Clubovka 2024: NORD architects - lecture at SNG

When Johannes Molander Pedersen and Morten Rask Gregersen returned to Copenhagen after their studies in London, their prospects were not promising. In 2002, the construction industry was plagued by a crisis, and aspiring architects saw almost no opportunities to create. However, the difficult start was blessed by improvisation, which led them to organize participatory workshops for local institutions to highlight the social dimension of architecture, a very progressive agenda at the time.
Today, NORD is a multidisciplinary team of urban planners, architects, landscape architects, consultants, and researchers, and besides Denmark, it has footprints in Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, and the USA. Despite its diverse operations and projects of various scales, their motivation remains the same: to design healthy buildings and urban environments with the highest degree of sustainability. Such slogans are not new, but NORD architects have gone further and anchored their systematic efforts into a manifesto of six commandments of humanization and social sustainability, which they rigorously honor in every project. Increasingly, they are addressing assignments related to the care of aging people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease diagnoses. In works like Alzheimer Village in the French town of Dax and the latest Memory Care Center in Philadelphia, NORD architects have applied an innovative program that transforms originally rigid facilities into places filled with natural life, proving that losing one’s identity does not have to be just a passive wait for the impending end.

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