peter cook: game-changer

deyan sudjic aric chen joseph giovannini hans ulrich obrist cao fei apichatpong weerasethakul peter cook ute meta bauer peter weibel

Ole Scheeren is an international architect who has gained global recognition through his designs for innovative high-rise buildings, residential communities and cultural institutions. With offices in Hong Kong, Beijing, Berlin and London, his work ranges from well-known buildings - including The Interlace in Singapore, and the CCTV headquarters and the Guardian Art Center in Beijing - to artistic installations, such as the outdoor cinema series.

For Scheeren, architecture is an organism interwoven with life. He conceives prototypes that redefine onceseparate domains such as living and working, public and private, and culture and commerce, by designing spaces that are centred on people's needs and experiences.

A large-scale solo exhibition of the German-born architect, showing at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, explores how architecture becomes a stage for people's lives and narratives.

'ole scheeren: spaces of life, 10 December 2022 - 4 June 2023, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, zkm.de 

Architecture is both a functional response to our needs and an emotionally charged experience that is an essential part of our lives.

When form follows function, architecture is limited to utilitarian problem-solving. It offers no more than is asked of it.

When form follows finance, preconceptions about the market rule out all but the status quo. But what if form follows fiction? Architecture could become the sum of the experiences, emotions and memories that it creates.

To understand fiction as offering a useful design tool for architecture is to be neither indulgent, nor whimsical. It is to think of architecture as the product of the stories, both real and imagined, and of the people who inhabit it. Such narratives can offer speculative prototypes for how places in which we live, work and share can be organised and experienced.