While designed to visually seduce, Dune is not primarily a formal exercise but a social, ecological, cultural one.
— Magnus Larsson
The threat is desertification. My response is a sandstone wall made from solidified sand.
I found out that there was this project called the 'Great Green Wall' where they wanted to plant trees across the Sahara desert, and the idea was born that I wanted to create a support structure for that initiative.
The only thing we lack for even faster growth is more capital.
I find it slightly absurd that the only thing we consume more of than water is concrete.
If you happen to live close to the desert border, you can pretty much calculate how long it will be before you have to carry your kids away and abandon your home and your life as you know it.
Architects create spaces that accommodate human activity. As opposed to many of its contemporary counterparts, Dune'is not so much focused on the styling of that activity, as on the supporting of it.
In a way, architecture is about communication. That's an aspect of the discipline that is somewhat lacking, and there's definitely room for more progression into that area. I suppose that gives me a bit of a different edge. I'm also very, very used to doing a lot of exhaustive research and finding interesting information from different sources.
Rather than just mimic processes in nature, I think we can harness the powers of nature itself and allow it to help us create. That, in a way is what the 'Dune' project is all about.
How are we to live with the desert, in the desert, within the desert?
We're stuck in the concrete age. Concrete has really become this ever-present material that's almost impossible to get away from. It's cheap, abundant, and easy to work with, and to an extent, that's good.
One billion grains of sand come into existence in the world each second. That's a cyclical process. As rocks and mountains die, grains of sand are born. Some of those grains may then cement naturally into sandstone. And as the sandstone weathers, new grains break free. Some of those grains may then accumulate on a massive scale, into a sand dune.
Architects create spaces that accommodate human activity.
I started off in journalism 16 years ago in Stockholm, and I wrote for a few different publications for many years. I've also worked in advertising as a copywriter and creative director, but I changed it for architecture at 25 years old.
With the right kind of financing, I think we can grow by 100 percent per year.
One of the most obvious reasons to start using timber rather than concrete is that it's the one commonly grown and therefore exceptionally renewable building material that we have available to us. And it acts as storage for carbon dioxide.
Sand dunes are almost like ready-made buildings in a way. All we need to do is solidify the parts that we need to be solid, and then excavate the sand, and we have our architecture. We can either excavate it by hand, or we can have the wind excavate it for us.
