Now I'd just say when the devil goes by you don't know and if it never goes by it will never be a good project. Welcome to Archimetic Sessions 1-1. I'm Amelia Taylor-Hockberg, and this week November 16th, 2015. We're featuring an interview from earlier this year with Jens Bethelson, a Danish architect working in historic preservation of royal buildings.
Jens' official title translates to something along the lines of royal building inspector, royal builder, or royal surveyor occupying the historic position of the king's architect, or in this particular case, the queens. In practice this means that Jens oversees the health of such buildings as the Danish parliament and the royal family's winter home. Jens was appointed to the position in 2011 and is Copenhagen firm, Bethelson and Shevink architects specializes in preservation work. A friend of mine, Matthias Motovic, used to work with Jens, and he helped set up this interview.
You'll occasionally hear him chime in as translator during the interview. All right, I hope you enjoy this one-to-one with Jens Bethelson. Maybe I should start with my job for the moment. I hope you're up for the Danish state, dealing with a lot of square meters, listed buildings in Copenhagen and Denmark.
Among those, the royal castle for the queen of Denmark, and she has not only one in Copenhagen, but she has a huge castle outside governing. In addition to that, the castle where the parliament is situated, and we are maintaining the buildings and we make projects there. My title is, I don't know if there's a good English title, but it's a royal building inspector. I think that a better way is a royal builder, and it's a title from back in the 16th, 17th century, where it was a tradition that king has an architect that he always used.
I'm the modern version of this architect. How did you come into that position? Well, by coincidence, in some way, it's a job that the people who are dealing with history and the architecture from the past is interested in, and we have a studio at that time, quite a small studio with 10-15 people, and we said, okay, it would be nice to have a job where we knew what to do the next four years. So we made an offer and got the job.
So was that a proposal for a specific project that you pitched to your work to them? No, it's a frame where you give your how much they're going to have per hour, and what the percentage of the building costs are you going to have for doing something, and then a lot of the peculiar projects and how products and funny projects and things like that pop up and you solve all the problems. Something that's just dealing with maintenance of the houses and other others are really interesting finding a solution for a problem that the houses or the buildings have. So in terms of interpreting the intent and the hopes of the client, this in this case being Danish royalty, who exactly are you consulting with in order to accomplish these preservation goals?
And what is the overall, besides keeping maintenance and keeping the structure standing, what is the overall long-term goal of the preservation? One thing that might be at the interest of American listeners is that the Royal Family here in Copenhagen and most of the houses in Europe is the Royal Houses. Actually, they're living at kind of a everyday life, and they try to have children, they follow their dreams in the children to school, they walk in the streets, they are actually living in a casual way. At the same time, as they represent something big, they have both the everyday rooms and the everyday facilities, so they have actually a house that works for an ordinary life in some way.
But we are not dealing with the king of wings directly, we are dealing with some other English officials, officials who take care of all the buildings, and they are actually our customers. And then suddenly, sometimes we come up with a project that the people need, so then she's just renting her. She's renting first, actually. Yeah, makes perfect sense.
Yeah, it makes sense. So that means that we have to deal with two problems, we have to take care of all the representative qualities and all the policies that a district building have, and at the same time we have to make a function. So it's a modern building and we can live a modern life in the buildings at the same time. Are there any particular technological or perhaps in particular conservation and energy efficiency technologies that you have kind of overseeing the implementation of if there's these updates to these structures to keep them functioning to the needs of a modern tenant?
What are the kind of technologies that specifically in regards to energy conservation that you've seen being implemented in these homes? Oh, yeah, that's a bit difficult because a listed building, you're not able to lift it to a level of energy efficiency that is interesting compared to a modern building. But at the same time, it's the taxpayers who pay all the maintenance of the buildings. So they, of course, are interested that we don't use too much money at a project and don't use too much money on the entities and things like that.
So we're always trying to put a little more installation in a building or we try to screw on the small bottoms. So you can maybe look at the energy consumption and you can turn the small bottom so you always make it more efficient or a cheaper way to use the building. And that might be, well, I think it's interesting too, that when you look at the modern building, you know that it's going to be changed for maybe every 10 years, but a listed building never changed. It's all small things that you can change.
So if you make a balance between the mid years that a listed building has changed, maybe three, four, five hundred years, then it's suddenly a very efficient building in itself because all the bricks are there or the symbol is there, only small changes has been made. So in the big perspective, then actually it's very efficient to have a listed building. So you recently released a book which the English name is the principle of appreciation. So in that book, you're detailing your process, like the actual methods that you use and rely upon to go through different preservation projects.
Could you explain in the context of a particular project that you're working on right now how you go through that process? Yeah, actually the principle was in Windows when we were asked to change the roof on the Queen's Palace and we found out that that's someone for 50 years ago, 100 years ago, that made some changes that actually did work, but it was not the perfect way of dealing with a listed building. It was the simple constructions that have been changed or supported by steel constructions and everyone who is dealing with a listed building is now that this is absolutely forbidden to do something like that. But if we had to change it and go back to the perfect or regional states, then we would use a lot of money.
Instead of that, we said, okay, this wrong thing actually works. So we keep it and we try to maintain the building and to change the roof without going too much back and be too idealistic about the original state. And then we said, okay, this is not the first time but it made a problem like this. We know there's always a certain amount of money.
We know that there's always limits because not only because of money but also because there's people who have some ideas and that's why we have to deal with several different problems that is maybe not always the best for the listed building. But we have actually two ways to do the building. We in the appreciation principle, that is to say, we have to look at the 49th stage of the house, how was it built, what was the idea, the original idea, and then we look at all the changes made during the years. And then we look at the people living there today and what are their claims or their wishes, things like that.
And then we try to combine these. We have a critical attitude to everything and then we make a combination and have a project that is actually combining. If we are able to go back to very close to the original states and at the same time meet actual owners or tenants of a building, then it's wonderful. And if we at the same time can spare some money by accepting some of the changes on the road, then we have a project that will be within the limits of the project and at the same time will straighten the original states of the building.
That's a perfect wish for every project. And Mathias was kind of to send over a kind of outline for what your overall process is in working through these different preservation projects. And one point in particular that struck out to me was nearing the end of the process after you've done a bunch of background research and compiled the different intentions and structural restraints and everything and all the different limitations that will go into the project. There's an incredibly important stage that I think is no American architect would explicitly admit to, which is simply we let the thoughts that we've had rest for a bit and we let it sit in the unconscious as a way, at least Mathias phrase it.
And that's a little bit of that, of course, that makes perfect sense in a way. But at the same time, I'd love for you to explain a little bit more what exactly is the value of that type of thinking of letting an idea rest and what happens in that stage that you then can reap the benefits of later on. What's very funny is that it's actually American advertisers expert that have invented the five principles that I sent. It's a guy called James Whipp Young and he made a deep brother's small book called How to Get Ideas or something like that.
And actually it was very funny because he is working on it, tell that what is important is to do exactly the same, that we do as architects. And the important period is actually the period where you have gathered all you know, all that is needed to know about the building. We gather something about the architect, about the limitations from and all the things we have just mentioned. And then the next period is if you try to push something out of the tube, then it will not succeed.
If you can give it, you can rest a bit, then suddenly the ideas are flowing, you know, when you were standing in the shower or you were walking the dog or whatever you do, then suddenly a good idea might pop up. And this is the way I want to work and actually it's the way we do today. So we are actually able to write the five principles in power for our job in a way that is similar to this advertised guy that broke the principles in the 1950s or 60s in America. That's lovely.
Recently I spoke to an architect who was working on a project for the Milan Expo, the world expo there, to represent the United States Pavilion at that Expo. And of course his client is the US State Department. And of course it's difficult to draw a line between being the architect to represent the client of the US State Department versus the preservation architect for the Danish royalty. However, they're both very obviously very high status clients whose intentions are going to be very highly speculated about and interrogated once the actual architecture comes to be into being.
When we were speaking with this architect who was representing the US at the Milan Expo, he was relating very little individual agency in how not just the design but in the actual ideology of the design, how that was able to come across. And so his design wasn't necessarily able to have that percolation period, have that in stage three where you just sit and let things rest, but it was more like here's a brief and we'd like you to follow it. And I think that in that in summer sex, that gives that's a very clear way for the architect to operate where they know exactly which values they're trying to put forth. However, in your role, the interpretation of that national ideology or that national presence is much more fluid because you're interpreting it through time and through heritage and history.
So, and one of these major topics that all preservation is deal with is how do you decide which values you want to preserve? So what is your and you have such a clear method for all the other options? So how do you approach that question for each project? Well, I think it's very important that it's a little bit like a conductor, a conductor who has to take the betones symphony once again, and he's very fond of the betone, he's very fond of the symphony, the music and everything.
He has the perfect orchestra and then at the same time he has to put something new in it. So you have to deal with the quality of the original artwork and then he has to put himself in the new interpretation of it. And I think that is the thing that's important for us that we have to know a lot and at the same time we have to be at a distance. So we are not that selfish, that we think we are more important than the old buildings we are dealing with, but we don't, it's very important that we are not animals.
So we have a certain approach and we have to give it a twist in some way that is our twist and our interpretation. And that's one thing, the other thing is that it is very funny that when you make advertised or you make a piece of art or you make a piece of architecture, then you have to work with a lot of things that maybe doesn't make sense when you're dealing with it. But at the same time, if you're not working with the problems all the time, then you don't know when, you know, say, when the devil goes by, you don't know, and if he never goes by, it will never be a good product. So that is why this period where you go in the unconscious, that is, you can do it in a conscious manner, that now I'm going from the conscious to the unconscious.
But if you're not aware of these qualities that can come up, then you might not reach the best project. It's a fun thing. So can you imagine doing this type of work for another client for some other international perhaps land? Yes, I think there's something in architecture that's international and it's always important.
It's a way of living, it's a way of the feeling rooms and feeling places. And it's very, actually, I think it's funny when you go around in the world, you can find in different worlds and different cultures, you can find the same quality of a building. And it can be very inspiring to go around and see and enjoy the same qualities that you can do here in Denmark. And actually, there's always the climate to take care of.
And of course, when you were living in Honolulu or something somewhere, other very different from Denmark, then you have to deal with the shadow and the wind instead of dealing with the cold and the lack of flight. But at the same time, when architects are dealing with the climate problems, they always are finding qualities that are the same. It's wonderful to be in half-shadow, all over the world. It's wonderful to have a dry house all over the world and a lot of other purposes, it's very important for people.
What about your own relationship to a kind of national identity? How has that changed as you're continuing to do this kind of work? And I imagine it feels you have a sense of pride to be able to be the kind of holder of this one version or one incarnation of a national identity through its architecture. So do you feel more Danish or less Danish or how does this type of work influence your own sense of national identity?
I think I never feel Danish in some way. I always feel like an architect can work everywhere. And I think that it's very funny to travel in Europe because you will always find some tracks from one architect to the other. The architect in Denmark is very inspired from an architect from France.
Royal Castle, the young urban house is part of the new England style. And if you find the tracks from that, then there's more Berlin, more Sweden, more Denmark in the new England style that is American. But you cannot take a new England house and just put it in Denmark and say, well, this is Danish. You have to change it a little bit, but this architecture has always traveled.
I like how you explain the traveling and the co-influenced factors in the European context. And while I'm not here to make explicit comparison between US and Danish preservation techniques, there is this kind of myopic perspective, a very short-sighted perspective and a lot of American preservation discussions because simply we don't have as long of a national identity or a national history to refer to as a lot of other European nations. And in fact, you see these kind of debates happening in Europe around architectural preservation that have a perspective of, say, geological time. Like, not to say that that's actually how their conceiving of structure is changing, but their perspective is much more capable of taking a long range and looking at both far in the past and far into the future of how the overall architectural history and architectural preservation should be dealt with.
Where in the US, things seem a lot more short-censity and a lot more short-sighted. Like, we have incredible debates around showed or shouldn't this one structure, this one, say, residential building in this one neighborhood that is so-called historic, should it exist because its moldings look like this or should it exist because, in fact, the land it was built on was supposedly protected. And a lot of these debates get incredibly complicated around the interaction with the public because the public becomes a amorphous mass of incredibly diverse stakeholders and different interests trying to represent an either pro or condivate. And there's many different instances that we could refer to in the US, but I don't think it's necessary to hone in on one specific example.
But I just wanted to ask you then, especially working in this national context, what is your interface with the public and how are you trying to or are you not trying to? What is the relationship with interpreting a public's idea of what the architecture should be or why it should be for the future? I think that it's very important that you don't look too long back because the building we are working with for the moment, not only the Queen's parcel, it's actually buildings from the 50s, 1950s, and 1930s that people hated for some years and now we're learning people to love them because there was a very strict idea with the project. And when we're dealing with this type of buildings, we always try to find the original idea.
And if there's a good quality in the architecture, then there's always a original idea. And if you follow that and try to enlighten it and tell people about the ideas, then suddenly people who don't hate over buildings, hate lists of buildings. And owners want to build a new house. They certainly try to, they will pop up loving their buildings.
And I think in the States, there's a lot of buildings when I'm traveling. I'm always traveling to look at architecture and I see a lot of buildings that is very interesting. And some of the buildings, much of the buildings, is actually from the last 100 years. And they were interesting.
And when you're looking in Europe, there's architects traveled to the US, Chicago and other cities around the 1900s and they came back with inspiration. And I think that it's very important that you don't look at the architecture as something that can only be new. But as something that it was given, it was born with an idea. And if you follow the idea, then certainly projects that's buildings will only look a little bit odd or a little bit old or something from last year.
Then you can enlighten them and people will love them because of their original qualities. Sometimes you have to remove something or you have to add something because of functional claims. But at the same time, if you follow the original idea, most people will love them. And interpreting these different projects and doing the research to stage the process.
Do you work with any other particular specialists or say historians or charators or other professionals in interpreting the projects that you're going to work with and then helping you decide how to move forward besides architects? Yeah, with art historians, for instance, art historians was expert in architecture. It's very good to speak with. And the engineers at the same time, when you look at the engineers, they have a history and a dealing with historic engineer project that is very interesting.
So it's not only it's not only architects that could speak with what we speak with everyone. We always try to stand shield by shield when we start a project. We gather that the people who are important for this project, it might be a priest by the engineer, it might be art historian, acoustics, and everyone. And then we invent a project.
So just one more question for you specifically about your book, The Principle of Appreciation. In devoting the book to outlining this process that you have for approaching preservation projects, who did you imagine being the core audience for this book? Were you thinking this would be a way to share your method with architectural peers or as a kind of record as well for yourself to be able to do self studies and have a kind of record of your practice or who you're imagining would be the core audience for this book? Well, my employees for once.
Sometimes you have to write something and say to employees, what is the main idea of the things we're doing here? And how do you have to sync on the project? How do you have to deal with it? And that might be very important to write something down.
And I don't know if they had read it, but of course the first step was my employees. The next step was my colleagues and our customers that maybe they didn't read it, but they know that he's a guy who knows something or he means something or he's there's something he wants a certain perspective that he has. And it's not always the meaning of each sentence, but it's the meaning of someone who has some ideas. And then I've used the last half years and I wrote the book to develop the ideas and to try to combine it with, for instance, this guy, the advertised guy from the 1940s and 50s, James Webb Young, just to make the principle more precise.
And my hope is that at the studio, we could use the principles every day when we started the project. So it's a kind of quality control that we know that we know everything about the project, we know everything about the architect and the limitations and everything. And before we go to developing the idea. So if it was a book for people, you know, I'm a publisher at the same time, and I know that it can be difficult to reach people and to make an angle that people will understand and think this is very interesting.
So it starts somewhere, it starts with some ideas and something that we really want and you really want people to understand. So my employees and myself and then we'll see. So I retract my prior statement saying that that was the last question. I have one more question for you.
What continues to give you inspiration over the course of continuing your preservation practice? I think that the inspiration is always the project. When building is from the 17th or 18th centuries, all is this idea that maybe you were not familiar to the idea. And when you start investigating the project, then you certainly find out that the colors that used was really strange and not as we would do it today.
That's very inspiring to see the combination of colors that might be quite different. And if you follow the house and you follow the original ideas, then there's a lot of inspiration there. And it might be a project from 19th century as well. And again, we have official board of culture.
They are saying yes and no to projects. And they think that the most interesting part of the architecture for the moment is the 1950s and 60s. So I think every time you deal with the historical building, there's a lot of inspiration to find. If you're not only rebuilding, but the time, the ambitions of the architect, the colors, the landscape and everything.
So when you are filled up with all the information about the project, you have seen it and felt it and suddenly the inspiration from yourself from that point of view. Well, yes, thank you so much for sharing your perspective. And it was really wonderful talking to you. Thanks for listening to our one-to-one interview with Jens Betelson, and a special thanks to Matias for helping coordinate the interview.
Donnie LaVoynoff edits the podcast, and Matt Skilling's composed the music. Myself and Paul Petunia are the producers of one-to-one. You can learn more about this week's interview in our show notes and listen to new episodes every Monday. Just to make things clear, we are a separate podcast from our Connect Sessions.
So if you want to keep hearing one-to-one interviews, make sure to subscribe. To keep up with podcasting news from our Connect, follow us on Twitter through at our accessions or hashtag our Connect Sessions. And let us know what you think by rating us on iTunes. You can also email us through connect at arcanect.com.
Thanks again for listening.