INTERVIEW: OLE SCHEEREN
If you’re not an optimist you can’t be an architect The Interlace SINGAPORE Named the World Building of the Year at the World Architecture Festival in 2015, The Interlace was Ole Scheeren’s second major completed project. Now familiar from any number of swooping and much-shared social media videos, the complex reimagines the housing typology in dramatic style. Instead of creating clusters of isolated towers, the studio “turned vertical isolation into horizontal connectivity.” 31 apartment blocks, each six storeys tall, are stacked in a hexagonal arrangement around eight courtyards. Several outdoor spaces and inhabitable terraced gardens are formed in between the interlocking blocks.
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thick material collages, rather than making the construction drawings called for in the brief. The risk paid dividends: the competition was won – OMA’s first such victory in two years – and Scheeren earned himself a job in the process. It was, he admits, “a pretty euphoric beginning.” After a year and a half he took a hiatus from OMA and attended London’s Architectural Association – winning a prestigious RIBA Silver Medal for excellence in education – before returning to the studio to work alongside Koolhaas on Prada’s flagship stores in New York and LA, among other high-profile projects. Over 15 years he climbed the ranks, all the way to partner level. Then, in 2002, the CCTV project came up in China. “I said to Rem that I absolutely wanted to do this project because it was taking on a country that had great potential and a great promise,” he remembers. “That ultimately made me decide to move to Asia, because the project really required a daily presence and engagement to realise something that was that radically beyond anything that had ever been realised before.” The monumental CCTV building, which forms a giant loop of interconnected activities, became a dramatic calling card for Scheeren. It quickly earned itself several prizes, including the Best Tall Building Worldwide Award in 2013, and an affectionate nickname – ‘the Big Pants’. While heading up OMA’s Asia office, Scheeren was also involved with the Taipei Performing Arts Center and the Beijing Television Cultural Center – a hotel and television complex that remains unopened after a fire caused by lunar New Year fireworks caused significant damage in 2009. During this time the practice began work on Mahanakhon and Interlace, which were later completed under the Büro Ole Scheeren mantle. Scheeren’s move to establish his own practice was finalised in 2010. I ask if his decision to leave was difficult to raise with Koolhaas, who had previously seen the likes of Joshua Prince-Ramus, Winy Maas and Bjarke Ingels follow a similar path.
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