problems or any changes in the production. We are trying to produce the same module detail just in different packaging. It is quite

simple. As an example, we have eight different apartments and they are based on the exact same detail all around; at the roof, floor, walls, and corners. The architect can combine

different apartments and play with it like Lego. Maybe there is a need for combining the different modules in; two, three, or four stories and the architect can make his own contribution to the expression.

We can change the façade material. We can make it with brick, wood, whatever the

customer wants. We like big orders for 300+ modules like this. The primary driver for changing or developing details, is of course money – money talks, that is the deal.

How does the industrial production setup affect our choice? It is of great importance that

the details are the same every time, when we draw the elements at our end in the office,

since we only draw the outside line of the element and push the 3D-button, and here you go, the element is there. So, we have to install all the details in the computer. It is not a person who chooses the detail. The computer chooses the detail. It will take more than a day to change a detail.

What does the quality of the material mean? Of course, the quality is of great impor-

tance especially when we have an atomized production. The tolerances are very important, because if we put some crooked wood in the robot it will stop, so it has to be top quality.

What does the financial budget mean? Most of the time, we make small budget housing.

So, of course, it has a great impact. The architectural quality is, of course, dependent on the economic framework.

Do few and simple details equal cheap solutions? Of course. Uniformity in a project is

of great importance, especially considering the production speed of our factory as well as

the speed on the construction site. Today, if we are not calculating with the robot, we have three production lines and each production line is capable of making 10-15 modules each week. If it is the same module more or less, the productions staff in the factory do it faster

and faster until they peak. So, when it is simple and it is the same all the time, the speed is increased.

Where is the limit? I do not know. When the robot is fully running, of course it has

some limits, I think it will be pretty good, maybe it is twice as fast in 10 years. I do not know.”

Next pages ALMEN+ SOCIAL HOUSING MÅRSLET, DENMARK ONV Architects Scandibyg A/S Photo: Jens V. Nielsen

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INTRODUCTION

The argument of the detail /

SEB BANK COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects Photo: Jens V. Nielsen

Buildings described as generous entities that are supposed to ‘give more than they take’ and understood as ‘integrated parts of the city life that give something away for free’ – in this case architectural qualities, is the clear message of Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects when you enter their homepage. Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects (L&T) is a Danish architecture office founded in 1985 by the architects Boje Lundgaard1 and Lene Tranberg2. For more than 30 years the office has positioned itself as one of Denmark’s most recognized and award-winning architecture firms. Over the years the office has grown big and today it is run as a partnership of seven people. The practice is grounded in the Nordic architectural tradition, where humanism, craftsmanship and ‘simplification of complexities’ are regarded as central virtues. Architecture is understood as a public matter, concerning everyone in society. At its best architecture rises above a narrow programme and becomes a generous gesture to the local community, the particular context or society in a larger perspective. The buildings designed by Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects are characterized by a clear approach to the tectonic aspects of buildings. This shows as deep insights and honest interest in how buildings are constructed and how this can be translated into e.g. aesthetic gestures or good functionality – or to qualify the context of the site. Material quality, structural conciseness and topographical understanding are fundamentals in their approach. Their projects hold a richness of details that are blunt but not crude, that are honest but not banal, that are clear but not oversimplified.

Pil Thielst graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture in 2007. For almost ten years Pil Thielst has been part of Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects and has played a central role in many important projects.

Notes 1. Boje Lundgaard (1943-2004) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts - School of Architecture in 1967. Professor at the same place from 1987.

2. Lene Tranberg (1956-) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts - School of Architecture in 1984. Has held a great number of public offices, and has received prestigious international prizes, Today, she is head of Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects.

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The argument PIL THIELST of the detail

/ Pil Thielst, Architect / Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects Copenhagen

“Did you know that a professor of Law once set out to prove the principle of justice by deductive argumentation? The kind of argument where you with one or more true stances,

prove that something is undoubtedly true. Of course, he failed. The result being that the only thing that you can conclude, deductively, about justice is that equal instances should be treated similarly. To me, this is mind blowing because something as basic as justice, something that builds our society, is something that we can only obtain, grasp, through argumentation. By arguing. Nothing of this can be concluded as true.

I come from Lundgaard & Tranberg and I think we are an office that argue a lot. We

argue with consultants, we argue with clients and we argue amongst ourselves. I think you could say the main force in our professional practice is made up of one half professional

self-confidence, some would call it arrogance, and one half everlasting doubt in what would be the ‘right thing to do’. So, arguing is a central part of how we work.

Of course, we always try to look at a problem holistically, and I think that architects

are soon the only ones insisting on holistic arguments, both solving technical problems,

architectural problems, functional problems and maybe aspiring for something higher than

the singular problem. I will certainly argue that there is no such thing as an architectural

detail or constructive detail, seen as an isolated problem. On the contrary, where we can grasp the concept of making something that holds together holistically that is where we put our forces. I will give a short overview of the detailing that some of you may think of when you hear; ‘Lundgaard & Tranberg’.

SEB Bank

In the SEB Bank project we work with contrast. The concrete of the core is very raw,

pointing out the method of construction. But in spaces where the human body and the skin come close to the construction, we try to wrap it with another kind of tactility.

Skuespilhuset

In Skuespilhuset (National Theatre) we have developed a very characteristic stone/

brick that does not need contrasting with any other material inside the space. Maybe sometimes the lack of detail is the details in itself. Even the joints subordinates to tell the

story about the stone. So, a lot of our detailing is actually about prioritizing. Trying to figure

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out what is the main concept and the detail sometimes being reducing every other scramble KANNIKEGÅRDEN RIBE, DENMARK Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects Photo: Jens V. Nielsen

and to tell the most important story.

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In another very small project – a classical building in Copenhagen – we redesigned the ­interior and made a new entrance. We tried to point out, when we add elements that have

a material character of their own, that they are ‘add-ons’, so you can see what is the old classical house and what is the addition.

This is sort of a ‘heritage’. All these details are something we developed in ‘an earlier

life’. I feel, what we are facing now with all these turnkey contracts, is that details are maybe not possible anymore. This is quite depressing. I came here today hoping that you can solve this problem for me as well.

Something that we are being introduced to more often in our sketching phases, earlier

and earlier on, is that a contractor has a predefined vocabulary [details] from which we can

choose. Everything is there. It is postmodern times. We can choose a new juxtaposition for a lot of statements already tried. Everything has been said and we can try to put it together

in new ways. We laugh and cry a lot about this. One standing joke is that sometimes, for the facade, there is a line that reads; ‘aluminum - color optional’. So we ask ourselves: How are we going to cope with this turnkey contract world that we live in?

I will go into depth with two projects, maybe we can find an answer.

In Kvæsthusmolen, I think it is difficult to establish where the detail is. We see a result

where the detail actually interlocks so much with the final concept, that it is not possible to claim that it is a detail. Actually, we went all the way into production mode with this. Inventing

a whole new way of making surface scratches in the concrete, where they become just a little bit imprecise.

The main concept of Kvæsthusmolen has to do with the big space and the incompre-

hensible scale, it has to do with the horizon and connecting this with the city in the background. You can go to the edge of Kvæsthusmolen and have an experience that you will not get anywhere else in the city. Almost connected with the sea and the world out there.

Of course, you could do this simply, with moderate detailing of the surface. But it is important that the experience is anchored in something that has a human scale and a human touch.

All the imperfections are marks of the production method as much as they are marks

of the human hands that held the device making scratches, when the concrete was semi-

dried. We are very proud of this – because it is an example where the concept is very

­abstract and high reaching and still deeply anchored in the detail. It is the story about space, about the surface having a reflection that resembles the reflection of the sea and about erasing borders while anchoring the human body very close to the ground.

I have touched on the concept of tectonics. Something we continuously whine about

in the office. We conceive tectonics as the logical expression of how things are built, while wanting to use cladding materials like tile. For example, this is one of these schisms we return to: What do we do, when the construction method behind the material is not at all

how it presents itself? Stone houses do not anymore touch the ground, the construction method behind, almost everything built, is concrete elements or something like that.

So, what do we do? How do we position ourselves in this argument between what is

true, constructively speaking, and what is interesting to express in the concept and the detail?

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Kvæsthusmolen

/ THE ARGUMENT OF THE DETAIL

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KVÆSTHUSMOLEN COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects Photos: Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects

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KANNIKEGÅRDEN RIBE, DENMARK Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects Photo: Anders Sune Berg

/ THE ARGUMENT OF THE DETAIL

Kannikegården

Kannikegården, the new house for Ribe parish’s parochial church council, resembles a

precise volume that has been undercut to reveal something more important underneath; old ruins that are the remains of a very early settlement. This was a big concern for the church, who felt that it was symbolically wrong to undercut the building. Are we suggesting that this house of the church is something lifted? It does not connect with the underground.

It was one of these situations where we really had to get into the material to find an

expression and a detail that expresses what is going on. It is not a heavy brick lying up there, it is a ‘flying brick’. It is a light cladding material.

One of the details I love the most, is the small fixture holding the last layer of brick,

suggesting that you only need light fixtures to hold it. It is pointing out that we are not pre-

tending to raise heavy stone up here. The wonderful thing about this detail is that it has a lot of ambiguity. When you look at it a bit closer, it is not at all the fixture that holds the cladding, it is a very excessive cladding of a gutter. I think this detail argues that there is no truth, or at least the truth is not interesting.

I think in this era of turnkey contracts there are maybe three ways to go, maybe only two.

One is that you make a concept that is so strong and so robust that even though you

do not get to the phase where you design the detail, your concept will be easily read, even

if the guy taking over fucks up entirely. Missing all the details, the details are lacking or poorly built. This is the one way to go.

The other way to go; is to continue arguing, constantly seeking ways to make ourselves

worthy, as architects to finish the design phases. I think the example of Kvæsthusmolen

proves this, even though it was not a turnkey contract. Getting into the material, suggesting

development of construction methods that can compete with other ways of going about this problem. We could have just argued that we need a very expensive stone from Portugal.

The third way – and this is my question for you: Are we obliged to express the true

way that things are built? Or can we freely choose on the shelf what story we want to tell in each project?

So in Lundgaard & Tranberg, we constantly look at the tectonic aspect as something

that goes from the highest ranking vision, something very abstract, to the detail. Holding in between, maybe the methods of construction, so that we do not get totally depressed when the only thing we can still express is concrete elements put together.

I will try to argue, instead of talking about the detail as dead or alive. I will talk about

what is interesting to show in the detail and maybe the truth is not that interesting. We can try to develop details that show themselves as arguments. A part of ‘the art of argument­

ation’ is also about lending yourself to a radical argument. Try it out. See what happens. To

reach a higher aspect of acknowledgment is always about testing out different positions.

So, maybe not so much search for the truth, but for more power to the argument.

next pages KANNIKEGÅRDEN RIBE, DENMARK Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects Photos: Jens V. Nielsen

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DEBATE PART 2 PLENUM I have a question for Vincent. Since you showed your project, Blox, here in

­Copenhagen, and talked about the detail and because you build all around the world; Do you think that the detailing has a special flavor in each country that it is? You bring your concept, but it will be transformed for each country where it is built or do you have a special detailing culture with you?

VINCENT KERSTEN I will explain two sides, China against Denmark. When you look at your detailing here [in Denmark], every product has a certificate, it is mentioned in the specifications, it is based on calculations. So, your contract is very closed. Everything is controlled and that means that you also reach a very high level. When you look at China, they have no specifications. You cannot imagine how they build buildings without specifi­ cations. You have some drawings and that is that. It means that they have an internal net­ work of trust, they rely on their network, their relations, and past experiences. When you ask them, is this possible? They always say yes and they go out of the room and you see they start phoning their network to make it possible. It is a completely different approach.

So, you see the difference between the cultures.

PLENUM I have a question for two of you because I found the presentations very interesting.

30-40 years ago, when Vandkunsten had social utopian ideas, they could risk to fail and my

thesis now is that modern architecture is so expensive that we cannot risk to fail. In Farum

Midtpunkt people were kind of invited to sit in the back part of their apartment, to be open minded about people coming from the parking lot and try to break down the privacy of the

building. Old Tyge Arnfred had this idea that this was the point. That you could build social utopian ideas. Does this mean that modern architecture today is actually so much in control

of its future, anticipating a success, that there is no place for social experiment any longer?

In the old days, you could risk to fail and you learn from that. Negative experience.

Today we do not have negative experiences in architecture, that is only costs. Is that true?

KIM DALGAARD I think actually the Lisbjerg project is an experiment, because we are doing this with untreated timber in four stories, on the inside and the outside. Of course, it is not completely about the social spaces as much as before, but we are taking care of that also.

PIHL THIELST My answer is yes. Or no, maybe it is a different aspect that I am trying to talk about now. I think the failing part is really important, and I think that this turnkey ­contract is a way of trying to control that no one ever fails, because it is a way for the own­ er, the client, to control that he has one place to place all responsibility of budget overflow

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and time schedules not kept. This, of course, I think, is a dangerous thing, this makes it even more important for architects to assume the very old, ancient, role that maybe the builder had in the old times, where a lot of the professional skills were gathered, economic­ ally. Craftsmanship and the person who drew [the design] were often the same person, and now I feel that if we have to argue against this field of contractors, engineers, and everything, we more than ever need to have this holistic knowledge, to get to the discussion in these circumstances.

KIM DALGAARD I showed two very different projects; the Almen+, the modular prefab houses is about the low risk and high security for the investment, but the other project is really departing from this and making experiments about how to build. So, these are two different standpoints, where one is a turnkey contract and the other a traditional contract.

ULRICH KNAACK Can I ask Vincent to react to this, because in the beginning, you said that you were worried about this turnkey contract and in the end, you said there is a potential.

Can you give a comment?

VINCENT KERSTEN We did two projects where we were invited by a contract developer.

Actually, you are covered financially to take risk, because you invent a new product, but a contract developer has more money for research, and to make prototypes.

You can spend your architectural fee when you are covered by a client who shares the ­research. You can go deeper in the research.

ODILO SCHOCH I am a bit disappointed. Move out of your box, it sounds like a psycho­ logical problem. You really c ­ omplain. Honestly, first of all you need to have knowledge about how to build. And if there is a contractor as a client, I do not want to have my financial situation ruined, just because the architect failed making the entrance to your shop. It is slippery, it is not good for old people. The shop-entrance you show has no handrail. So, who takes the responsibility? I think it is a bit naive to say, “well we just need to fight always”.

I will show later a project where we made pure innovation, nothing was a standard, we didn’t even do an energy certificate, but it is built on a turnkey contract. It works, but you really need to interact with the contractor, and you need to make sure that you talk the same language. I once fell down in front of the theater over there designed by your office. It was icy, so now I have the opportunity to tell you my accident, remind you of your responsibility, because we have seen the ‘shoot and run’ ethics. Take the picture without any people and run away.

PIHL THIELST I am sorry you fell. I think it is absolutely important that we get into the actual argument. It makes it even more important that the architect has a wide field of knowledge, I think the danger with Excel-sheets is not money, the danger is not to keep a budget, of course, you have to and that’s always what we try to do.

On the last one, Ribe Church House, the energy and the money, have been spent on the exterior, because we had a generic space budget inside that could stand we prioritized this way. But if you do not get into the prioritizing process, if you are kept in the Excel-sheet,

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you are only allowed to ‘move horizontally’, you cannot prioritize vertically. Then you are truly screwed – I think. I totally agree that [we architects] need to get the knowledge and the skills to get into this discussion and make ourselves worthy of going all the way, drawing the details. We can show the client and the contractors that we understand all these ­aspects, the technical, the construction aspect, the financial and the time and everything else. So, I totally agree and then I also disagree...

PLENUM Steen, I enjoyed your debate on the ethics. You got us into details and how once

said; ‘you have to serve somebody’. So, my question to the panel is; how do you arrive at

the detail? What is the process? Is it experience or how do you get there? Can you only make good details, when you have made ten bad ones? What is the essence of the detail?

PIHL THIELST That is a difficult question. But I think that Steen pointed out ‘failure’, and this is something that you will not like to hear. Failure is sometimes a fantastic means to move forward and to discover something else. This is how all systems - even the capitalist systems develop themselves. Hopefully, in the office, you have some old colleagues who have tried to fail a few times. So I do not think it is necessary like this to fail, but I think the aspect of failing and exploring is very important.

KIM DALGAARD I think it is very difficult to separate the detail from the medium scale and the whole scale. I think we make a lot of details, we have a lot of debate about details, but I think basically the detail should not subtract from the overall impression or idea of the project, but support it. Support the sensibility of the project. So, I cannot really say some­ thing specifically about the detail. I cannot separate it from what is a larger detail or an even larger detail again.

HORST GÜNTHER Luckily, I am only an engineer, not an architect, so often I say my calculator saves me, when I am making a detail.

VINCENT KERSTEN I would say, we need the time for it. Like I already mentioned, we have much more energy in the business development and the competition phase, which means, in the end, we are squeezed in short time to make the detailing. That is really the problem now in the architectural offices. We need time for it.

PLENUM Well, I am not in this business, I just have a giant question for all of you. If you

are selling bacon or Audi-cars and you have a growth rate of the double, it is a double ­success. What is the criteria of a success for an architecture company? Could it be to have twice as many contracts? Or to be a better architect?

So, the question is; the criteria of architectural success, what can that be? Is it an

exception compared to bacon production and car production?

STEEN NEPPER LARSEN Not being an architect, I think, maybe this discussion also have to involve the people or the companies who pay for the building. How much money are they willing to spend on the project? It is more or less a demand I think.

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KIM DALGAARD I cannot really define it, but I think it reminds me of the first question I heard, when I entered the architectural school. What is architecture? It is more or less the same question, but I cannot answer. I think you know when it is there, like art.

You know when you nailed it and you know when you didn’t.

PIHL THIELST I think if a space, a city, people or society is left of better when you have been there than before you were there, then you succeeded. If you are able to interpret the space and call forward qualities that have not yet been shown, then you succeeded. Of course, all the time keeping economy and time schedule.

ANNE BEIM Okay, now is a coffee break. We went fifty minutes over time, so we need a break to talk about all of this.

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PART 3

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Digital vs physical Most architectural design processes have now become digitized, but when computer based tools were first introduced, architects were a bit hesitant. Today, drawing formats, BIM models (Building Information Models), shared data platforms, and ‘design to build’ are generally based on computation.

But, what happens when architectural details that have evolved out historical building traditions are transferred into digital standards and then back into the messy world of a building site? Can the stuff built in the computer be built in reality?

Digital tools ask for exactitude due to the data is based on numerical logics, but how does this affect the dimensions linked to; the knowledge of the hand, the building culture offered by the craftsman, or the lack of common order in the construction business? Four speakers across industry and academia have been invited to discuss how they see the knowledge transfer from the digital to the physical world that is linked to constructing details contribute to architecture, and how it changes the architectural professional practice.

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The proper detail LAB

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PD TEST LAB TU DELFT, NETHERLANDS The Bucky LAB, TU Delft Photo: The Bucky LAB, TU Delft

The Proper Detail Lab (PD Lab) has grown out of the ‘Bucky Lab’ and the ‘Bucky Lab Seminars’, where research and student assignments have looked into the combination of architecture and building technology and how it can be brought to a higher level.

The trademark of the Bucky Lab is to develop innovative sustainable building constructions and concepts. The semester starts with the design of the architectural concept, which will be materialized and developed to a final design. The ‘Design by technological research’ method integrates; Computer Aided Design and Modelling (CAD & CAM), structural analysis, material sciences and technological research in the design process. The research is done by virtual and physical testing of the materials and structural performance of the design. The results are used as feedback to optimize the design into a state that it can be built as a full-scale prototype.

Marcel Bilow was born in Bielefeld, Germany and studied architecture at the Detmolder Schule für Architektur (OWL). After serving as an apprentice bricklayer for three years, Bilow co-founded the architectural office ‘raum204’. From 2004-2008, he worked under the chair of Design and Construction held by Prof. Ulrich Knaack at Hochschule OWL. In 2008, Bilow co-founded; Imagine Envelope B.V. He currently leads the Bucky Lab and Bucky Lab Seminars, focusing on design of innovative building constructions and facades.

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GRADUATION PROJECT Pieter Stoutjesdijk, TU Delft Photo: The Bucky LAB, TU Delft

The proper detail LAB

MARCEL BILOW

/ Marcel Bilow Dr. Architect Associate Professor / The Bucky Lab TU Delft

“I would like to talk about a platform for product development, that we call the Proper Detail

Lab (PD Lab). It’s a story I’d like to tell, not about me myself, but about a team. Four important people are part of the team, there is Tillman Klein; head of our facade research group. Pieter

Stoutjesdijk; a former student and now colleague of mine, researcher and entrepreneur,

and Jeroen van Veen. Pieter went to MIT as a student, where he got in contact with Larry Sass and ‘friction fit’ connections. He learned to use a CNC milling machine to make wood

connections very precise and therefore also very sturdy. He bought then, a CNC mill, a very

old one from the seventies, but made in Germany. Very sturdy and still capable. You could say: ‘from the old ladies, you are able to learn the most.’

During his graduation project, Pieter developed a Haiti house, which was entirely

CNC milled, to give each of the victims of this huge catastrophic event their own home. He built it two years later in 1:1 and it’s now on display at our faculty.

After graduating, he started a company and built for a friend of his family, a very small

house in her garden. Back then, he was already trying to get the most out of the CNC friction fit connections. He developed a system, similar to LEGO, where each part is prefabricated

and then brought to the building site, having in mind that each of the different elements has

to be carried by two people. It went well and he started thinking about a building system you can access online. By choosing different standard components and maybe a few special ones, you are able to order your house and get the price immediately. Like you order a car.

With that, you can call it 4D or 5D planning, you already have a lot of information at hand.

Not only the materials you use, but also the time for production, the [building] volume you have to transport, the prices of course, and maybe also additional information like; how

much gasoline you need for the transport. So, all components are already integrated,

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Friction fit connection

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which means you are able to make a very accurate price estimate. Based on that, we – the faculty said: That’s a very good approach. We have to keep this guy. We have to make sure we make good use of him, try to push him and support him. So, therefore, we developed the concept of the PD Lab.

A house, designed to be entirely CNC milled, which boosts the circularity, by interchangeable demountable components, produced from materials which are bio based. CNC milled,

using technology to increase accuracy and detailing. So, we applied to 3TU, which is a

universal research grant, funded from the four technical universities in Delft. We formed a partnership. Got a grant, 50.000 €. Asked a couple of companies to join in and then started.

3TU made these constructions after we told them. We should not rely on the sharp point of

a pencil, for the craftsmen to be able to read our joints and draw lines where to cut the boards. We would like to change this method into a way where you digitally design, engineer and produce these parts, taking the sharp points of the pencils out of consideration. In principle, we set up a couple of goals, which were naïve but challenging. We talked about

zero tolerance, no screws, only bolts, because they can be replaced. No tools on the building

site, in order to increase, or to lower failure costs. We did not do this because it’s easy, we did it because it’s hard. We sat together, linked a couple of graduation students to this project, bringing research and education together.

Jeroen is responsible for the facade. Nick thought about interconnecting the building

components. They developed the entire house, based on the concepts Pieter had already

developed. So in principle, they’re LEGO blocks, which are interconnecting, easy to carry by two people to the building site and assembled with a couple of tools, and just a few nuts and bolts. Everything fits together like a glove.

We built the first components and showed it on the building fair. The only thing you

needed, was a rubber hammer and a smile. We used the unit as an office during the fair and it was also key to attract more and more sponsors. Back then, we had already figured out

how the different components come together. We had a box unit, which is a vapor open construction, and the facade cladding, that is not only the cladding, but also the entire raincoat. The fittings that hold elements together, also provide the mounting holes for the facade brackets.

We built the next one on our faculty, in front of a bus station, to be visible for students.

It took quite a while. We were able to get support from a scaffolding company and they set up a scaffolding while it poured, rained like hell.

We then placed fifteen tons of concrete as a counterweight, since we were not able

to build any foundations. That might be a warning for all students. Whenever you start building lightweight, bring enough concrete.

At the same time, the pre-produced boxes were already made in Pieters company.

We loaded them onto a truck, and headed towards the building site. We put it all together

and then rain struck again. Code orange, hurricane warnings, made us realize that we ­really had problems. What we hadn’t foreseen in the fair was; the material that was made to 0.5

mm tolerances, could expand by three millimetres when wet. And despite what I’ve talked

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about; no tools! In the end, we had to make a couple of modifications, in order to make the FRICTION FIT CONNECTIONS The Bucky LAB

elements fit together. As much as I like dramatic skies, I would have really wished for sunny

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conditions. But in general, the building process went by very quickly. We were able to

maneuver the elements by two people and in the end, even the pre-fabricated rubber roof fitted perfectly.

Thanks to Alcoa, we were able to get quite a lot of these Reynobond facade sheets.

The wonderful thing about this is that if you mill it, you are able to fold it like an origami

structure. We found in one of the graduation projects, the most crucial details. I always say,

to the young students, always start at the corner. If you are able to solve the corner details, you are done.

Using different router bits on the CNC mill that we have already used for the wood

constructions, we were able to define all the different lines. We cut, trim and mill these lines where the elements are folded. The machine mills it down to half a millimetre, which leaves the outer layer of the aluminium panel and then, you are able to fold it.

We also have to make sure it’s proof against the wind. We made calculations for the

lifting forces and the forces on the mounting brackets. We tested them and figured out that

all the problems - or solutions - lay in the detail. From a huge variety of tests, we were able to figure out the right form and detail of these bracketing systems. It’s such a tiny little detail, which makes such a big difference, so it’s always about the details. Then, we asked

students to help. If our system is good, it explains itself on the building site, so we don’t

have to. All of the smart technology, is in the detail. So, we had a bunch of ‘newbies’, in our

case, students. We made sure they wore hats and safety vests and let them go, after a short instruction. It worked quite well, but every now and then, we faced problems. Due to

the rain, we couldn’t perfectly align all of the elements, which in turn provided the mounting holes for the brackets. If you make a 10.5 mm hole and you have to insert a 10 mm bolt and

the elements are three millimetres misaligned, you will not be able to put the bolt in anymore. So, every now and then, we had to drill a hole next to it, or use another screw. Back

to the facade cladding; the parts arrived pre-folded to the site and we were able to carry these to the building site very easily. We placed the first elements and immediately ran into

problems. Might be a glitch somewhere when planning this, three or five months ago, and no one had seen it before. So, in this case, we had to find some innovative solutions.

Remember, this is the protective layer to keep the house watertight. The facade on the

short side, is entirely out of fabric. It’s a glass fibre, reinforced fabric, which comes in one big sheet and is then mounted with these springs. We have never tried that before. It actu-

ally works quite well, due to the high tolerances we are doing here. The entire house was

only three millimetres longer than expected. Talking about detail, complexity is not a problem

if you are aware of this. Every component came together, building components out of wood, facade brackets, fabric facade and all. Perfectly in this case, with a little bit of massaging of the corners every now and then.

Having already a long list of things that went wrong, I count 42 right now, means that

the next building of this type will be 42 times better. “

PD TEST LAB TU DELFT, NETHERLANDS The Bucky LAB, TU Delft Photo: The Bucky LAB, TU Delft

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The strong story of the detail RAMBOLL HEAD OFFICE ØRESTAD, DENMARK Mikkelsen Architects Photo: Adam Mørk

A sound understanding of; how buildings are constructed, how they perform structurally, and how the aesthetics is closely linked to the material properties and the p ­ urpose of the architectural program characterize the trajectory of Mikkelsen Architects. Stig Mikkelsen were for many years part of the inner core of the awarded Danish architectural firm, Dissing & Weitling before he broke out and founded his own firm in 2012.

Dissing & Weitling originates from 1971 having grown out of the Danish modernist ­architect Arne Jacobsen’s office. One sees with no doubt a deep-rooted Scandinavian design tradition across the work of these three companies and several of their projects have for many years set new standards of excellence in design and architecture. In Denmark as well as internationally. As in Arne Jacobsen’s architecture – a cool clear expression characterizes the work of Mikkelsen Architects. They are interested in testing new materials and challenge the limits in terms of performance, aesthetics, and functionality. At the same time, there is an attitude of ’down to earth’ or practical sense found in their work, which enrich the elegant design features and details by making them readable and realistic.

Stig Mikkelsen graduated in 1985 from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture and having worked in both Denmark with Dissing & Weitling and in the UK with Norman Foster - Stig Mikkelsen’s tectonic understanding stands upon the shoulders of a building culture originating from half-timbered farmhouses and a high-tech state-of-the-art architecture. His office now sets new standards for architect­ural innovation in Denmark with a continuous attention to the role of the detail.

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DAMESAL, TRANSFORMATION

MATERIAL AND TRANSPARENCY

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DETAILS MATERIAL AND TRANSPARENCY Mikkelsen Architects

The strong story of the detail

STIG MIKKELSEN

/ Stig Mikkelsen Architect Founding partner / Mikkelsen Architects Copenhagen

“I will describe two projects, but first I’ll go back in time and tell you where we come from.

I think the whole understanding of detail is constantly developing. And it’s not only the detail. One project we did in the past I remember clearly. Our thinking was – from the concept to the detail - there needs to be a story to tell all the way through.

There was nothing there, so we thought, it needs to be fairly simple as a geometry, but

there should be something to love. The building is containing books in a not very communicative part, then another part should be much more communicative. (This duality gave us)We had quite a climate orientated purpose, so we quickly came to study all the aspects

of the facade and what is driving its design. This gave us the first input to, how to make up an architectural language for the project. We’re also aware that if technical aspects are well

integrated in the project, they stay, and you can design ‘around them’. If they are not so

well integrated, they leave, because you have to save money along the way. A double skin solution was actually something that we ended up bringing all the way through. So, with the clear purpose of this building, keeping books or keeping people, we could come up

with a language that was very simple. A facade strategy made up of only two types of cladding. The transparent part and the closed part, providing suitable climate for the

books. We decided, there needs to be some details we really like, but we also knew there could be very few.

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We took this idea to the next level in the Rambøll Head Office. The social understanding of

Rambøll Head Office

what we were trying to solve, was a big part of the picture. In the industrial process of making a much larger building, you could say that; the inspiration for details came to a

large degree from the efficiency of how to build. We know that we, as architects, need to play around with volume studies and building concepts. We also need to think about, what

is the content of the building? What is the social strategy? What will people want to do inside? How do we bring quality to the client? And how do we create a language of com-

munication, overview and architectural strategy? At the time, digital tools were assisting

us, but also confusing us a little. There’s a huge amount of information; all the parts of the

building could be taken out and looked at carefully. And you could say, when looking at the whole cost issue, it was useful to have this information, but as a design driver, I don’t know.

One part of the solution we had to come up with was an environmental strategy. Having

looked at the social and internal parts, how do we solve things, coming from the outside?

You see daylight was really important and the whole design of the building came from

­daylight studies. That strategy resulted in two solutions, to accommodate two different

orientations. The next layer, was the industrial process of prefabrication, to be able to test facade components ahead of fixing. We went quite far in developing details – as a family of

details that can support the overall understanding. It is part of the story we want to tell. The language of details is a very important story – a part of the overall story.

A few years ago, we got the opportunity to look at a small project Damesalen1 and the

Damesalen

possibility to use a new material. It is only a building of 300m2, on top of an existing

­university building. The overall idea was to extend a gymnastics hall, with one additional floor to include laboratories and testing facilities. The concept was to make a very simple

gesture. An elegant glass box, that could contribute to the overall understanding. Then decide the facade and the details, so that our orientation made sense to the facade strategy.

The existing structure contains all installations, serving the rest of the building, so we

did not have too much of that at the top floor. Therefore, it could be fairly elegant – the roof itself. The starting point for this ambition was a suggestion to use a new material2. It is kind

of magical. Where you normally need 200mm of insulation, you can use a vacuum insulation panel, also called; VIP, which is ten times better. It has one weakness though, if it is punct­

ured, it doesn’t work at all. So, to integrate it into the double glazed or triple glazed unit, was a good strategy that was accepted by the client: Bygningsstyrelsen3. To have the

freedom to play with this material, allows you to work with very large glazed units and then position your insulated parts, as you like. What was special about this process, was that the design evolved through the collaboration with the manufacturer of the material. We had

designers testing different layouts of the facade while, at the same time, the engineer and the manufacturer tested different orientations to see what worked. So, the outcome was a

facade, that is completely flush on the inside and outside, with a very thin appearance, containing a variety of materials within the glazed unit. We really wanted to keep the facade

simple, transparent and active. The framing system could have been produced very simply, locally or in wood. The only advanced part is the glass. Our fear was that it was going to be

too one dimensional or two dimensional, but we find it very interesting. So, it is a multi-layered facade, but made only 66 mm thick. The facade details kind of explains the project.

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Notes 1. Damesalen refers to; The Ladies Hall 2. The design concept is based on new high performance facade technology. It is by Mikkelsen Architects in collaboration with Dow Corning and the German company OKALUX. 3. Bygningsstyrelsen: The Danish Building and Property Agency is the state’s property enterprise and developer.

RAMBOLL HEADQUARTERS, DENMARK

/ THE STRONG STORY OF THE DETAIL

DIGITAL TOOLS RHO Rambøll Head Office, Ørestad Syd

Cooling system

Doors

Facade

Heating

Plaster- and glass walls

Concrete fornt edges

Electricity

Concrete core

Concrete walls and columns

Ventilation

Ceiling

Stair cases

MIKKELSEN arkitekter a|s

RAMBØLL HEAD OFFICE ØRESTAD, DENMARK Mikkelsen Architects Photos: Adam Mørk

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Next pages

DAMESALEN KØBENHAVN, DENMARK Mikkelsen Architects Photos: Mikkelsen Architects

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Then I want to talk about to another project that we completed last year. The Thorvald

Ellegaard Arena in Odense. In this case, it’s a bicycle and athletics arena. As always, cost

was a big issue. A kick-start for this project was Denmark winning a gold medal at the Olympics 2012. So, in Odense, we were asked to design a velodrome on an existing site.

Our studies, working with BuroHappold, took a direction towards membranes and together

we came up with a solution. First of all, working with a velodrome, a wooden piece of furniture, a bicycle track, is wonderful. That’s like a given piece of design. How do you add

to that? We came up with a design for a big stretch membrane, that kind of reflected the track itself.

The way water runs, really shaped the overall structure. Because this is a one skin

membrane, you will, apart from rain from the outside, have a huge amount of condensation

on the inside. So, that was really an important technical design driver. Luckily, it also looks good.

We decided that the shape of the track itself, should come from the landscape. So,

the exterior of the track is following the landscape. We ended up with this velodrome where

you have daylight to some extent all day, since you get ten percent daylight through the membrane. It was designed for the Olympic bike riders, but today, it’s mainly used by kids, so it’s a social place.

The language of the detail is really important, but it also makes a lot of sense, in terms

of, how you build. It’s not something you decide to have or not have. I think this project is really a great gesture and it is very much alive, because of the detail. “

CYCLING AND ATHLETICS ARENA IN ODENSE

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Thorvald Ellegaard Arena

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CYCLING AND ATHLETICS ARENA IN ODENSE

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THORVALD ELLEGAARD ARENA ODENSE, DENMARK Mikkelsen Architects Photos: Adam Mørk

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Digital platforms and the control of joints /

DOME OF VISION AARHUS, DENMARK Architect: Teglgaard & Jepsen NCC A/S Photo: NCC A/S

When NCC together with the young architecture office Teglgaard & Jepsen ­designed and built Dome of Visions for experimental reasons in 2013 – it sparked a whole new set of ideas in the company. Also, it opened for unexpected opportunities. Not only was it a showcase for a classic structural typology and new ways of testing minimal construction – the sphere made of the light wooden frames also became a symbol for new ways of meeting, and a place for debates about the future of building and urban development. The structure was built as design for disassembly (DfD), which meant the Dome has moved around to different sites not only in Copenhagen, but also to Århus. In 2015, it entered the public political scene; Folkemødet in Allinge/ Bornholm, which gathers people from all parts of the country. In Allinge it was built in a more permanent version and it has now become a ‘signature building’ for the popular ­national event and for the celebration of democracy.

The Nordic contractor NCC had probably never foreseen how Dome of Visions would change their image and their focus, which always has been to strengthen their position in the competitive market of the construction industry. Yet, now they also work on significant internal changes of the organisation and collaborations. Digital platforms for sharing data files are developed and improved ongoingly and the visions of the dome are tested as part of new management systems for construction. To ­control the collective digital platform seem decisive in this matter.

Vibeke Grupe Larsen graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture in 1988. She has throughout her career and worked with implementation of sustainability in architectural processes and the design decisions.

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Digital platforms and the control of joints

VIBEKE GRUPE LARSEN

/ Vibeke Grupe Larsen Architect Head of Sustainability / NCC Building Copenhagen

“When you are an architect like me, employed by a contractor, you definitely feel the serious-

ness of the [building] process. I have worked in architecture firms, in engineering firms, with

clients and now I’m in a contractor’s firm. NCC is a Nordic company with departments in

Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden. Sweden makes up 55% of the entire production activities in NCC. Norway, Denmark and Finland counts for about 45% altogether. Presently we are about 2700 people working with buildings in Denmark.

In the building industry, there is a tendency to talk about architecture as if it is losing

integrity and it is something you can call added value, some kind of hocus pocus, a ‘layer’ on top of construction. My colleagues in NCC, are some of the people you have to convince that architecture is much more than that.

NCC covers four business areas: Building, Infrastructure, Industry and Property

­Development, but presently, we are reconstructing our business. We are changing from having seen buildings as part of a problem, to seeing them as parts of a solution. This has

an impact on our organization and our business area. Also, it has an impact on how we work with buildings and digitalization; the internet of things, VDC1, BIM etc. This calls for

diversity in our staff – people who are able to catch current trends and working method­ ologies that make things come alive.

NCC wants to be a ‘consulting contractor’ and not ‘only assemble buildings’. We

want to control the processes. It requires a lot in an organization like NCC. We see a

­tendency where the market is moving towards much larger projects and this means more

complexity. It means, we have more things we need to know how to handle, for instance; installations and ecological- as well as social sustainability. Right now, we are trying to

point at; how to run a building, how to demolish, recycle, and work with circular economy.

That is where the money is. Also, where we can argue for more money in the early phases, to establish the proper concepts and establish the most carried through architectural

­projects. When I try to explain this in my organization; that we can take some of the money

we save in facility management and put them into the design of the building, that’s not necessarily how my colleagues look at it yet.

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The fact that all [critical] solutions are decided in the early phases of a building project

DOME OF VISION AARHUS, DENMARK Architect: Teglgaard & Jepsen NCC A/S Photo: Jens V. Nielsen

is another important point. I am working together with our VCD department to bring

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­digitalization into play – but is difficult. We hope to move away from the Excel sheet, to a higher awareness about the fact that different actors need to work together in all phases.

Sustainability is an important driver, that can help the architects to be part of the earlier

phases. It is necessary for a contractor, to be able to work together with the architects.

Maybe, we don’t need the engineers [independent consultant] any longer, because NCC have their own engineers in-house, but we still need to be in dialogue with the architects.

Talking about digitalization. It has an impact on how files are exchanged, the know­

ledge and the data, so we can build [digital] models that allow projects to have a proper amount of architectural detailing. I think it’s very important. Contractors such as my own company are not yet obsessed, but they will be. They will be obsessed by the idea that we

need a close collaboration with the architects in the early phases. In return, the contractor sets requirements for the architects, since contractors basically consider money as the driving force. Architects also need to argue when it comes to money. I believe that we are

in times of transition, where the contractors are in the process of a mind shift moving from an understanding that ‘value’ is more than money. But in the meantime, the bottom line still

counts until we [the contractors] are able to cope with creation of value the same way as the architects - who are able to do both.

Dome of Vision

We have a pilot project in NCC, the Dome of Vision2. It has been built in version 1 and 2.

Version 1 has been moved around between Aarhus and Copenhagen several times. The

Swedes then realized they also wanted a Dome of Vision and built one in Stockholm and a 3rd version is going to be built in August in Aarhus.

Dome of Vision has caused a lot of architectural discussion and it is actually getting

more and more beautiful, from version 1 to 2, to 3. It is like a tool for us and enables us to

communicate closely with Kristoffer, who is the architect [idea maker] of the Dome of Vision.

He really knows how to deal with the details and gets very upset, when our engineers and

our VDC people do not understand him. It is about dialogue and communication, which we have to be aware of in future processes.

We use the Dome of Vision 3, all the way through VDC and we have so called: build-

before-build models. This is how we want to work with a pilot project, where we intend to integrate VDC in the entire process, from the very beginning. Even before the investment

has been made. Simply, to allow collaboration between different partners to take place and to be aware of what we need to write into our own management system.

I am really interested in how Henning Larsen Architects integrate engineers into their

practice. This platform for engineers and architects working together, from the early phases

to the end of the project, is quite necessary. The ability to live up to the collaborator’s ­expectations in regards of technical knowledge will also be required from the contractor.

Not to forget financial knowledge. Having the ability to describe, what are the alternatives

here? How does this create value? What is the intention behind this? There is something

about how we talk to each other, what we expect from each other, that is very interesting, in order to make the digital processes work. To understand yourself as architect, you need to be broad and build your argumentation with help of other professionals.

The role and the importance of detailing in today’s buildings is a matter of using tools

and processes, that enable to create beauty, assembly, quality and design for disassembly.

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Also, resilience and the climate changes at the moment require that we address this. In the processes of digitalization, it is crucial, that necessary simulations and evaluations can be

made throughout the project, to argue for values in different ways than just price. This is

also an argument for using money to create good and resilient buildings. The control of joints, between materials, elements, components and volumes still call for great focus on how to make these joints. You do not just push a button and then comes a 3D-print.

As long as we have different climates, we also have different circumstances. This also

goes for different geographies and for different cultures. There are still important issues

that are not calling for general solutions. Today, the mantra is that, what is built and how it’s built, is specified by the customer. It will not be the case in the future. Ten, twenty, thirty years from now, the customers will require much more from us. It is also an argument for

us to be many people with many competences. It is a matter of coordination and it may be

one of the big tasks in the future. We are all responsible for developing good solutions. By saying this, I take a lot of responsibility as a contractor, because we have to transform ourselves into someone who are able to develop good, architectural details - together with

the architects and the other stakeholders. Challenge your collaborators on quality and holistic approach and aesthetics, and know what you are talking about! Know about the money, know about the culture, the climate – everything that is relevant. Challenge the contractor, in terms of material qualities, technical as well as cultural understanding of the

purpose and meaning and sustainability. Don’t be afraid of this ‘hopeless’ word sustain­ ability, but use it as a driver.”

Notes 1. VDC: Virtual Design Construction - modeling software and techniques to design and evaluate possible construction processe.

2. Dome of Visions is a geodesic dome built in wood, lined with triangular transparent polycarbonate sheets. The purpose of the project is to investigate and document the benefits of building and living in a dome that is a greenhouse. The intention is to inspire new ways of living and at the same time to collect data and find new ways for sustainable construction and material consumption. Behind the project, the contractor NCC is in close cooperation with the Danish architects Kristoffer Tejlgaard and Benny Jepsen

Next pages DOME OF VISION ALLINGE, DENMARK Architect: Teglgaard & Jepsen NCC A/S Photo: Jens V. Nielsen

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INTRODUCTION

The detail and its digital challenges BIM is generally defined as a model for exchanging structured information in building projects digitally. In other words; the use of structured digital data to make architectural projects more efficient, economic and quickly delivered. It is about how various forms of project information can be communicated between the architects, engineers, contractors and suppliers – the main collaborating partners who specify the character, quality and exact performance of the construction elements and products. Although BIM often includes an architectural design model tied to a relational database, it is primarily seen as a project management tool. Naturally, the structural properties of the software have great influence on the architectural design processes; what sort of standards/objects are already or can be defined and how does the organizational logics of the software influence the procedures of the design process. BIM and comparable digital design/management tools are closely linked to the thinking of industrial production industry and has also been used to a great extend in the shipbuilding industry and it shows beneficial to use, when the ‘end product’ is easy to define and when it is based on commonly agreed standards.

Architectural design processes are dependent on a multitude of external and not standardizable bits and pieces of ‘information’ that reaches beyond the mere facts and figures related to physical construction. Cultural traditions embedded in the different professions, industries, and companies, as well as legal requirements and regulations about ‘how to build’ are part of the bigger picture that ought to be taken into account and critically evaluated.

To BIM or not to BIM – when wanting to develop new ways of constructing architecture or wanting to design particular architectural details is clearly a critical question, since the ‘agility’ of the program structures, their range in terms of design freedom seems not yet solved.

Odilo Schoch graduated in 2001 from ETH in Zürich and received his doctorate from Aachen University in 2009. His PhD thesis focused on quality management used in architectural design processes. Presently he is post-doctoral researcher at ETH Zürich at the department of architecture and building processes. From 2008-2011 Odilo Schoch was assistant professor at CITA/KADK being specialist in BIM, sustainability and general information modelling.

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Arch_Tec_Lab – fabrication at ERNE Holzbau AG ▶

Bildunterschrift Zürich 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOYMtLmCYuI 2017/05/04 Dr. Odilo Schoch schoch@arch.ethz.ch

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The detail and its digital challenges

ODILO SCHOCH

/ Odilo Schoch Dr.-Ing. Architect, head of postgraduate education CAS DIGITAL, Chair of Architecture and Building Process Prof. Sacha Menz / ETH Zurich

“Architecture, for me, is to join different systems, building elements, in order to make a construction, a building, a bridge, a wastewater treatment plant or whatever else. As an architect you need to be able to connect things. In order to do this, we need to understand

the material itself and the structure. And it is about financial aspects. Then we have set the foundation to have a dialogue with yourself and a dialogue with your collaborators.

The more distant view on the systems: We [architects] are rarely those, who initiate a

project and have the money. So, the problem is: we need to have the knowledge to turn money to a building. [to a student in an audience:] Did you ever learn how much a door

costs? [Answers: No] See, that’s the problem. Where do you get that information from?

From your experienced colleagues or from the Internet, but then you do not have a trustworthy setup.

Talking about joining; I like Berlin Tegel Airport a lot. You look at the window-details and you see how it’s joined. And it’s worn out a bit. It’s forty years old. In this single joint, you have to consider the window and the handrail, so people don’t fall down. Someone had to solve

this problem and I’m sure it was not only one person - and this is the main message today: for architecture we will collavorate.

It links to “digitalization”. Where is the digitalization? It’s not that special, because we

are ‘living in it’ and we simply need to accept it. It might be new for us the older generation,

but younger generations grew up when the World Wide Web was already there. I mention this because we need to understand how things are made, how digitalization is made.

Another story: Some people may see a randomness in tiled stone-walls in the Vals-

spa by Peter Zumthor, the Swiss architect. But there is some logic in this. Each layer of

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natural stone has a different rhythm, based on a certain logic – quite nice. So it’s a system

- and the systematic approach helps us sometimes to handle complexity.

SEQUENTIAL ROOF ARC TEC LAB BUILDING ETH ZURICH, SWITZERLAND Top photo: Odilo Schock Bottom photo: Screen schot YouTube, Erne AG Holzbau, Laufenburg, Schweiz

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I will tell you how we made this building, the Arc_Tec_Lab at ETH Zurich. We made a building

with a robot-fabricated roof. We made a geometric visualization, all the other things were

just code. Of course, we ask for BIM-data and these informed 3D models delivered by the MEP engineer and by the architect. We failed with all that, because we didn’t say what we

needed it for: we didn’t talk. It’s not just about to take the data and merge it. No, we need to have a design intent and the design intent is probably based on necessity. We, as architects, have the potential to take leadership when communicating the intents and interests.

So, what I am asking: “who is taking the leadership?”

Another picture: Some of you might know The Saint Gall Monastery plan drawing, it is a

really old drawing, almost exactly 1200 years old. You still see: it is a floor plan, the stairs are just missing arrows, to show where the stairs are going up. It is amazing, we still can

read it. But at that time, people didn’t have that much central heating, ventilation and artificial light. So, we need these technical installations and we developed the experts within design. We have many experts. We cannot have the building master the way we read about it in the history books, but we can have someone who integrates them.

That is actually [for] a common environment, a common social environment, a common

communication environment and a common data environment. These are what came out

of the last 25 years of ‘bimming’ [doing the BIM method]. Bimming the way we do now came to the world because technical installation plans became so complicated that no one

understands them [see picture], not even MEP engineers. So, we make a 3D model out of it to better understand the design. And that’s the problem. We don’t really understand whether it is a good ventilation pipe or not, because we are architects, we are not MEP

engineers. No problem, you will say, we just go online. We get all the information. No, all information doesn’t exist. Have you ever used a BIM-library in the Internet?

A BIM-library provides a file of a building element that you can download it inside your

software. You can scroll through the product families and you have to choose from 262.000 parametric objects? Amazing. But you can not build a building out of that. The problem is,

how do you find the right one? There are seven thousand sanitary objects, toilets ... that’s nice. But it doesn’t show generic components and individual optimal solutions. This is what we need to solve.

In detail: I noticed that there are almost two thousand paint buckets in that website to

download. Now, if we think that digitalization of the design, not of the construction, but of the design: is about having two thousand different paint pots? I think we are wrong. So what is the big problem? The big problem is our skills. Why? The thing is, when we have

these 3D-object BIM-libraries, you click on it, and it’s really fun, you have windows and this and that. But you don’t know whether it matches your task. When needing your own optimal window, then you cannot download it, you need to develop it with own skills.

We went a bit further when designing the previously shown roof. And how was the

roof done? A data drive iteration circle is the key. The Architects defined: it needs to be a

certain type of roof and a certain materiality. Why wooden roof? Because of saving CO2 and having a lightweight structure. We could have done it in steel with an additional sheet

metal on it, but we decided to make a wooden structure. Importantly, we collaborated with

different experts. We had four PhD students, two engineers, a couple of architects, wooden

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engineers, they all cost money. But, compared to the construction cost, the design was really cheap. Today, the engineering and design tasks of a conventional building are actually

not that expensive. Usually it is only ten percent of the construction costs, but the impact you have, particularly in the beginning of the project, is strong.

Now back to the roof. The designers created the roof with a python script. By this we

­created a geometry for the structural analysis and to create fabrication data. By scripting

we we able to handle each beam. Each beam has its individual geometric setting. How was that done? We contacted a wood construction company, they got the contract, because

they have a really nice fabrication robot. So, our fabrication code was sent to them. And we got their knowledge on wood. Nowadays this construction company gets a lot of contracts

now and they will become turnkey contractors, because they see a huge market. They hire the architect, they have their five preferred architects, they tell them which data they should

deliver, they develop their own facility management software. It’s a carpenter company and

that’s what they do. So, it’s quite interesting development and shift in the relations between

contractors and designers. What is the big advantage of this? It’s the carpenter [contractor] who has control of materialized things and they can make, for example, buildings.

Now about BIM and the detail: In Switzerland we have had economic success for the last thirteen years. We didn’t have a recession like most of Europe had ten years ago. It meant that we didn’t need jump into a BIM thinking in order to test whether it might be a more efficient workflow. Now we can learn from others.

And we observe, that there’s now a third revision of the governing classification system

[DBK, cuneco, molio] in Denmark. Classification systems are needed for cost calculation

and to compare one project to the other. Software can quickly read such data and give me

more time for design. My critique on this steady reworking of an essential tool is very simple: it must have a problem, otherwise no reworking necessary. Why didn’t architects and ­engineers spend moneyto develop new processes which describe a building and its quality

in a data schema that matches our workstyle? We cannot represent the whole building with

classification codes. It never was the intention, but we thought ten years ago, here [in

­Denmark] as well as in Switzerland, that we could describe a whole building by codes and 3D models. It sounds so romantic: ‘we have a physical building and a virtual building’.

Forget it! You can never describe the holistic complexity of a building in a virtual environment. You can make analysis of a topic, you can make simulation, in a virtual environment.

Actually it’s getting easier, you really just press a button and it tells you how many windows you have. That’s nice. How many square metres of corridor you have. Therefore, it is not so

bad to have 3D models and classifications like the DBK. But we forgot, that “hey, we could include an analysis of how to make the joint”. No one considered that ten years ago – not even me. Software could tell us, where was this going to present itself in the building?

Why didn’t we develop such tools?

In Switzerland, we are currently thinking of a data driven design and construction

setup. And first result is: we focus on “BIM only for a specific purpose”. If data will not help to reach a certain purpose, then we might not use data to reach this purpose. By this we

are currently less limited. And we don’t produce data for the sake of data. I want to have

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the critical information to solve my task, because I want to take the leadership in the d ­ esign.

Therefore, please consider so called ”common data environments”. They are the platforms that the project members can share their information. Now that we have this for data, we

can start to think about common environments for the people involved in a certain project.

You end up having partnerships even with the contractors. Why don’t you collaborate with a carpenter? Make a new firm, in order to have a real collaborative environment. That’s money driven collaboration and a perfect setup to create innovation. After a few weeks you

know how to join the team, how to connect their skills with yours. That’s a joint as well and that’s why I started with the joint. Thank you.”

PLAN OF ST. GALL MONESTARY SWITZERLAND Drawn in year 826

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DEBATE PART 3 PLENUM How do you consider this shift of roles and how is it linked to the tools? I mean

how far does the architect go into manufacturing? As you ended up also pointing out, Odilo.

And how do you react to creating a new type of company, new sort of collaborations,?

Marcel?

MARCEL BILOW I’ve been focusing on the construction in this presentation. I could also have focused on the new role of the architect, because it is totally changing. There is a point where you end up building or buying a house like ordering a car. You go to BMW or Volkswagen. You say – hey that’s my VW Golf and I would like have the black outside and red inside. I’d like to have these aluminium rims and the 136 horsepower version with the sunroof and the air conditioning. They give you a nice price and the dealer pushes a button.

Do you think you can change the colour of the leather, six weeks later? You can’t, you all know that you can’t.

Architects are so used to showing the clients around in the building when it is being built. This will be the bathroom and this will be the kitchen. Oh – you don’t want the kitchen over here? No problem, we can change it. You don’t like the way the windows look? We will change it, no problem. It means some extra costs.

If we enter that stage, the moment you hit the button, you are done. You’re not an architect anymore. You’re not able to show your client around in the half finished building.

Maybe it’s even forbidden to be there, because robots will assemble it for you. It’s a high danger zone. At that point you have to think about what the architects will do? We actually think one step further, we will create an entirely virtual environment, where you can spend months in your newly designed building, as a client, until you hit the button and say, that’s where I would like to have my bathroom and my kitchen. And if you can’t decide we will cut 25 holes for you, for the sink and the toilet. There, there, there, there, there. And you will wonder why houses are so expensive.

PLENUM How much can you individualize that? Because BIM objects will download that

stuff, but you might want the other one, another construction system. And you don’t get it there.

MARCEL BILOW You can get it there. The question is, at a certain point, how much control you give the architect and how much freedom the customers are able to accept.

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ALMEN+ SOCIAL HOUSING Scandibyg A/S Photo: Scandibyg A/S

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That’s really a change. That’s really difficult. If you want to have a fixed price from me, I would say today right now, that’s the house you get. Don’t complain ever, after I push the button. That’s easy as it is. It’s a like car. If you order it, six weeks later, you can’t change the colour of it.

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VIBEKE GRUBE LARSEN I guess that’s where VR come into play, virtual reality. And that is a really good tool to communicate with the clients beforehand – what you are actually getting.

ODILO SCHOCH But will the clients accept that process? They are so used to that they still can make changes. In Switzerland, we have a different system. We make the tender document. And the construction company make a bid and offer a completely different materiality. And it results often in a disaster, because we need to replan everything.

PLENUM A question that puzzles me is, why is it so complicated to make a good detail?

I think it has to nothing to do with money actually, because I know a lot of cheap houses

with very good details and a lot of expensive houses with very bad details. So it has nothing to do with that, maybe it has to do with something else.

PLENUM It’s not difficult to design a detail, but the way you approach it is different. Some

say, a detail is ‘God given’, because the architect had experienced, seeing a butterfly flying over a green field.

PLENUM I’m an architect. And I want to ask you, what do you think is more sustainable,

wood or aluminium? I can’t tell, unless you tell me how long your building would be there, where you place the building, what is the function, and so on. It takes two days to get the

right answer and then I can make a decision, how to design this detail. So therefore, if you don’t know the circumstances, you will never be able to make the right detail. You may be

able to change one circumstance and the entire [production/value] chain will fall apart and the detail is useless.

PLENUM I don’t think it’s necessarily difficult to make a detail. It’s a part of the story we

want to tell, and the whole understanding of architecture. There needs to be something to love when you are very close to building. You can have a fantastic concept, but with no love in the detail. You can lose it so quickly and then you will decide that the details can be a crafted detail, a really nice, special detail that you like or it can be an industrial detail. The

beauty is the way we produce things, in an industrial way, but I don’t think it should be a big problem. It should be a very strong part of the design.

ODILO SCHOCH I need to repeat a bit. It’s not difficult to make a good detail, you just need to be able to name the requirements. What makes it good? It’s quality management and as I’m not skilled in all detailing procedures of wood, I can only observe and estimate.

Then I need to ask the expert and we need to have the same language to communicate and hopefully I’m able to have the leading role, because that’s ‘my requirement of my own ­detail’. How do we communicate? That’s what we need to learn, it’s not that easy.

I don’t want to have students building my house based on a YouTube video. Sorry, I don’t want that in the future, because they are not skilled in working with the aluminium.

They are really not skilled. It is nice that they learn it, but we have experts. They learn for three, four years, how to handle aluminium. And he’s not an expert in steel. So that’s what I’m worried about, you have a brilliant detail and unskilled labour.

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PLENUM l have a comment to this, because I agree to what Stig says; ‘the detail does not

necessarily have to be an extra cost’. On the contrary, it’s very much about the idea and the

concept, that you will fulfil and will follow up on from the early phases. If it is done with skill

and in a good collaboration with the client for instance, based upon virtual reality with the ability for the client to walk around in the building, from early stages, then I think there is a really good argument also for allowing this to be perfectly integrated. And therefore not be an extra cost for the final product.

VIBEKE GRUBE LARSEN It is whether you have a strong context and concept, and you are able to fulfil that with skills and good communication. And to be consequent all the way through the process. I think a good detail will be there.

PLENUM Okay - thank you. I don’t know whether this is a question or a comment to your

comment. I’d like to elaborate a little bit around the title. The detail is dead, long live the detail, and of course, it’s stolen from; the king is dead long live the king. Somebody died,

but again, we are saluting what is coming, hopefully we are celebrating what is to come. If

we swap the king with the details, we are saluting the detail, we are praising the detail. For me, the detail is a part of the whole – referring back to Steen Nepper’s definition; the ethics of a whole. If we pile up details, we have a whole. If we are missing the detail, we would not

have the whole. In comes now, the role of architect and the role of art in these detailing question, because detailing is not about how to join difficult components. It is a kind of

composing thing, a practical definition of a detail. For me a detail is ‘putting life together’, condensing the whole through the detailing and then we add something and then we are

getting back in position as architects. So it’s not about physically joining things together. It’s more visionary, how can you lift, transcendence as human beings. That was maybe a c ­ omment and maybe also a question. What is detail?

PLENUM Thank you very much. I am almost at the end of my PhD. I would like to offer a

sort of overview of the lectures we went through today, and then rise a question. In the presentation of Vincent, I realized that whenever they [OMA] were able to be a leading consultant in the process, they were also able to execute the details in a way they were happy

about. Then I realized something common across the lectures. There is no problem nowa-

days with the detail, because whenever architects, need to make a new detail or improve a

previous detail, they are able to make it. If they are able also to control the detail, by knowing

how to execute it, the outcome is also interesting. After this, we come to the criteria about, what would be the best architecture – or the best detail?

I think it is also possible to have some dialogue and regular communications among

the team members. Then we can point at ‘the concepts of sustainability and complexity’, which were just raised, and the ‘knowing about the financial aspect or the money’. I think,

if we ‘move into BIM’, as Odilo discussed this; ‘into the process’, we are able to improve support systems for the cost analysis, which was missing. Maybe you could share some

experience? There is a gap, when there is a detail, but no regular collaboration between the

architect and those who are going to execute the detail. I realized today this is the problem.

Instead of who is making or creating a detail, I would like to hear, why architects themselves

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are not in the execution process. Of course the needs some experience? Especially, if ­Vincent was here, I would like to ask him how they experience this or how BIM might help in order to fill this gap also?

ODILO SCHOCH Forget about BIM when starting the design. It’s about making a building which has a value, not to mention the British document that defines the BIM process, it defines the BIM goals first and then the project goals. In Switzerland, we developed an opposing model; a standard, which we have to apply. First the project goals and then you derive the digital support tools and we don’t call it BIM. It is simply a data supported work­ flow and at a certain time, there will be the automated things and so on. It is just a foundation to build on top of. Now, how to develop a good detail in this c ­ ontext? I don’t really know whether it’s purely digital and so on. What we miss much more is how to have a much more integrated system. It does not have to be digital, but just to have this idea of a new ‘material’ for the facade. So we can have a different setup of the facade. Whether it’s nice or not, functional or not – it is not about variations, but about design alternatives. We simply have

to take responsibility – someone has to take the responsibility of the details. Software might help taking responsibility. Final comment on this; we now observe the concept of LOD (Level of Detail). The level of detail thinking in the bimming world is being reconsidered. It’s not like in the beginning, you have a low LOD and rough envelopes. LOD is now being developed so it fits to the design task. Maybe the very first day, you already know the window frame detail, because it is highly important, because an external expert says so. This ­understanding, it’s a current discussion and I think that’s good. I didn’t answer your thing, but I commented on it.

I think this talk about detail sounds as if you can have it or not. You can say, the way we decide to put buildings together is the detail. The detail comes out of this. You cannot avoid details, you can make it stronger. You can make it a very decisive part of your archi­ tectural language. Thinking about architecture from the very big scale down to the next levels. The detail is really important, and I agree it there is not ‘a digital way to find your detail’. You can have an idea about a detail and then the digital tool can help you to indus­ trialize it, computerize the transformations of the detail, that easily can go to the contractor.

He also get those tools as well. But I think the detail needs to come from the architect. You need to say; I need a certain rhythm, I need the structure to be like this, and the next layer of the design needs to be like this. This is the language I want. You cannot go digital and then expect wonderful details will come out of it.

MARCEL BILOW Never apologise to be a student, a PhD’er or whatever. I’m forty years old. I changed many titles on my business cards, but I will always be a student and curious to learn new things.

ULRICH KNAACK Let me start to wrap up - Long live the detail - there is a new approach to details. When I see across the whole symposium, I’m not worried about the architect.

Well, there is a different financial setup, but it’s still the same profession and I’m not worried about the architecture. What I learnt today is the importance of controlling the process, if it’s communication, if it’s BIM or if it’s digital or whatever, it seems to be super important.

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It can be the classical setup with the contractor as the leading partner, which is clear. It can be this ‘lead consultant’ model as Vincent Kerstens named it. A setup, I have worked in myself and I liked it very much, because I was very much in control of money – meaning the detail. The setup could also be in public private partnerships. We heard about the ­importance of communication across the; designer, engineer manufacturing building people, also organized in integral design processes. We learned the detail needs time and money.

It needs communication. The final question for me is who owns the detail? That’s the one, who has the final value? And that’s what is to be served. And there, the power actually starts.”

ANNE BEIM I can partly answer this question. Some years ago another big question was; ‘who owns the BIM model’? I know some of the big contractors [in Denmark] were very eager to own the BIM model for reasons we also heard about today.

To answer the question about who owns the detail? The architects do. It’s as simple as that. [The detail] is where everything comes together, the architects holistic idea and the intentions of the building? How it is supposed to be executed, fabricated, what sorts of materials, the durability, the aesthetic, and so forth. I believe it is the architect and it will never be different. From our perspective it has been super exciting and thrilling to experience so many critical arguments and presentations, showing and proving that, there are so much to talk about and there are so much still for us as architects to do in the profession.

I think it’s an open invitation to continue to discuss these things.

This [symposium] has just been all of what we wanted and we hoped for. Great ­questions, so I say thank you.”

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