“Architecture is knowledge augmented by feelings,” explained Professor Jan Søndergaard. And in his speech he put an emphasis on poetry dissolved in the air - such a perception helps to find clear pragmatic solutions. Even if you are designing a plant. For example, in the Bang & Olufsen administrative complex in the Danish Struer, the architect managed to combine childhood memories and analogies with high design.
The company develops and manufactures high-end audio, video systems and telephones. Ian showed a slide with an elegant TV remote control. This subject set the associative series for architecture: soaring - support, lightness - heaviness, impenetrability - transparency, movement - stability. One of the buildings is made of bridge structures using 5-6 cables: a reinforced concrete object seems to hang in the air. It has several supports, but they do not interfere with the visual connection with the landscape. Jan compared this picture with the well-known view of nature through an open door, gate or from under a canopy. As a child, he himself lived on a farm, woke up from the sun's rays and went out onto the grass, where the bees were buzzing. The feeling of being in a stream of light is also present in the administrative complex.
Architecture only allows you to streamline the flow, to feel its weather mood and rhythm: complex structures emerge based on simple geometry. In turn, the rays play with the texture of the surfaces, causing the space to change throughout the day. In a narrow hallway, the concrete looks soft. The movement is supported by the choice and combination of materials. Interaction with the flow of light does not stop with walls and doors: the interior is free from hierarchical subordination, built on the principle of overflow, free communication. Here are transparent staircases and steps. Sculptural silhouettes of furniture divide the interior into intimate zones: workplaces with a dynamic dotted line stitch the picture of the facade.
At the same time, the direction of the game exactly corresponds to the function of space. Each employee can observe the technological process, the general structure of production. And, in addition, he is constantly in the reality of his favorite landscape. How do people feel here? Probably involvement in something common and light.
In order to organize life so happily, it is important for an architect not to forget how to feel. The ability to feel is exactly the same necessary professional skill as analyzing the context and the ability to substantiate your artistic guesses. This is what distinguishes an architect from a marketer, a negotiator, from a builder, and even from an artist. Jan Søndergaard believes: "New buildings will shape our environment for the next 50-100 years - we are directly responsible for the aesthetic impressions, for the emotions that architecture generates."
For him, the customer once became ideal, with whom they discussed intentions for six months, went to feel the place, shared thoughts and experiences, and then all these impressions turned into sketches, which gradually overgrown with details and only then grew into a project.
Jan Söndergaard is a co-owner of the architectural firm Krohn Hartvig Rassmussrn (KHR) and is also a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. And when he talks about artistic impressions as a necessary material for working on a project, the idea is by no means conveyed from the ivory tower (although in everyday life of Russian practice this is often perceived as such). The meaning of sensory interaction with the world of physical laws has been known for a long time. Suffice it to recall one of the most important books for every architect - Finn Juhani Pallasmaa “The Thinking Hand: Architecture and Existential Wisdom of Being”.
At the lecture, Jan showed a slide with a picture of his compatriot, Wilhelm Hammershoy. At the end of the 19th century, this artist stretched a thread from Vermeer to Morandi, exploring how changes in light affect the forms, textures, shades of objects and rooms. The poetry of silence for him is the perfect beauty of pure light. Such a chamber, contemplative state of sensual contact with the world is also present in the objects of Söndergaard. In the office center, the staircase becomes a sculpture: depending on the lighting, with clear or vibrating contours. A thin window profile at the corner of the stained-glass window reduces the border "inner space - the trees of the square". The staircase between the two buildings becomes a separator of light (and functional) flows - due to the device of upper natural lighting - and the graphics of shadows enrich the interior.
By the way, Jan began his acquaintance with some objects with photographs of models. Layouts are his trademark. It’s not a matter of habit, but of the experience of communicating with the customer. Computer modeling has narrowed the perception of the future object to looking at the picture. But the picture does not allow to fully appreciate the spatial, structural solutions, focuses on color and materials. Here the customer can dictate: "I want black, I want red." The discussion will drown in random details, the feeling of the whole will be lost. The layout assumes to go from general to specific, to find details that confirm the main idea.
- But this is very laborious and time consuming! - I expressed my doubts to Jan before the lecture.
“Yes, but it all depends on how responsibly you approach the project, whether the architect has something to say to the customer, and not just follow his lead,” Ian replied calmly. - You can draw several 3D images hysterically overnight. But they will not reflect real life, real problems and needs, if the architect does not connect emotionally. And feelings are not included on demand - it takes time to experience.
Do you need a “thinking hand” - the habit of drawing?
“Anyone can technically master a computer. But it will be just something done in the program. If you do not connect existential experience - it is better not to continue!
Is it possible to do without a computer now?
- Of course not. The computer gives the architect the best control over the process. But this is already the next stage … Now all competitive projects, municipal orders are carried out exclusively in new programs, unless special conditions are stipulated. The problem is different. Renders are often ordered from the same companies. The performer masterfully builds the effects, but he himself has never been to the place for which he draws the project. You can ask him to enhance the experience, go for a trick: make it look as if the light is falling from the north - no one may even notice the substitution. People are used to rich colors, stamped images of giant tropical butterflies flying out of geography, acidic greenery, and searing sunsets. In reality, this does not happen. We are losing the present, living connection between architecture and place. We do not take into account how, depending on the time of day, the time of year, the visual image of architecture changes - textures, shades, the form itself. Now they are more concerned with geometry, oversaturation of shapes with details, enhancing the tonality of colors, in fact, they create an excess of visual noise. Architecture is a subtle experience transferred from the outside to the inside.
Scandinavian architects are known for their attention to natural light. In Denmark, Norway, Sweden - does the sun shine differently?
- Light has no national boundaries, only the landscape affects the play of the sun, - Yang smiles. - Unlike its northern neighbors, Denmark does not have a pronounced relief, we have wide panoramas, any city is no more than 40 kilometers from the sea, so the air is humid, dense, with the effect of mystical scattering of light.
In these mystical landscapes, with dominant horizontals and rare, modest verticals, it seems as if nothing is happening, but something is felt. On the stage of such an endless field, the Church of the Holy Cross on the island of Sjelland was erected by the KHR bureau. The building is constructed of fiberglass composites - it is translucent or glows, depending on the time of day. The volume consists of two parts, similar to large flat stones, and even the cross remains in the plane of the roof, only slightly rising. The pattern of the cross is given by the location of the light lanterns - so that the sign is read from the sky. Yang said that he strove to do a clean thing, without symbolic load.
His concept was believed by 25 clergymen and accepted the idea of building from fiberglass. The narrow part of the building is the nave, it has several entrances, open and closed parts - depending on the purpose of the premises. The wide part is like an amphitheater, it narrows towards the choir, the stained-glass windows face the fjord, and there are also several exits and entrances for outdoor events.
The guest house also looks like a continuation of the landscape, the layout of which, as Yang said, is built around a bathroom. With continuous - in the entire facade - panoramic glazing - there is also an overhead light and through ventilation.
The desire to capture as much light as possible is noticeable in other projects as well, regardless of where the stream comes from. For the metro station, there are triangular pyramids of lanterns - even the sun reaches the Copenhagen subway! Again, the underground parking in Reykjavik is illuminated by diffused light, like a crevice of Icelandic rocks.
In a school-shared library in the center of the Danish capital, natural light is maximized through the structure of the façade, where glass meets brick.
One of KHR's major projects is the Fiberline Middelfart plant. For this work, Jan Söndergaard was nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Prize for the fifth time. The factory complex is conceived as a giant artificial slope cut by three stripes of light. The stripes are oriented from east to west so that natural light enters the premises all day. The internal space is unified, and only the office part is divided into floors on one side of the complex. The plant produces fiberglass, and this material was actively used in the construction of the complex itself. An innovative experiment was the large-scale use of double-glazed windows - three light strips are made of them. The result is a building dressed in what is produced inside it: a healthy and convincing self-identification.
After the lecture, Jan was not released for a long time, the students of the MARSH school and the guests clearly sympathized with Danish architecture, which, according to the story of the distinguished professor Søndergaard, is not decorated with ornaments, is pragmatic, and has a tectonic approach. Of the more than 180 slides of his lecture, a third was with pictures of nature, highlights, textural beauties and silhouettes of structures. I was sure that Jan was constantly drawing something in a notebook, walking with an easel to the open air, visiting museums by subscription. Where does he get inspiration, how does he reboot? It turned out that everything is simpler. You can also strengthen your sensitivity in the gym, three times a week. And Andersen's favorite fairy tale from Jan Søndergaard is also about light: it's called "The Shadow".
