Our 11th stop is at Lütjens Padmanabhan (Zurich, CH) alongside Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Pahmanbhan.

They experience the joy of building when they draw or build a model. To draw a line over a paper, to fold a paper into a model or to build out of folded metal sheets, is the exact same thing 

Oliver and Thomas are extremely faithful to their 1:50 models, in their office, there is a saying: “The model is always right”. So, if anything deviates, the question must be “why is our drawing not as good as the model?”. These models are tools NOT to overthink, we’ve come to realise.

Probably, their platonic love for thinness arose “out of laziness” (their words) from their first model in which "the skin of the building became thinner and thinner and that became into a theme that has stayed with us ever since”. To add up, insolation (and so on) doesn’t allow us to build in a monolithic way anymore “that is the new culture we need to embrace”.

Thinness is a language. “We think that if you use language, you should be serious about what you are saying. But it occurred to us that when you say serious things, you may as well say them with a light tone in your voice.”

“Architecture is self-conscious about it’s own fragility”. Name a more beautiful thing.

“If you are a painter or a musician and you fail, there is not much left. It is really risky. But we still have toilets and a dishwasher that works, and you can cook and sleep and it doesn’t rain in. So, we have a safety net. We can reach net level or we can go beyond it”. Or go beyond it, I repeat.

"You don’t pay us for the architecture, the architecture you get for free.”

Guest: Oliver Lütjens + Thomas Pahmanbhan -  Lütjens Padmanabhan (Zurich, Switzerland)

Host: Ana Catarina Silva (Porto, Portugal)

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