So, let's get started.
I'm just saying, you guys really know how to put on a show.
But it's much more than just a show.
Thank you so much.
My name is Søren Pihlman and I'm the curator of this year's contribution in the Danish Pavilion here at the Biennale.
And it's really a pleasure to be here.
And I'm also the director of Pihlman Architects in Copenhagen when I'm not in Venice.
I've really been looking forward to this day.
I must say and I also know that some of you at least know that it has been a moment for me that has been.
I've been looking forward to this for two years now actually, and I will say that over the past two years we have been deep in the making of this exhibition.
So, this exhibition, Build of Sight, is both a renovation as well as an exhibition.
And it is an actual construction site.
It's not staged, it is real.
I think people sometimes forget that.
And as many of you already probably noticed, it's also an experiment.
But for us, it's also a built manifesto.
It's a demonstration of a method.
It's actually a demonstration of our own practice.
And it's a statement of a belief that we see essential in tomorrow's architecture.
Thank you.
I grew up in Denmark, in central Denmark, in a very small suburban town.
I would also say it's surrounded by quite subtle and very familiar Danish landscapes.
And I attended also like local small school in this close-knit community.
So I feel on many levels like a very traditional Danish upbringing.
Throughout my whole childhood we always went to the small summer house next to the fjord and i spent all my childhood summers just on the water side, either just watching the water or participating in any kind of water sports, swimming and just spending time there.
I think that's really The big beauty about the Danish landscape there is so much water.
And I feel like we all, if we don't have a connection to it, we should have.
I think it's a very Danish quality to believe in communities and to do things collectively, to work together.
We're also a very social democracy and I think most people in Denmark They don't believe that much in the idea of a genius.
They way more believe in the idea of working together in teams to collaborate.
But I also feel that I've always been kind of a collector.
I really enjoyed just going out and finding things and collecting, keeping them.
And I think to me it seems like all the things that I've collected throughout my life has always been associated with a memory.
For me,
So it's been difficult for me to throw things out.
And I still enjoy doing that.
Yeah, I definitely think there is a clear connection between this interest of mine and the way that I enjoy working as an architect.
I also remember some years ago, me and my girlfriend went to Iceland to be teachers on a small architectural course, but they didn't have any money, and so didn't we.
So we decided it should just be about the things that people could find within the boundaries of the existing little town.
And then we tried to to combine that in interesting ways.
And I think people also enjoyed that very, a set of very narrow possibilities, because they had to find value in the things that they found.
I guess that setting up a set of limitations for myself has always been a way to thrive in a certain setting, because I kind of need those limitations.
Thank you.
One of the things I tend to go back to when I have to explain what started the practice that I'm running right now was that I was really curious of trying to understand why these new developments around Copenhagen they all look the same.
And I didn't really understand that, because at that time I was in the early years of architecture school and you were set free.
You could do whatever you wanted to.
But as soon as you entered Ørestedden and Nordhavn and these development areas of Copenhagen, you just got the impression that all of them was made by the same architect and by the same developer.
And then I started to realize okay, there is a set of rules in the construction industry that you have to follow, or at least you have to break out from them.
And that requires a lot of like.
You need to be brave in a way and you need to take a lot of fights.
And I think all these things that like wrapping in the constraints of the architecture field, I found them quite interesting and inspiring.
And then I just remember that I was cycling around in Copenhagen and I saw many of these sites before that they were done.
And I actually thought that the new buildings were most impressive before the final layer was attached.
To me, that was a clue.
I have to find out what is behind the layers.
What do you actually find behind the facade?
Would there be a way of exposing that and letting the construction site itself become the narrative of the architecture?
So for me, Venice is a city and a place that is probably the most important place to present new ideas within architecture and art.
And I feel that it's also a great opportunity to push the discussion forward and bring something to the table that I find relevant.
This is the Danish pavilion, and it's maybe not visible from here, but it actually consists of those like two different pavilions that have been connected.
So the older part, which is the one over here to the right, was from the 30s, and then There was this later edition back in the 50s late 50s and I think what really struck us when Jacob and I started to dive into this is that it's actually very little material that we're able to find about it.
So I think that the main goal for today would be go in there, get some great samples.
Now we start with the floor, make a hole, figuring out what does it actually consist of, what do we find underneath, and hopefully being able to bring something back to our test center in Denmark and in Switzerland.
And then we have plenty of time afterwards because the exhibition will be in one and a half year.
So I guess from now on, a year onwards, we will be able to conduct all those tests and stay in touch with you and figuring out where to Find solutions.
Yeah, exactly.
And also if we have to go here again, and I guess we will have to.
The first thing we do is trying to get a better understanding of what is present, like we are registering the existing environment like the initial condition, because that's our whole platform.
That's the thing that we have to work with later on in the process.
And we try to get as close to that as possible.
And I feel as deeper as we dive into the existing materials and the existing elements that are present.
We find natural logics, we found boundaries and we find other types of relevance that we would normally never see.
So I feel it's...
It is needed, and I will always prefer spending more time in these initial phases just trying to understand the existing, because I feel, as more as I understand the existing, it's easier for me to predict the future.
But I think we have a very good understanding right now of what we'll find here.
And the huge variety of materials.
Yeah, exactly.
But I think we will also.
I guess it will be the same more or less that we will find throughout at least the area inside.
And then we'll have this what is it like 50 centimeters of gravel before we'll find clay in the bottom?
I think all the things that we have found here, they have certain qualities.
And I like the dark tone of this silt.
I like the bricks as well, the stones, the gravel, like everything has certain qualities and I think it's just a question about how we combine them.
Yeah, absolutely.
And what to build out of it.
Exactly.
I think materials they can perform in various ways and I see that Often we try to push materials into situations where they are not really performing well.
And I think there is something counterintuitive to that.
I think if you flip that process around and try to understand the materials, first figuring out what can they actually do, And especially when you work with existing materials that has already been processed, it's not just about understanding the logic of natural materials.
It's really about diving into these complex structures the debris and the leftover from building cultures that has developed over years.
Then suddenly you see that there are potentials here that has not been fully utilized.
And if you listen carefully, You can also start to see that there are forms and geometries and logics that emerge just from understanding the materials right.
17 centimeters, right?
And then we had this small gap here around five centimeters.
So we have been investigating this pavilion already in many different levels, and we have been going here on a field trip together with the students from the Danish Architectural School and we did a 3D scan of everything and we have looked into different visible layers.
But what we're really interested in now is trying to see how much information can we gather from the things that we can't see.
And we're especially interested to get a better understanding of the existing slab because right now it comes to different levels.
There's the one from the 1930s, which is the highest part, and then you have a lower part in the extension from the 1950s.
And we would really like to see what is the thickness of this slab?
What does it consist of?
Are there any cracks, voids, potentially in rebars?
And from there we can start to calculate what are the material properties, low bank capacity, etc.
And figure out where do we need to do the maintenance work.
We conducted multiple scans in different places.
We have one in particular no two actually that shows the different layers quite well and also the reinforcement ones.
So these are the layers that we detected and we found four main layers.
Can we see, if we go for a 2D view, like this one, is that a section?
So here we can start to see a grid structure.
It's not necessarily because it needs to be raw, but I think there is an honesty to it.
And sometimes the honest construction can be even more refined than the ones that has been cladded in raw materials.
So I think it all comes back to an idea of building simple in a way like using as few materials and as few resources as possible, but do it with an absolute care and after being very precise on the analysis of what to add and what not to add, and what to remove and what not to remove.
And I think this very basic idea of building simple or like using as few things as possible, that has been the driving force for us and it has led us into many different projects.
And I think it continues to be like the inspiring source of the practice.
I think the reason why materials continues to be the driving force for us is because, in a way, when you reduce architecture down to the very basics, material is the only thing left, in a way.
The rest is up to us as an architect.
But the materials that we have, that is, our building components, And I think the more we can let the material be the protagonist of the architecture, the more interesting the architecture becomes.
And then, of course, there are different materials that I personally find more interesting than others.
And I think sometimes it's difficult to say exactly where the fascination for different materials comes from.
But I think in general there is something about when the material reveals something about itself, that it reveals the cultivation, like when it comes it goes from a resource like, for instance, a tree, to a piece of wood you can see, like the traces of how it's being cut down and so on.
Then like all those exposed traces of the process that brings us down to be a building component.
I think the more visible that are, the more interesting material it is.
So this feedback, like in the dialogue with the existing materials and the existing structures, existing buildings, I think that is where we are developing the projects.
So it's not because we have an idea of what kind of project we will do beforehand.
We just embrace the things that's already there.
And then we look for potentials.
Just to give you an introduction to some of the things that we talked to Felix about was that when we have those different aggregate sizes there will be we can combine them, of course, in different ways, and the natural way to combine them would be to use the clay as a binder and then do a variety of different sizes of stones and sand, so you kind of like have a combination of like different sizes where like, the bigger aggregates take up the the majority of the space and then you have smaller aggregates in between and then in between that you have sand and clay.
Then kind of like, holds it all together.
Since I was appointed as the curator for the exhibition in Venice in the Danish pavilion, I started to look into the pavilion where we were to set up an exhibition in the first place.
And as part of my research, I found out that there was actually some issues with that pavilion, that it was in poor state and they wanted to renovate it, and I wanted to do so for many years, but it's been difficult because of the changing exhibitions, lack of time and funding.
So I thought this could be a great starting point for an exhibition and also to use my time in Venice and use all the effort that I'm putting into this to invest in lasting improvements of the pavilion rather than just setting up a temporary exhibition.
So it's, on one hand, just a very classical renovation where we are fixing the floor, the former slab that is cracked, and some of the tiles that are cracked.
They can't withstand the load of all these changing exhibitions.
So we want to upgrade it.
And there's also an issue that the pavilion is flooding because the floor has been made too low, so it's actually lower than the surrounding around the pavilion.
So we want to raise the floor, we want to strengthen it and thereby also allowing other types of exhibitions to take place in the future in the pavilion.
And then, at the same time, we use this opportunity to investigate and research together with a lot of different researchers and engineers and specialists.
We're looking into all the materials that we find on site and we try to see how we can use them for other purposes, not just as a floor that it used to be, but also how can we look at the floor as a resource and as a material that can be used in multiple ways.
And in the end, ultimately after the exhibition is over, in 25 in Venice, we will cross all the exhibition elements, put them down to the ground where they came from.
We will finalize a new floor where we use all the existing tiles from the former floor and the ones that broke as part of the process.
We will cross them even further and create a terrazzo made of the broken tiles.
And we are restoring all the windows.
We are even taking one of the existing windows and turning that into a pivot door.
So we are literally just working with the things that we find in the pavilion.
Thank you.
These two here, seaweed there, and then straw.
I also think you can start to see the different amount of compression that we put on each test.
You can see there is a higher degree of density in some of them, and some of them are more porous.
But I'm looking very much forward to test the mechanical properties of these later on, when they're hardened, to see which of them we'll actually be able to use or utilize for construction purposes.
Absolutely.
I feel that collaboration is key to everything in architecture.
No matter how much you try to convince yourself that you are actually building as an architect, you're not really building.
You're just thinking and drawing.
But in the end You are dependent on so many other disciplines in order to achieve anything in architecture.
So I think collaboration is important and I feel that we are collaborating on many different levels.
We are both collaborating with the resources that we explore and that we find with the materials.
But I also think it's important to accept and be humble about that we don't have all knowledge And we have to be inspired.
So we are looking for collaborations with researchers that we find interesting people that have another way of looking at the very same things as we are looking at, but differently.
And they can extract information in another way that we can.
And we try to gather as much of this information from these specialists and letting the project be informed by this information.
So after we returned from Venice then we had all the documentation of the building and so forth they started looking at it through different building archaeological optics.
So some students focused on time, kind of when are the different parts of the building from.
Some students looked at the condition of the building, where it needs repair, where there are damages to the building and so forth.
All of this actually is excavation material that we took from the site.
You remember we also sampled it in Switzerland.
And we realized that there are different layers.
So here you can feel the most clayish layer.
That is our binder now for all of our samples and even the floors as you can see now.
It's the matter of the ratio between this clayish binder and the different sizes of the stones and the amount of stones.
So the reason why we need to cast it so thin is that it needs to dry out, so we need to remove the water, and that can just happen at the surface of the material.
I think this is interesting because this is also.
It is actually shaping the material that we are making here, because we have to think about the thickness of it.
We can't make it very thick.
We have to think about the environment that we create the material in, in order for it to work.
So many things that suddenly influence the final element, the final material that we are trying to create here.
And I think these are the interesting aspects in the way that we work right now is that we really try to let the materials kind of like form themselves in a way.
So I like the idea because what we look at is scale level of the building.
A building is made from material that become element that become the house or the apartment.
The reverse is, you have then the building that become an element and giving the opportunity to create something new.
So you're really talking about that.
We are scaling down the components, like from being a building we're scaling it down to being a component, from there onwards down to become like dust and particles.
And from there, we can start to scale it up again.
Exactly.
And for me, that's kind of the beauty we are able to do.
It's like you kind of have now an infinite loop of process.
The building here is a very, I would say, standard generic concrete building from the late 60s.
We see them many places in Denmark and actually many places around the world.
Very generic structure, a lot of repetitive elements.
And it used to be a building that was built for the Danish fur industry in the 60s.
Later it was took over by the Copenhagen Disabled Center.
And the client in this case wants to do some kind of community center that should host many different activities, from activities within the field of arts to social activities.
And they also wanted the building to have a very diverse, spacious program from theater spaces, artist studios workshops libraries cafes, lots of different things.
And of course, that inspired us in the process.
But I think what really was the defining factor in this project was that we insisted on everything should stay on site.
And so the ideas started to rise that It would be interesting just to flip things around to see how little we would actually have to move things.
So, instead of taking one thing from one end of the building and moving it to the other, we were trying to explore how little a movement we could do with the things to achieve something quite spectacular.
So the existing slabs, we cut them out and flip them either up or down, and thereby forming the foundation for a stair that actually connects all the floors.
Now,
But even after we did that, we still had concrete elements left over.
So we looked into how they could be utilized for other purposes.
So we started to do furnitures, bar disks, also in close proximity to the places where we were harvesting these materials in the building.
So you can actually go through the building and then you can see, like all the voids that we created, the double height space.
You can see all the materials that we remove there.
They are still within the space, they just have a new function and they've been moved slightly like how we were cutting down the concrete, flipping it down, but in the same place.
And in the same way as we did with the concrete, we did with the brick walls.
So to open up the facade towards the street and towards the rooftop terrace on the first level, we were just cutting away the lower partitions of the brick wall and flipping them down, using the bricks as a pavement instead of a wall.
So again very, very simple manure that kept the bricks in the same position more or less as they were before.
So you can kind of see where they come from.
And I feel there was this transition in scale in a way, because as soon as you work with these bigger components elements, it offers a certain architectural impact.
And no matter if it's a little broken or anything, is very dominant and you can use it again as an element.
And I think that was what the concrete offered, and that was what the bricks offered.
But there was at some point.
We reached some kind of threshold where The materials that we were harvesting were more just waste, like broken wooden studs, gypsum boards and stuff like that.
But we kept all the materials here, even though that we didn't know what to use it for.
So we started to create our own material bank in the basement of the building.
And then we just revisited these material pools later on in the process.
And we ended up finding a supplier in Denmark that could take all our wooden waste and shred it and make it into particle boards.
So when you are walking around the building, you see all these furnitures now in the building that is made out of the wood waste from the building itself.
And it's very coarse particle balls.
So you can actually see patterns in different colors.
And that comes from the different colors the wood was in the building before.
So some of it are some of the broken doors that was painted in very vivid colors.
Some of it is from a form of wooden floor in the ground floor.
And some of it is just from wooden profiles in these lightweight interior walls.
So we had a lot of materials here that we insisted on keeping, even though we didn't know what to use it for, just because we didn't want to throw anything out.
And the same goes to the material that we had.
We made a contact with... a car wreckage facility just outside of Copenhagen.
So they took all our metal waste that we couldn't use.
We had some old, broken radiators and some ductwork and other smaller metal components.
And then they just crushed it all to cubes and then we used them for some of the furnitures as well.
And so it also became very playful just to play around with the materials we had and find the right collaborator that could help us utilizing these materials.
So I think there is a poetic quality in materials just trying to express themselves and that you can unravel those small stories in a building so you understand it.
I think the more we understand things, the easier it becomes for us to find value in things as well.
And I think that is what we are trying to achieve with the elements that we are repositioning.
We still do it in a way so people understand where they came from, that they've just been moved.
And I think it's the same approach we have to all the new things we have to add to the building that we want to add them in a way where people understand that something that has been added.
They can kind of like see what the function is for each of these elements.
And of course there's also I think there's a very pragmatic way to it as well that it's easier to maintain, it's easier to change if you're not hiding things away.
But I also feel that it offers another layer of details to a building.
That it doesn't become flat.
Suddenly it has a lot of, there's a lot of things going on.
And I think it offers something to the architecture.
The architecture becomes more rich when you're not trying to hide things away.
And then at the same time you use way less resources.
I think Torvai has demonstrated a way of working with existing materials that has been an ongoing discussion in Denmark for a longer time now.
But I think it's been more about how we become better at sorting our waste, how we become better at creating these places where you can gather secondhand materials.
But then it's been mostly used in these smaller demonstration projects.
But this is, This serves as a demonstration project on another scale, with another function, and it has another impact, I think, because it's actually a project that bigger developers and clients can learn from.
And I think that's what makes this special.
And of course, that it also, we managed to go so far that we did in this project.
Like it's really been a question of utilizing almost everything.
I like to think about architecture as something that is very dynamic, because it's always in a process, in a way.
It's always alive.
Either you are building something or the building slowly deteriorates disappears, or you are transforming it, you're renovating it or even tearing it down.
It will never be static.
We are putting all the components together now.
So here you see there are the three of them together.
So we have the extracted sand from here and then we have the alginate and the paper.
And then mixed with the excavated sand from the site and alginate.
I really think it's interesting what you talk about in the drying process and also in the mixture process, that we don't have to activate the binder by heating it up, because I think that is one of the biggest issues with cement, for instance, that you really have to heat it up to certain degrees, which is very energy intensive.
But this is just the raw materials that we mix together.
Yeah, activated by the water.
Activated by the water and then it works.
Yeah.
It's super interesting to look into these natural binders such as Alginate, but it would be interesting to see how.
How could architecture take its starting point if you look into natural resources that are already present in certain areas.
So you're not going to scale it up and use alginate everywhere in the world, but it becomes like a very specific component that is being used, for instance, here in Venice because there is an abundance of alginate, and in other places it could be other kind of biters.
And therefore you also have to find the right aggregates to mix with it.
And suddenly you're developing site-specific materials.
I feel the whole discussion about how we can built the future architecture still takes its starting point in a very old-fashioned way on looking on resources, where you accept that you always go out in nature and harvest your materials and you process them and then they can take part as a building component later on in architecture.
But when we look at the buildings that is being built today, most of the buildings is actually being built in areas where you already have buildings.
So I feel there is something counterintuitive to that.
I feel we have to be better at looking at the resources that we have already processed, resources that we already put into this world.
And not just for saving energy and saving resources, also because they are embedded with a lot of poetic qualities.
They have traces of history.
They have their own narratives.
We are, as all of you know, living in a very paradoxical time.
It's marked by both overproduction as well as scarcity.
And it's very clear that the way that we're built now isn't the right way forward, but I think it's less clear how we get there.
So nonetheless, I believe the path toward real change begins by shifting the way we look at the things.
That is already here.
And if we begin to look more closely at what we are actually doing, then construction becomes something that is more than just delivering a product.
It becomes some kind of a space of invention, potentially even poetry.
In that spirit, I think build of site is not a finished object.
I see it as a built question.
It's a method that in its core can be applied everywhere.
And it's a statement of a belief that we see essential in tomorrow's architecture.
So is there a life after Venice?
I feel that Venice has been a fantastic experience for us, and it allowed us to dive into a lot of unanswered questions.
A lot of things that we have been thinking about in our way of working with materials how to approach existing buildings.
I feel that Venice has become this kind of a laboratory where we could just play around with things and expand our own methods, so it became more playful.
And I think if we look at the projects that we have done so far, When we did the house 14A, it was a very small scale.
It was a private residential building.
And from there we moved onwards towards Torvai community, larger in scale concrete, more generic in its structure.
And I feel like then going down in scale again that we did here in Venice.
It has kind of like solidified our method in a way where we are, I feel that we believe more in it now because we have proved that it works.
And of course, like contexts and materials always change.
And like for instance now here in Finland, the building that we're working with here is completely different again.
It's a barn structure from the late 1800 and mostly consisting of these large scale stones and like a wooden roof structure.
But I feel that For us right now, the question is about how do we scale up this method?
How do we move beyond the very comfortable zone of Copenhagen projects and venture out into the world and face new challenges in new building topologies, new contexts and, of course, keep on developing our own method as we go?
Yeah, it's super nice.
I have to keep them.
So we're creating a nice sort of material catalogue of everything that we have available to us here to use in different capacities.
We'll get to go to Koskisson tomorrow to talk to them about maybe reusing some of the wood that we have here.
I feel that there is an ongoing, I would say global discussion right now about how to save resources, how to limit ourselves in a way.
And I feel that what we are offering in that regard is that we are bringing a more playful approach.
And I think if we could combine those two things that being more aware of producing less waste and find a path there that is being driven by playfulness and joy, I think we're on the right track.
Thank you.
