Anders Lonka, one of the three founder partners of ADEPT, a young Copenhagen-based firm with office also in Hamburg, is the guest of this new appointment. After a rich, extensive work experience at MVRDV, Diller Scofidio+ Renfro, New York and Cebra, he taught for several years at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture and from 2006 he dedicates himself, with his young multidisciplinary team, to an architecture focused on developing a real interaction with the city, as a large community, synthesised in the concept ‘place over building’.
Our conversation starts sharing his professional beginnings and considering the difficulties that young architects have to face, deciding to run an own practice and we continue by deepening the concept of an architecture as open process rather than a defined typology, which is fundamental in their design approach. The new Aarhus School of Architecture, a flexible and innovative ambience conceived to become an active, experimental incubator for architectural exploration, with the ambition to evolve due to the mutual influence of the surrounding urban environment, the street and the people, is another topic of interest followed by Braunstein Tap-house, a distinctive proposal that, above is extremely attractive formal expression, embodies an important story, born according to the possibility of a limited lifespan. Sustainability, a ‘must’ in every intervention of the practice, is analysed in relation to innovative solutions they have adopted, including the upcycle of leftover construction materials extended from Aarhus School building to the external hardscape. The polycentric human-scaled vision for a typology of new sustainable urbanism related to 80 ha urban development in Cologne, Germany, suggested by their new winning proposal, WoodHood, expands their concept of sustainability. Stadtmuseum, an intervention just started, concerning the transformation of a protected building in central Berlin, left for more than 20 years neglected, and the strategy internally adopted of ‘a box in the box’ conclude our talk.