Towards the Global

To painting, even music, to the written word and narratives. Beyond the man-made I can also find great delight in the natural world. Of course, the splendour of our particular Scandinavian landscapes is a constant source of inspiration, but so too are the patterns of geological strata or the hues of col-our in a forest. What I mean to say is that the world is filled with such an infinite array of fascinations and marvels that I see no need to restrict myself to referring only to other built work. We not only find influence in the buildings of other architects but also look to other phenomena and sources. The leading influence of art on architecture is not new but has been with us since the Renaissance, and the work of our office is no different. I think where my inspiration from art is elaborated a little is the particular kind of works I have been drawn to. A recurring influence has been the great paintings by Hieronymus Bosch. First, in their sheer boldness, produced at a time when Europe was governed by strict social conservatism, and art could convey either devotion to God or the glory of war, and little else. And there he was, laying out in vivid detail an entire spectrum of emotions and every sensation of the human condition. It's all there, in a rich tapestry of Purgatory, every feeling is laid bare, from love to angst, from serenity to abjection. I feel that architecture can accommodate this breadth of senses and can be made richer with such an intricacy of emotions. A building can of course express a certain feeling or attitude, but architecture, for me, is at its best when it goes further and plays host to the entire range of human senses and feelings.

Melnikov by then had gone from being one of the Soviet Union's foremost cultural figures to falling victim to Stalin's purge and becoming an outcast. Indeed, Chatwin's hard-gained interview was conducted at Melnikov's then home and studio, the seminal work which bears his name. I was struck by Chatwin's lucid descriptions of the importance of the house in contemporary architecture, and with why it was both a modern marvel and a poetic reinterpretation of traditional Russian building techniques. This led me to his other writings and in particular his book The Songlines, which has left an impression on me. In it he documents his experiences in Australia with the Aboriginal people, studying their culture and developing a thesis about their age-old songs and their connection to nomadic trav-el. Australia is a continent unto itself, charac-terised by vast deserts, almost impassable to man. However, the Aborigines had developed a means of charting a safe passage across them through the incantation of songs describing the nature of the landscape as one passed through it-the presence of a tree or the shape of a rock formation. Not only is Chatwin's reporting of this tradition, the people he meets and landscapes he crosses erudite; it also offers up the concept of interpreting a landscape through non-visual means, in this case, song. This, to me, was fascinating. In Western culture, a terrain is only ever documented through visual means-cartography, with, in-cidentally, ancient maps being another reference I use. But the concept that a landscape can be charted by and inspire the other human senses was novel to me. This is a concept that I have come back to time and again. For example, our work at the Trollstigen Plateau explores how one can have a multitude of sensory relations with a landscape beyond the visual domain. A wide-ranging universe of amazements pointing in all kinds of directions. I don't know if these independent references of fascination form a coherent system of meaning. I tend to use these attractions as cultural gravitations in a mental pinball machine triggering all kinds of associations in all kinds of directions. I guess I have to leave it up to architectural historians to solve the mental puzzle of stitching this patchwork of fascina-tions, references, and produced work into a more systemic pattern. This kind of interpretive framing might have to be retrospective with a certain delay, and I think it's way too early to conduct this exercise. I'm more preoccupied with difference we make and less with the possible similarities architectural historians might find interesting. I'm engaged with architecture in the making. It is like a journey and that's why I like to refer to the concept of a map or an atlas as a way to contextualise what we do. The five topics I have addressed in my recent lectures are like overlapping layers forming an atlas with different dimensions, creating a hybrid context of physical landscapes and cultural dynamics by which we try to navigate through different modes of creative thinking. The atlas establishes a base for reflections on our own positions in relation to the many layers of history, nature, and different cultural dynamics we are facing. In a sense, the projects we make are always a construct of multi-layered narratives due to the complex interactions between these fundamental conditions. The work we do depicts the world we engage with by changing it, while at the same time portraying how we view the world. Just like an old atlas. It is both a panorama and a mirror, a topography and a storyline. There is always an embedded narrative with rational, emotional and even anecdotal aspects. This multitude cannot be framed within a single view.

Maybe you have to be an altruistic mind to appreciate the fact that creative explorations never truly follow straight lines because the complex landscape being explored does not resemble a flat stratum. Architecture is not a solely rational endeavour. It is an applied art. A creative way to cope with complexity, it should not be reduced to a true account of any "scientific" reality. You release so much energy when you add imagination to knowl-edge. My practice would not survive without humour and zest for life. So I'm a bit sceptical of the growing academisation of the profes-sion. Architecture depends to a certain extent upon an analytical approach and other academic skills, but these abilities cannot stand alone. Architecture is, in my view, the result of a free mind operating in a seductive way. We have to view the world in a multifaceted way where subjective issues such as feelings and sensations do matter. We are living in a world where all kinds of advertisers and opinion-makers are trying to take advantage of us by inscribing our dreams and desires into certain logics or algorithms. I think artistic expressions ought to counteract any technological matrix. Artistic imagination will hopefully always beat artificial in-telligence. I welcome the growing interest in so-called design thinking, but I hope Google will never figure out my wicked mind. I think architects must take a normative standpoint because we are trying to figure out how something ought to be. Not how things are in a scientific sense or how they will most likely turn out if we surrender to the rationality of established power structures. We have to map a territory and try to trace and merge complex patterns of behaviour, desire, need, convention, constraint, and so forth. To do this properly, we need human empathy, not rigid rules or computed algorithms.