Ole Scheeren
On assignment by ICON Magazine, I had the pleasure to take some portraits of the architect Ole Scheeren in his Berlin office, for a long interview published in the magazine.
Büro Ole Scheeren Group is an international architecture practice that provides architecture, interior design, and urbanism consulting as well as research and project management. With offices in Hong Kong, Beijing, Bangkok, New York, London, and Berlin, Buro-OS designs and realizes pioneering building projects and urban developments worldwide.
To date, Ole Scheeren has completed projects with a combined area of more than one million square meters. His buildings have won numerous awards, including World Building of the Year 2015 and the inaugural CTBUH Urban Habitat Award 2014 for The Interlace in Singapore, the global CTBUH Best Tall Building Award 2013 for the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, as well as the CTBUH Award of Excellence for DUO and MahaNakhon in 2018.
His projects are prototypes that engage new conceptual possibilities and explicitly manifest how the spaces in which we live and work can be reimagined. He sees architecture as a matrix of hybrid narratives from which to construct future realities. From city-defining structures to intimate spaces, his work embodies a rigorous search for new potentials to realize specific and unexpected solutions inhabited by the lives of people and cities.
Recently completed projects include the Guardian Art Center in Beijing, a hybrid arts space and the headquarters for China’s oldest auction house; MahaNakhon Tower in Bangkok, a mixed-use high-rise development that upends the conventional typology of the skyscraper and stands as an emblem of the city’s rising status as a modern metropolis; DUO, a large-scale development in Singapore which actively engages the surrounding urban space to create a new civic nexus for the city. Further projects under development include Fifteen Fifteen, a sculptural residential tower and a new beacon for downtown Vancouver; Riverpark Tower in Frankfurt, the transformation of an existing office building into an expressive residential high-rise; a major urban redevelopment and super-tall skyscraper in Shenzhen; Empire City in Ho Chi Minh City, a large-scale Observation Tower complex that presents a symbiotic vision of nature and living in the space of the city.
