January 5, 2010

Magnus Larsson (UK/SE)

UK based Swede, Magnus Larsson stayed at the capsule version of Creators Inn by Elvine at LAT, while in Gothenburg to give a speech at TEDxGöteborg. Interview and a previously recorded TED presentation video found after the jump.

How would you describe yourself for someone that have never met you?
I’m an architect who used to be – and still occasionally dabbles as – a journalist and a copywriter. My DNA was tested a few years ago for an article, and having seen those results, I know that I’m excruciatingly boring, the most common man on the planet: no interesting major diseases, an ever-so-slightly-above average tendency for rheumatic problems, and a lineage that makes me 1/25 Ethiopian jew. I’m the same as everyone, really.

What is creativity for you?
Creativity is the combined act of making yourself receptive to the usually sudden realisation that something is potentially possible, followed by the stubborn actualisation of that something. I believe, with Tibor Kalman, that everything is an experiment: if you actually pause to look at things, it’s very hard to not be inspired by them. In that way, pausing is creativity. But you also have to let go of that pause button. The people at TBWA/Chiat Day and Apple got it wrong: it’s not about thinking different. It’s about thinking-and-acting different, though of course that hasn’t got quite the same ring to it. To stay in the world of advertising slogans, creativity is the whole chain: Think different > Go create > Just do it. Remember “Tank Man,” the unknown Chinese rebel who stopped with his bags of groceries in front of the tank in the Tiananmen Square in 1989 and refused to move? That’s creativity.

What was your reason for visiting Gothenburg, and what did you do during your time here?
I was invited to give a TEDx talk about my proposal to build a 6,000km long habitable wall made from biologically solidified sand across the African continent as a way of potentially stopping desertification in its tracks. I ended up staying in a capsule hotel and talking about not only this artificial sandstone wall, but also one of my first and one of my latest architecture projects, what I mean by Radical Optimism, and why I hate umbrellas.

You are an architect yourself. What did you think about the capsule version of Creators Inn by Elvine and the overall idea and design behind the LAT space at Lindholmen?
I think it’s a beautifully realised act of maximising the possibilities of a space – but above all I applaud the programmatic idea of fusing a flat with an office with a music studio with a hotel. As soon as you grasp how it works, you realise that a lot of love has gone into the creation of this interior intervention. It’s quite mad, in the best sense of that word, and it’s a true love hotel, in the proper sense of that word.

You have proposed an idea called “Dune” on how to stop desertification that has gained lots of attention around the world. Could you please shortly explain what it’s all about
A proposal was made about five years ago to mitigate against desertification in the Sahara/Sahel region of Africa through the planting of a massive shelterbelt of trees right across Africa, from Mauritania in the west to Djibouti in the east. My proposal seeks to add a supportive-habitable architectural layer to this shelterbelt, in order to help protect the trees from the forces of nature and the threat of people chopping them down. My suggestion is that we could use the bacterium Bacillus Pasteurii to solidify the existing sand dunes into sandstone structures, which would potentially be a comparatively cheap way of creating such a very long and very narrow pan-African anti-desertification city; a sand-stopping device made out of sand, a way of using the desert itself to stop it from pushing further south.

Magnus speech at a previous TED event.

You told us that you did “Dune” as your degree project as part of your architectural education, but that your teachers failed you. How did that happened?
I worked rather hard for a year to come up with this proposal, but by the end of it – in fact, on the very last day of that year – the panel of tutors that I presented it to considered the project a failure. Dune then went on to win the first prize of 15,000 dollars at the Holcim awards, get endorsed on Bldgblog by Geoff Manaugh (whom I believe to be the best architecture critic in the world), and catch the attention of the organisers of TEDGlobal, who invited me to present it on stage in Oxford in July 2009. This in turn gave birth to several invitations to give Pecha Kucha talks, as well as a string of articles in publications such as Wired, the BBC, the LA Times, Slashdot, Above Magazine, and so on. Whereas it is obviously wrong to judge the opinion of the initial panel based on the project’s latter success, it does remain the same project. There seems to be a logical gap between the school’s response and that of the rest of the world. Whether that is due to a problem with my scheme or with the school’s criteria for success, I leave for others to decide. Failure is in the eye of the critic – but also in the eye of the person behind what is being criticised. It is always easy to pick something apart; if you want something to fail, you can be a radical pessimist and make it fail. But you can also be a radical optimist and imagine how it might work and how it might make the world a better or more interesting place. Personally, I have very little time for the pessimists.

What are your plans for the future?
First, I’ll work out a way of making sure that Dune continues to live on in some form and at some scale. I’m talking to several different companies about different ways of getting the necessary research done in order to be able to build with what is potentially a new cementitious material, a way of building with plastic stone. Then, there will be more projects like Dune, but also more projects in other veins. I’m currently trying to work out whether to cut my hair and get a job, or whether I should pursue a different and more individual path. I think I’d feel at home in a design studio at the intersection point between Yves Behar’s fuseproject, J. Mayer H’s office in Berlin, Bjarke Ingels’s BIG, and some seriously innovative research unit at the MIT. A studio that doesn’t hesitate to treat open-minded entrepreneurs well and use their money to change the world. If that sounds like a description of your company, I’m all ears. But I guess I’ll probably have to set it up myself.