Ole Scheeren

Ole Scheeren is a German architect, urbanist and principal of Büro Ole Scheeren with offices in Beijing, Hong Kong, London, Berlin and Bangkok and was a visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong from January 2010.

Born: 6 January 1971 (age 53) Karlsruhe, Germany
Nationality: German
Alma mater: Architectural Association School of Architecture
Occupation: Architect
Parent: Dieter Scheeren (father)

Innovator Scheeren:

Since moving to China a decade ago, Ole Scheeren has seen Asian cities grow crowded with cookie-cutter towers—anonymous edifices that reveal nothing of what’s happening inside and bear little connection to the places around them. The German architect is determined to change that, working to soften the rapid urbanization with structures that challenge bland vertical building typologies and show signs of life.

Scheeren honed this fearlessness under Rem Koolhaas, whose firm, OMA, he joined in 1995. With nine years under his belt at OMA’s Netherlands base, he moved to Beijing to oversee the studio’s construction of the China Central Television (CCTV) headquarters, for which he’d served as a partner in charge of design. At five million square feet, the complex could have felt oppressive. But shaped into a kind of Möbius strip, with a sharply angled cantilever, it looks different from all sides, achieving an ambiguity that keeps it from feeling overpowering.

After starting his own firm, called Büro Ole Scheeren, in 2010, he witnessed several of his OMA projects come to fruition. Among them is the Interlace, a Singapore housing development that opened in September 2013. Asked to devise 12 high-rises, Scheeren turned the scheme on its side, in effect, crafting a composition of 31 stacked and staggered horizontal blocks that produce an array of roof decks and outdoor areas for a community of some 1,000 families.

Work keeps rolling in for his young practice, which is based in Beijing and Hong Kong. Currently under construction in Singapore is the Duo, a pair of skyscrapers whose concave forms will dynamically frame interior plazas. At street level the buildings will in places be reduced to mere columns, allowing the public to pass through the complex; further up, setbacks and cantilevers will create accessible green spaces equal in size to the towers’ footprints.

Scheeren doesn’t mind being known as a designer of gigantic structures as long as he can continue to reinvent building types. His goal, he explains, is to provide settings where people can imagine their lives playing out in meaningful and even fantastical ways. "Form doesn’t only have to follow function," he says. "It can also follow fiction."

Design philosophy:

‘Our projects are prototypes that engage new conceptual possibilities and explicitly manifest how the spaces in which we live and work can be reimagined. We see architecture as a matrix of hybrid narratives from which to construct future realities. From city-defining structures to intimate spaces, our work embodies a rigorous search for new potentials to realize specific and unexpected solutions inhabited by the lives of people and cities.’
[Source: Profile - https://buro-os.com/office/profile]


‘Every Piece of Architecture is First a Work of Fiction’

For the past 30 years, Ole Scheeren has built a career defined by an internationalist outlook. The German architect has lived in 10 countries, and worked in 25, always guided by a philosophy that recognizes "the power of bringing people, cultures, and practices closer together."
[Source: https://archinect.com/features/article 20 Jan ‘23]

Works:
Tencent Helix, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
The Axiom, Shanghai, China
“Spaces of Life_ Exhibition” [Exhibition]
Wuliang Interstice, Yibin, Sichuan, China
Nanjing Nexus, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China
Sanya Horizons, Hainan Island, China
Fifteen Fifteen, Vancouver, Canada
ABACA Resort Mactan, Cebu, Philippines
Shenzhen Wave, Shenzhen, China
Barclay Village, West End, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Empire City, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
The Interlace, Singapore
Riverpark Tower, Frankfurt, Germany
MahaNakhon, Bangkok, Thailand
DUO, Singapore
CCTV, Beijing, China
Collaborative Cloud, Berlin, Germany
TVCC, Beijing, China
Angkasa Raya, Kuala Lumpur City Centre, Malaysia
The Scotts Tower, Singapore
Archipelago Cinema Venice
Kering Pavilion, Shanghai, China

Quotes:

“Every Piece of Architecture is First a Work of Fiction.”

“I had built my office very intentionally as a global team over the years.”

“Every piece of architecture is first a work of fiction; it is created before it exists, and it anticipates many different futures.”

“Fiction is an important quality in both the architecture we want to achieve, as well as how we want to achieve it.”

“I believe that ‘form follows fiction’ more than ‘form follows function.”