Mind your behaviour

Wednesday February 24th was the kick off for DAC’s series of events following the opening of 3XN’s exhibition, Mind Your Behaviour at the Danish Architecture Centre. This night’s event took place at a fully booked DAC with over 130 participants ready to tune in on Kim Herforth Nielsen and Ulrich Knaack.

Kim went through a number of 3XN projects and emphasized the importance of the social dimension in their work. The spiraling staircase is a reoccurring element in many of 3XN’s works, for example Horten Lawfirm, Landsbanki and Ørestad College. In the college the staircase is placed centrally in the open spaced building and is designed with plenty of space to hang out and socialize with friends. The students are furthermore encouraged to always use the stairs instead of the elevator. That result in a lot of ascending and descending for the 1400 students in the 5 story high building and the students get used to be more physically active.

With Middelfart Sparekasse Kim stressed how important it is, not only to design a bank, but to create an urban space for the citizens of Middelfart and implement multi functionality from the beginning of the design process. The same goes for the Museum of Liverpool that aims to be more than just a museum; they have created an indoor urban space for the Liverpoolians. 

Nature’s own constructions have always been an inspiration for architects and engineers. That is clearly visible in the new Danish Aquarium that is to be constructed right next to the airport in Copenhagen. The spiral, visualized with pictures of seashells, maelstroms and galaxies, forms the layout of the building which also represents an important branding value as the aquarium is visible when taking off or landing at the airport.

Finally Kim showed examples from 3XN’s new Research & Development department, GXN. Newly developed materials and constructions used in projects like The Cube in Berlin that has self-cleaning facades and concrete that cools or heat the building when needed. All in all, measures that reduces the carbon footprint of the building with 25 %.

Research must fail 

The discussion on new materials made a smooth transition to Ulrich Knaacks lecture. Ulrich is an architect, specialist in facades and currently a professor at two universities in Holland and Germany. He presented a wide range of innovative technical solutions, invented by himself and in collaboration with his students. He showed us energy storing concrete, floating facades, air balloon walls, vacuum packed cardboard facades, self erecting constructions, adaptive insulation and finally told us about the possibilities of Rapid Prototyping. Ulrich’s motto for working with matters like these is “research must fail”, which proves that results don’t come easy in this line of work.
Research and development within Rapid Prototyping, or 3D printing, is accelerating and today you can produce prototypes in a wide range of materials. Caterpillar in California is developing a system called Contour Crafting that its creator believes will one day be able to build full-scale houses in hours produced on site. Lots of architects has flirted with these ideas, among others Winy Maas of MVRDV.

Both the speakers contemplated on the subject of behavior, Kim on how architecture influences human behavior and Ulrich on how architecture behaves, influenced by humans, nature or any other external or internal factor. But knowing if these architectural tricks actually do change or influence human behavior is hard to say without having the chance to experience the buildings themselves. I have been at the Ørestad College and I know that it is a very popular school, but does it really have such a big influence on the students? I’d like to think so, but hard to tell. Architects and planners have visions and crazy ideas and some of them are really good at expressing them on paper but the on-site experience isn’t always what was expected.

Knaack presented the facts, so to speak. Science is hard evidence and here the fluffy human factor was taken out of the equation. The future of cities depends on innovation and research in how we build and produce building materials without trashing our planet.