all images via screenshot from TED Video of Ole Scheeren.

Ole Scheeren is a German architect and principal of Buro Ole Scheeren with offices in Hong Kong, Beijing, Berlin and Bangkok. He is chief designer and leading the company’s creative vision and strategic development. In TED talk video, for architect Ole Scheeren, the people who live and work inside a building are as much a part of that building as concrete, steel and glass. He asks: Can architecture be about collaboration and storytelling instead of the isolation and hierarchy of a typical skyscraper? Visit five of Scheeren's buildings — from a twisted tower in China to a floating cinema in the ocean in Thailand — and learn the stories behind them. 

In this video, Ole Scheeren focuses on a narrative stories of spaces changing the way of living and designing. Scheeren says that ''for much of the past century, architecture was under the spell of a famous doctrine. "Form follows function" had become modernity's ambitious manifesto and detrimental straitjacket, as it liberated architecture from the decorative, but condemned it to utilitarian rigor and restrained purpose. Of course, architecture is about function, but I want to remember a rewriting of this phrase by Bernard Tschumi, and I want to propose a completely different quality. If form follows fiction, we could think of architecture and buildings as a space of stories - stories of the people that live there, of the people that work in these buildings. And we could start to imagine the experiences our buildings create''

Scheeren adds that ''in this sense, I'm interested in fiction not as the implausible but as the real, as the reality of what architecture means for the people that live in it and with it. Our buildings are prototypes, ideas for how the space of living or how the space of working could be different, and what a space of culture or a space of media could look like today. Our buildings are real; they're being built. They're an explicit engagement in physical reality and conceptual possibility.''

''I think of our architecture as organizational structures. At their core is indeed structural thinking, like a system: How can we arrange things in both a functional and experiential way? How can we create structures that generate a series of relationships and narratives?And how can fictive stories of the inhabitants and users of our buildings script the architecture, while the architecture scripts those stories at the same time?'' 

The CCTV Headquarters in China designed by Rem Koolhaas, OMA and Ole Scheeren.

> via ted.com/talks/ole_scheeren_why_great_architecture_should_tell_a_story#t-682927