Dialoguing with the surroundings - Interview with Lars Johan Almgren from Dorte Mandrup
Dialoguing with the surroundings - Interview with Lars Johan Almgren from Dorte Mandrup by Ana Moura, Catherine Scalzi, Stefano Campagna
Lars Johan Almgren, Senior Architect and Associate Partner of the architectural firm Dorte Mandrup delivered a special lecture titled Place: Innite, Hidden, Lost, Forgotten, where he showcased selected architectural works and delved into the firm’s award-winning design for The Whale, a competition project set in Norway, won in 2019. A key member of Dorte Mandrup for nearly a decade, Almgren has played a pivotal role in shaping projects during the competition stage, transforming concepts into reality with creativity and artistry. His bold approach, keen aesthetic sense, and deep contextual understanding are evident in his diverse, high-quality portfolio spanning various scales and disciplines. In his lecture, he highlighted Dorte Mandrup’s design philosophy, emphasizing the integration of climate considerations and cultural heritage, ensuring that each project engages in a unique dialogue with its surroundings.
Q: What led you to Dorte Mandrup?
LJA: At that time, the office was quite small, something I felt was quite interesting. I felt Dorte had a strong will to design something, to have and to include the desire to shape something. To not only do simple structures, but to be playful, joyful and elegant. Not extravagant. I think that is why I applied to the office.
Q: And that’s what kept you there?
LJA: What kept me there is that I felt like I could do what I was best at and also evolve as an architect. I was given an opportunity to do interesting things and to work on interesting competitions and projects. From the start, I have been working very closely with Dorte, and she’s been a joy to work with. If you work well with someone, it is helpful as well. In everyday life, you will need to work with other people and everyone gets stressed, angry, and frustrated. If you find a team which works well together despite this, it’s invaluable.
Q: From your experience, how can an architectural atmosphere be created to establish a greater sense of place?
LJA: When it comes to space it’s all about everything that space does to you - if it’s tall or bright or dark or cold… it’s the elementary, basic things that you can play with in space. Space itself is such a strong experience if you’re open to it, which I think everyone is. Maybe you’re not analytic about it, but everyone experiences space - a narrow street opening up to a big plaza, a church being cold when it’s a hot summer day, and you have this kind of vast, dark room with little lighting… Space itself will always be such a strong way of communicating and understanding yourself, your body, and your relationship to your physical environment. How to take that and be able to use those things in a conscious way, in a beautiful way, that’s the next step, because that’s what you do in this profession, as an architect.
Regarding the atmosphere from a workplace perspective, Lars also expressed the following:
LJA: People are the driving forces behind a workplace atmosphere. When you’re working in a people-based line of work, you need to have certain people that have that drive, to drive things in a certain direction. It doesn’t necessarily have to be only one person; the leadership needs to be involved and believe that the direction you take is a good one, but it can also be one person leading one small part of the office or project that drives it in a certain direction and makes the other people engaged and thriving. You need that energy that you get from people and their relationships with other people. And it’s something that we as human beings are quite good at, creating this kind of enthusiasm.
Q: Your studio creates irreplaceable places; places connected with the context, places born in and from the context. When I think about an irreplaceable building, my mind goes to buildings that have stood for centuries, that are creating an identity for the people. When you design an irreplaceable building today, are you already thinking about its long-term future and how time and nature will reclaim it - when it will be a ruin?
LJA: Sometimes we have that conversation in certain projects. We talk a lot about the end of life of a building and whether it will be dismantled, become a ruin, or be recycled. It’s a consciousness that buildings might not be used as they were intended. So there might be an importance to reuse the materials somewhere else. In Italy, there are a lot of ruins, and it is very different from other places in the world. If you go to Japan, they have totally different traditions because they have a catastrophe every once in a while, so they have a different approach to architecture in that sense. So I think having the whole lifespan of a building in mind is important. It doesn't mean you can build something you think should become a beautiful ruin, but you can also think about the fact that everything has an end. That can be poetic and beautiful by itself. That something has an end, disappears, and reappears. It’s almost like us human beings, we have a certain time and then we disappear and we’re not there, but maybe there is something left of us. It can be physical evidence but it can also be a memory. I like to think of that as being a humble approach to what you create. The idea is that it won’t necessarily be there forever and ever, but that you can give something to some people for a couple of years and make sure that it is also a sustainable way of designing instead of a wasteful way of doing.