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to the weather. The location is directly south
towards the fjord, twenty meters away from it,
and it is this huge warehouse that sits in the
outermost peak of Oslo, below the castle. So
you are getting all the weather: the winter, the
spring, the autumn, the summer… We have
all the fisherman in front. It is actually this
kind of closeness to these things, as we were
discussing before, that makes you learn from
them. To design something you need to be
filled with it. You have to be under the skin
of things. Landscape does that to you.
BI: Just to finish this landscape theme, I
think that there is something that our work
shares, this idea of invitation. You called it
generosity. It’s an invitation to something
different. One of our first buildings, the VM
Houses, has these triangular balconies, 5 me-
ters long. The idea was to get so far out into the
air that you could actually turn around and
look at your building. When you are stand-
ing there, you feel in the air, surrounded only
by your neighbors. Obviously also with The
Mountain and the Eight House, where you
climb up a ski slope. In other words, the
idea that each project somehow tries to make
available something that would normally be
off limits, so that you end up having not an
accumulation of private domains, but rather
a new kind of man-made landscape.
KT: We talked about architecture being ac-
tive. To me it is about prepositions: in, over,
through, within… Anything that can relate
to many prepositions all of a sudden moves
into active positioning in relation to people.
If you can walk through, over, in, under, and
so forth and so forth, then you are close to
the landscape. Because the landscape and our
whole language is based on the fact that we
develop prepositions to define our position.
Where we are in relation to something else.
If architecture is only ‘in’ then it is not ac-
tive, because it only defines one preposition.
It has to have a whole range of prepositions
in order to be active. This was the discussion
we had at the Venice Biennale, and that is
why I am no longer happy with the separation
between inside and outside in the debates on
public space, simply because I believe that
it is limiting to the architecture, and to the
public space. These are the type of things that
I try to follow, and I see in your designs that
you are trying to create active buildings too.
BI: Definitely. We normally differentiate
when there is a need, “a must have,” or a
desire, a “nice to have.” The more “nice to
haves” you can add to what the client is ask-
ing or to the program, the better.
KT: For instance, there’s a debate now at
the urban city planning offices in Oslo because
they don’t know how to represent the Opera
House in plans. Is it a building? Do they cut
the building below? Or is it outer space? They
don’t know! And that’s fantastic.
BI: That is exactly my dream. I have been
saying this all the time, in a city map build-
ing is yellow, public building is red, park is
green… and I have been focusing on this idea
that industrial is gray. It is like this cancer-
ous tissue in the city map, but I am curious
to see how are they going to label the power
plant. It should be green, or maybe red… but
definitely not gray, even though it is also gray.
KT: I agree. These are the kinds of hybrids
you learn about by moving back to nature
and landscape. Landscape was never only one
thing. Unless we accept the complexities of
the systems we are dealing with, we will get
nowhere. And I think that is something to
“The separation between
inside and outside in the
debates is limiting to
architecture and to the
public space”
