ole scheeren

Accelerated architect

It felt like Ole Scheeren’s year. By 2012, barely into his forties, he’d co-authored one of the world's most recognisable new structures – Beijing’s CCTV Building – and hived off the OMA mothership with Rem Koolhaas’ blessing, completing the project as a solo operator. His Archipelago Cinema, designed for a Thai island, was rebuilt that summer in Venice as a floating venue for his cinematic debut, Against All Rules – the Architect Ole Scheeren, by the documentary maker Horst Brandenburg, while other mega-projects were well underway.

It seemed a fitting moment for us to connect. Scheeren’s Wallpaper* offering was a typically headlong rush around the fast-changing Asian landscape in the company of a clutch of artists, writers and photographers drawn from the region. As he noted, with two weeks to complete 20 pages, ‘the only way to look at this was to simply declare it yet another exercise in making things happen at China speed’. The point was context and culture, driven home by author Douglas Coupland, who concluded with eight fictional darts dispatched with trademark pop-cultural precision. It was a prescient issue; Büro-os’s Mahanakhon Tower in Bangkok and Singapore’s Interlace subsequently leapt from visualisations into spectacular reality.

Scheeren’s star continues to shine in the Far East, with new projects on the go in Malaysia, China and Singapore, including the Guardian Art Center in Beijing, Singapore’s Duo Tower and the Angkasa Raya in Kuala Lumpur.