fiction is to fantasize about how it could be

In that sense, architecture is the fiction of the real world.

So turning dreams into concrete reality with bricks and mortar.

Architecture is the canvas for the stories of our lives.

The city is never complete it has a beginning but it has no end.

It's a work in progress always waiting for new scenes to be added

and new characters to move in.

When I started studying architecture and told people what I did

the most frequently asked question was always,

'Can you tell me why all new buildings are so boring?'

People have the idea that in the past buildings came with ornaments and decoration.

Moats, drawbridges, spires and gargoyles.

Today they've been reduced to containers of space. Boring and boxy.

Somehow so many of our choices today tend to settle with reaffirming the status quo

by replicating what's already there rather than inventing what could happen next

I decided I want to change that

in the movie Inception the architects find that they can finally realize their wildest dreams

because they're in fact designing inside a dream.

The architect Cobb explains how he and his wife want to live in a house with a garden

but prefer to live in high-rise. In real life we would have to choose, he says

but in a dream we could get it as we wanted it.

we've made a building in Copenhagen called the mountain

combining a parking structure and an apartment building

by turning the parking into a man-made mountains of cars

we can turn the stack of homes into a cascade of houses with gardens

penthouse views and big lawns. Cobb's dream home made in real life

We call this idea bigamy. That you can take multiple desirable elements that

might not fit together or even seem mutually exclusive like the gardenn home and the high-rise

and merge them together into a new genre

you don't have to remain faithful to a single idea

you can literally marry multiple ideas into promiscuous hybrids

the beauty is that architecture not only allows you to dream stuff up

It also allows you to alter the facts

you can turn pure fiction into hard fact

we went on to imagine little tweaks to the status quo that now

form everyday reality in Copenhagen and beyond

the 8-house is a neighborhood of townhouses

where you can walk and bicycle from the street to the penthouse.

Turning a city block into a mediterranean mountain town of paths and squares

The Harbor Bath brings the beach into the heart of the city realizing the Parisian slogan

of May '68" Sous les pavés, la plage."

The Court-Scraper combines the urban oasis of the courtyard

with the extreme density of a skyscraper into a new world hybrid of the two

Copenhill is a power plant the turns waste into electricity

and that is so huge that it's gonna be the biggest and tallest structure in all of Copenhagen.

How could we transform the stereotype of the power plant into a public amenity

we thought Denmark is cold, we have snow, but no mountains

but we do have mountains of trash

so we wrapped the plant in a continuous envelope of a giant ski slope.

This is only possible because the power plants so clean

the smoke coming out of the chimney is completely non-toxic only steam and co2

so the top of the hill will feel fresh like mountain air

to completely alter people's perception a power plant

from a dirty neighbor to a public park

we designed the chimney to release its steam in puffs of smoke rings

the ultimate transformation from a symbol of a problem pollution

to something playful that puffs rings of steam

this sounds like science fiction

but this is the world changing potential of architecture

what started off as wildly fictional ideas ski slopes and smoke rings

is turning into everyday reality in Venice they sail in gondolas through the streets

and in Copenhagen they ski on their power plants that turn trash into electricity

a weird dream has crystallized into concrete reality

today people flock towards immersive worlds in the virtual realm

more than a hundred million people populate Minecraft

where they can build their own worlds and inhabit them through play

the real world predecessor for Minecraft

Lego has become the greatest toy company in the world

with the population of minifigs of 3.7 billion

the largest ethnic group on the planet

these fictional worlds empower people with the tools to transform their own environments

this is what architecture ought to be. If geography is the documentation of the world as it is,

architecture must become world craft, the craft of making our world

where our knowledge and technology doesn't limit us

but rather enables us to turn surreal dreams into inhabitable space

to turn fiction into fact