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The making, the shaping is the making.
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The way I see architecture is just a container.
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It's the background for life to take place.
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There is no doubt on that.
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What we make makes us black.
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The soothing voice you just heard belongs to Anubhama Kundu, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary architecture.
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Her practice asks, what we gain when we start to value time, craft, and care, and how we can create more harmonious ways of building and living.
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She's exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and her work has received some of Architecture's highest international honors.
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In this episode, we talk about what has shaped her, how she looks for the spirit in all materials, and why we all need to befriend time.
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Now to me, listening to Anubhama is almost like a philosophical meditation.
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So I encouraged you to just take the time, slow down, lean back, and enjoy.
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My name is Veronica D'Souza.
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Welcome to What Shapes.
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It is the biggest honor and pleasure to have you here in this orange studio.
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Thank you for having me.
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Great to talk to you as always.
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So I am curious if you have a moment or an experience where you kind of first fell in love with architecture.
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There wasn't a particular moment, but once I decided to study architecture, it felt like it was the most obvious thing.
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What gave me joy or what always drew me was what I did with my hands, you know, like knitting, embroidery, anything, you know, just doing any kind of craft painting.
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I loved painting watercolors.
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And every time you engage with your hands, even if you're just fiddling in a restaurant waiting for someone with a napkin, you made something out of it, or you folded uh something, you know, time passes and in the end there's an object that you made.
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And then for long later you think about or you see what you did actually.
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So my entry into uh design and even architecture was actually the making of things and not so much the thinking about it and then making it.
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The making, the shaping is the making.
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And through that, I just realized wider expansions of what can be done with that skill set.
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What do you think has shaped how you look at the world and how you exercise your practice?
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The biggest driving force is my aspiration.
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Beauty, you know, beauty and looking for beauty in everything uh has of course shaped me because beauty spontaneously like l uplifts me.
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And uh it's not something that goes via the mind.
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You just see a beautiful flower just opening, or you just see some dew drops in it, and whatever physics is going on with the light and the rainbow.
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It's just so spontaneous, the the upliftment.
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So I'm I'm de definitely shaped by beauty and sometimes a lack of beauty, you know, the uh the ugly experiences make you I realized as a child when I felt um suffering, I realized if you just try to zoom in or zoom out in some different scale there is a beauty.
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And I and so the aspirations, I think my aspirations that came out of this kind of experiences with with joy and suffering, they and how to navigate that has shaped me because it's a question of the perception and what you can therefore envision.
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So, yeah, a lot of maybe philosophical words there, but I think what has shaped me is uh my thoughts and also negatively sometimes, you know.
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You realize that the thoughts you think and then uh shape you, and then we start being vigilant about the not so good thoughts which crystallize into maybe not such good belief systems, that we can just sh shake them off, you know.
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And it's easy to shake them off when you start realizing that these thoughts are not necessarily your own, you know.
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So if you just try to de dis delink the self from that, those thoughts that pass through your mind.
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And so that kind of uh inner gaze, you know, has shaped me.
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And it uh it has the thoughts on one hand, being aware, not actively thinking, just being aware if those thoughts which drive us are really ought to be in the driving seat.
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The other thing that shaped me is the making, the hands.
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That has always been a good thing.
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There is no doubt on that.
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What we make makes us back.
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Thoughts and acts.
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Can you talk about a project you've been part of creating where you experimented, of course, with both the hands, the craft, and that kind of beauty that taught you something?
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So when I I would like to talk about Wallhouse, which is my own house.
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Um that I see my own house not in the sense of ownership, but the fact that there wasn't a client whose needs I had to satisfy.
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So architecture, for me, the way I see architecture is just the container.
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It's the it's it's it's the background for life to take place.
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And uh, like they say, you know, that the function of the pot lies in its nothingness.
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So it's the nothingness that we have to create and materials have to come together to hold that void.
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So when I had to when I built that house, and I used to live live in a thatch hut before that for at least 10 years, I think.
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So um it was an opportunity to um do everything very consciously and to understand that the materials have contained so much more capacity um than we know about it.
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So I was able to go into that materiality experimentation and delving into what else this those materials that are lying around us in plenty, not looking for precious things.
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Look what is in absolute abundance, just lying around.
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There was mostly earth.
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And I started noticing how ancestors had um learned to fire that earth into bricks and make it waterproof, and how my opinions um on my thoughts on bricks um were quite limited when I I uh based on whatever we were we were taught, you know, in in architecture school in the industrial, post-industrial age, you know, and you were looking at brick as the modular object, you know, like the the the efficient way of producing.
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But then bricks had a much longer life.
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It's the first manufactured material.
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And you see, even the Romans and even, I mean, all over, you know, our ancestors have used brick in a very free way beyond its form and orthogonality.
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They used them uh to uh make nice edges and inside of the its thickness, all kinds of materials could be thrown in.
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And they there is a beauty, you know, in in that humble kind of not not lavish in the in the daily utility of it.
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There was so much wisdom.
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And uh I think uh so brick brick intrigued me because it's the alchemy of how earth, water, fire, air have to come together to transform this uh uh the earth lying around us to become waterproof.
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And so I I had a chance to really uh go deep into it and produce something which made me sort of, you know, celebrate the brick itself made out of local the local brick, which is it used to be much cheaper than the the factory-made one.
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We work we thought these were the bad bricks, and then there were those proper factory bricks that are stronger.
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So through the making of this house, I realized that the good brick is the bad brick and the bad brick is the good brick when you think about the environmental and energy impact of things.
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So I try to celebrate this discovery and love for this material, its timelessness, but also to celebrate the hands that have engaged with it in each and every step until the masonry was done.
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So yeah, this this this house uh demonstrated having the purity of pursuing architecture without uh so many requirements, deadlines, budgets, and so on, liberating myself from those pressures and just letting it flow and become what it wants to become.
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How did you do the celebration of each step as you talk about with the brick?
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And why was that important?
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For me, materials are not like a banal thing, you know, and the material is separate from the spirit.
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For me, the spirit gets revealed in the material.
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It's not the material I'm chasing.
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I'm ch I was chasing to reveal the spirit of the material.
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All these universal forces, like say the law of gravity, these are all invisible.
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And the gravity force may be vertical uh and make us do orthogonal things, but actually when you have a roof span or you have to span something, gravity doesn't act on that material.
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It it it it makes the thing bend.
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That's called the bending moment in engineering.
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So it's if you take a chain and hang it, it's not just the chain, but it's revealing the shape of how gravity acts on it.
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For me, all that is invisible, because you're talking about shape, that shape is called catenary curve.
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Materials, for me, they reveal the underlying invisible laws, you know.
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And I I feel it's so exciting if you could allow the material to also enjoy, I mean, to be expressed that purely.
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So it's the honesty that uh that I was trying to celebrate.
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And the the there are strengths and vulnerabilities, and you can reveal both.
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Are there some materials that you refuse to work with?
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No, I would never.
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I would I don't refuse anything.
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Because everything is possible and exists, should be explored.
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I think for me it's m not about this material or that.
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It's about how much of anything.
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The material I love is the local material.
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Whatever is there is the material.
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And natural or can it be anything because what is everything is just made, you know, through energy and so the question is all how much.
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You know, there are in today's world, I know it's very popular if I would say I come here and say, I hate plastic, I hate uh what else is bad?
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Uh concrete.
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Yeah.
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So it's very nice for people who are s uh able to this is all again what I told you about, you know.
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I worry about these narratives of highly opinionated, you know, saying people are so highly opinionated without knowing the math and the facts of everything.
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You know, because it just makes it popular because it's more of a herd mentality than a true opinion, half of the opinions.
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How would we, without plastic, navigate COVID and all that, you know?
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There are places in the world that, you know, there's gonna be disaster relief requirement, there's flooding.
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How can I hate cement, you know?
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And by the way, cement is not only that Portland cement, that we may be manufacturing it in a good way or maybe in a bad way, or making each and every park bench out of cement.
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You know, that is the question.
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You know, but cement is some it's a genius thing invented, but even before that, cement is the action of bring putting something together.
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So even lime is a form of cement.
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So there are natural and not so natural for every glue, for everything.
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And in the end, humans are using putting it.
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We have to be aware that energy, the difference between natural materials and manufactured materials, like brick.
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No?
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Even brick is a manufactured material.
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It's it energy goes into it, whether it's cement, aluminum, whatever.
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Energy goes into it, a raw material.
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All materials come from the earth.
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Whether it's wood, whether they grow, whether they're alive or they are dead, who knows if they are dead, even stones.
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We don't know, really.
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They they may be inert to some things, but they also change and keep forming.
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So there's some kind of life going on.
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All these materials have their properties, and humans have added energy to them to make their properties to uh or to amplify something or to make to create new things with that, in that alchemy.
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And energy is an input and waste is an output, and those become materials to be also managed then.
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You did this exhibition at Louisiana about time.
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And it was very beautiful.
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And you talk about time.
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Why is why is that so important to you, Anupama?
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Like what what does time mean to you?
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Time it is eternal or it's running out.
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These are concepts.
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It's not a given, you know.
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Some people uh it's relative, like, oh, it sounds like Einstein.
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Suddenly I realize.
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But in the sense that some people feel how much is how much time is a lot of time, you know?
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Everything you can't speak anything about it because it's all about how the person is, you know, trying to squeeze a lot of activities in a given time or it's these are just notions.
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The reason I spoke about it is because in our times I found that there is a narrative, underlying narrative, which I don't subscribe to that I wanted to make a point about.
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Uh because I I have my own way to deal with time and matters to do with time, including calendar and making time for what matters, you know.
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In fact, on my WhatsApp uh thing it says, there is time for what matters.
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Is what I what I I like to feel this quality that I feel I'm I'm rich because I have time at my disposal because I can always choose to prioritize what matters more.
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And so but I have seen increasingly um in the profession and also as a professor, because I have to deal with uh students, and I see that there is a a kind of narrative that is being, you know, taken as an assumption, you know, that time is money.
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Like whenever you need something to be better made, or you need to some where where you know, okay, this could have been much more clever.
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Then you say, no, but that would cost us another couple of human hours.
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I didn't agree with this perspective of time is money.
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I thought it was a flawed concept floated in the times of industrialization and all these capital drivers of, you know, and the way economy is being explained, you know, that uh, you know, that I think scarcity mindset, you know, of of trying to, yeah, to to cut back on things that people like doing.
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And then the creativity has to be extracted and things have to get mechanical and repeated so that people have to hate their jobs and all those things.
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And I felt, and especially for the for the from the economic angle, I think that that that is a flawed idea because actually when people work, I mean, I'm talking about craft and all that is that we love, that is being uh we are make being made to feel that it's a luxury we don't cannot afford to have, that we can have another human being giving their attention and care that it's impossible to pay for.
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But I wanted to float instead, um I wanted to discuss that aspect, you know, that that is a flawed idea.
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Because I think on the contrary, the people and their work, the work that people put in creates value, and that value is what is capital, whether it's in not equally in everybody's hands or whatever, that's a question about capital.
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But in whichever situation we are, time we even if you have only one hour, let's say eight hours are booked in an oppressive job or whatever it is, time is your only resource that is truly your own that you can do something with.
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And time is a vehicle to to do everything, including every little action, small and big.
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Because each action will shape the next create the track for other things.
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So I think the first thing to take back is time, to get your time on your hands and to not feel like you're running out of time and to see, think that, okay, to to pull down that argument, I ask myself, if we are supposed to save time of people, where did that time go?
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Why are people more stressed?
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Where did all that time go that you saved?
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You know, are we a are the buildings better?
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Are the more beautiful?
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Have we created more beautiful cities?
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Are are people now with the free time that they can do other things and devote it?
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It's so good because time for me is like a friend, you know.
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I have tried to befriend time.
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That, hey, don't make me under pressure, you know?
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You should be like surfing or you know, just let it flow like float on the time.
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Like just try to have a good time also.
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And one very good when it's very hard in the beginning, one of the things I ask people to do who ask me this question is just like th just first of all stop doing what you hate.
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Whenever you hate something, just stop.
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Don't do it.
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It will find a way out.
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It's an indicator, you know, it's not making you feel well.
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Don't do it.
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Find organize some other way around it.
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There's no need.
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Our life is so short, why should we fill it up with things we don't like to do?
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That's how you gain time.
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You're always an oracle to me, Anupama.
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We start somewhere, we go somewhere else.
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I want to ask you if you have a desire or a dream for something you really want to shape.
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I yes, actually, I would love to do a co-housing project.
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Because I believe that there is a way of living in beauty, you know, where the architecture supports you to slow down and make your life long.
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And instead of having friction, just through the architecture, you can create conditions for harmony between people.
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And that's why I like the idea of co-housing, because there is a way to live together which is not in that old model of, you know, nuclear families, the husband and wife and the bedroom for the children and the whatever apartments provide.
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There's a way, and of course in Copenhagen there's so many examples of co-housing anyway.
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But I think there is really a way of architecture that I imagine always where the individual each individual can have this very good contact with themselves, have spaces for that, contact with others because each individual, it's not that there are social places and individual needs, every person needs both.
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So how can you design that that person's daily experience where where the the the in the social noisy, lively will not come will not c have a conflict with the quieter, solitude, it etcetera?
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So everybody needs everything.
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So I think architecture can navigate that.
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So contact to oneself, contact to others, but also contact to the world at large, you know, to see a patch of sky, the to walk on the bare earth without shoes, you know, on a daily basis, you know.
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And with architecture that is porous, where you know, not sealed, where if you cut a section, you the air in my lungs is continuous with the rest of the uh different temperatures everywhere, but no walls.
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Everything is breathing.
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And there is a way to do it.
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I I imagine that way.
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And I would like to live with others who are ready in such a situation.
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Where should it be?
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Should we do it in Copenhagen?
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Because Copenhagen has such a long history of co-housing and I think for the wealthy countries I've seen people um I love to come here because I I I think there is there is a sense of progress and wealth but it's not at the cost of the kind of intimate c encounters you see people having or there is a very uh personal quality to a lot of things that a lot of big cities don't have uh don't seem to hold on to.
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I'm glad to experience it like that.
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I think some of the things we're known for in the Nordics in general is that it takes more time to connect with strangers.
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When you do, I think people are very open, but there can be moments of withholding.
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And so I think there could be a lot of benefits to create an architecture of belonging.
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Do you have something that you think you know has been a meaningful truth to you or something you've taken with you or collected along your way that you maybe can share with us and maybe it finds resonance in someone else?
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What I would like to share is a kind of realization that a lot of our disturbances or conflicts have to do with you know our experiences and our words sometimes being in conflict, you know you know like um it was spoken at the previous program that I just attended where you know people ask you through storytelling how to sell an object, you know, or how to market, you know, something.
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And what I would like to say is that I think that the stories we tell ourselves and each other are very, very potent but they're also the the zone of manipulation to some extent, you know.
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So I feel I would like to share with the listeners, you know, that I realize that to value my experience more when the body responds to something, when you cringe, when you feel just you feel like goosebumps or you feel you know actually.
00:24:25.039 --> 00:24:34.319
So I think uh I would like in this age in which we are spreading stories around and cross-pollinating everything.
00:24:34.559 --> 00:25:00.799
I think it's good to be rooted in our own deep experience in our body to be grounded and listen to the experience and to feel and encourage that authenticity to grow and to to recognize this experience and to let that be an indicator you know of uh which stories are helping and or harming us is what I would like to share.
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This podcast hosted by Veronica D'Souza was recorded live in Copenhagen during three days of design 2026 Denmark's official design festival thanks for listening.
00:25:14.480 --> 00:25:18.240
See you in Copenhagen June 9th to 11th 2027
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The making, the shaping is the making.
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The way I see architecture is just a container.
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It's the background for life to take place.
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There is no doubt on that.
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What we make makes us black.
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The soothing voice you just heard belongs to Anubhama Kundu, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary architecture.
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Her practice asks, what we gain when we start to value time, craft, and care, and how we can create more harmonious ways of building and living.
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She's exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and her work has received some of Architecture's highest international honors.
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In this episode, we talk about what has shaped her, how she looks for the spirit in all materials, and why we all need to befriend time.
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Now to me, listening to Anubhama is almost like a philosophical meditation.
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So I encouraged you to just take the time, slow down, lean back, and enjoy.
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My name is Veronica D'Souza.
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Welcome to What Shapes.
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It is the biggest honor and pleasure to have you here in this orange studio.
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Thank you for having me.
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Great to talk to you as always.
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So I am curious if you have a moment or an experience where you kind of first fell in love with architecture.
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There wasn't a particular moment, but once I decided to study architecture, it felt like it was the most obvious thing.
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What gave me joy or what always drew me was what I did with my hands, you know, like knitting, embroidery, anything, you know, just doing any kind of craft painting.
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I loved painting watercolors.
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And every time you engage with your hands, even if you're just fiddling in a restaurant waiting for someone with a napkin, you made something out of it, or you folded uh something, you know, time passes and in the end there's an object that you made.
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And then for long later you think about or you see what you did actually.
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So my entry into uh design and even architecture was actually the making of things and not so much the thinking about it and then making it.
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The making, the shaping is the making.
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And through that, I just realized wider expansions of what can be done with that skill set.
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What do you think has shaped how you look at the world and how you exercise your practice?
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The biggest driving force is my aspiration.
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Beauty, you know, beauty and looking for beauty in everything uh has of course shaped me because beauty spontaneously like l uplifts me.
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And uh it's not something that goes via the mind.
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You just see a beautiful flower just opening, or you just see some dew drops in it, and whatever physics is going on with the light and the rainbow.
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It's just so spontaneous, the the upliftment.
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So I'm I'm de definitely shaped by beauty and sometimes a lack of beauty, you know, the uh the ugly experiences make you I realized as a child when I felt um suffering, I realized if you just try to zoom in or zoom out in some different scale there is a beauty.
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And I and so the aspirations, I think my aspirations that came out of this kind of experiences with with joy and suffering, they and how to navigate that has shaped me because it's a question of the perception and what you can therefore envision.
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So, yeah, a lot of maybe philosophical words there, but I think what has shaped me is uh my thoughts and also negatively sometimes, you know.
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You realize that the thoughts you think and then uh shape you, and then we start being vigilant about the not so good thoughts which crystallize into maybe not such good belief systems, that we can just sh shake them off, you know.
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And it's easy to shake them off when you start realizing that these thoughts are not necessarily your own, you know.
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So if you just try to de dis delink the self from that, those thoughts that pass through your mind.
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And so that kind of uh inner gaze, you know, has shaped me.
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And it uh it has the thoughts on one hand, being aware, not actively thinking, just being aware if those thoughts which drive us are really ought to be in the driving seat.
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The other thing that shaped me is the making, the hands.
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That has always been a good thing.
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There is no doubt on that.
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What we make makes us back.
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Thoughts and acts.
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Can you talk about a project you've been part of creating where you experimented, of course, with both the hands, the craft, and that kind of beauty that taught you something?
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So when I I would like to talk about Wallhouse, which is my own house.
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Um that I see my own house not in the sense of ownership, but the fact that there wasn't a client whose needs I had to satisfy.
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So architecture, for me, the way I see architecture is just the container.
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It's the it's it's it's the background for life to take place.
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And uh, like they say, you know, that the function of the pot lies in its nothingness.
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So it's the nothingness that we have to create and materials have to come together to hold that void.
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So when I had to when I built that house, and I used to live live in a thatch hut before that for at least 10 years, I think.
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So um it was an opportunity to um do everything very consciously and to understand that the materials have contained so much more capacity um than we know about it.
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So I was able to go into that materiality experimentation and delving into what else this those materials that are lying around us in plenty, not looking for precious things.
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Look what is in absolute abundance, just lying around.
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There was mostly earth.
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And I started noticing how ancestors had um learned to fire that earth into bricks and make it waterproof, and how my opinions um on my thoughts on bricks um were quite limited when I I uh based on whatever we were we were taught, you know, in in architecture school in the industrial, post-industrial age, you know, and you were looking at brick as the modular object, you know, like the the the efficient way of producing.
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But then bricks had a much longer life.
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It's the first manufactured material.
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And you see, even the Romans and even, I mean, all over, you know, our ancestors have used brick in a very free way beyond its form and orthogonality.
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They used them uh to uh make nice edges and inside of the its thickness, all kinds of materials could be thrown in.
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And they there is a beauty, you know, in in that humble kind of not not lavish in the in the daily utility of it.
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There was so much wisdom.
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And uh I think uh so brick brick intrigued me because it's the alchemy of how earth, water, fire, air have to come together to transform this uh uh the earth lying around us to become waterproof.
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And so I I had a chance to really uh go deep into it and produce something which made me sort of, you know, celebrate the brick itself made out of local the local brick, which is it used to be much cheaper than the the factory-made one.
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We work we thought these were the bad bricks, and then there were those proper factory bricks that are stronger.
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So through the making of this house, I realized that the good brick is the bad brick and the bad brick is the good brick when you think about the environmental and energy impact of things.
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So I try to celebrate this discovery and love for this material, its timelessness, but also to celebrate the hands that have engaged with it in each and every step until the masonry was done.
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So yeah, this this this house uh demonstrated having the purity of pursuing architecture without uh so many requirements, deadlines, budgets, and so on, liberating myself from those pressures and just letting it flow and become what it wants to become.
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How did you do the celebration of each step as you talk about with the brick?
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And why was that important?
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For me, materials are not like a banal thing, you know, and the material is separate from the spirit.
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For me, the spirit gets revealed in the material.
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It's not the material I'm chasing.
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I'm ch I was chasing to reveal the spirit of the material.
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All these universal forces, like say the law of gravity, these are all invisible.
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And the gravity force may be vertical uh and make us do orthogonal things, but actually when you have a roof span or you have to span something, gravity doesn't act on that material.
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It it it it makes the thing bend.
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That's called the bending moment in engineering.
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So it's if you take a chain and hang it, it's not just the chain, but it's revealing the shape of how gravity acts on it.
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For me, all that is invisible, because you're talking about shape, that shape is called catenary curve.
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Materials, for me, they reveal the underlying invisible laws, you know.
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And I I feel it's so exciting if you could allow the material to also enjoy, I mean, to be expressed that purely.
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So it's the honesty that uh that I was trying to celebrate.
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And the the there are strengths and vulnerabilities, and you can reveal both.
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Are there some materials that you refuse to work with?
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No, I would never.
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I would I don't refuse anything.
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Because everything is possible and exists, should be explored.
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I think for me it's m not about this material or that.
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It's about how much of anything.
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The material I love is the local material.
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Whatever is there is the material.
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And natural or can it be anything because what is everything is just made, you know, through energy and so the question is all how much.
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You know, there are in today's world, I know it's very popular if I would say I come here and say, I hate plastic, I hate uh what else is bad?
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Uh concrete.
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Yeah.
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So it's very nice for people who are s uh able to this is all again what I told you about, you know.
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I worry about these narratives of highly opinionated, you know, saying people are so highly opinionated without knowing the math and the facts of everything.
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You know, because it just makes it popular because it's more of a herd mentality than a true opinion, half of the opinions.
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How would we, without plastic, navigate COVID and all that, you know?
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There are places in the world that, you know, there's gonna be disaster relief requirement, there's flooding.
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How can I hate cement, you know?
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And by the way, cement is not only that Portland cement, that we may be manufacturing it in a good way or maybe in a bad way, or making each and every park bench out of cement.
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You know, that is the question.
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You know, but cement is some it's a genius thing invented, but even before that, cement is the action of bring putting something together.
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So even lime is a form of cement.
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So there are natural and not so natural for every glue, for everything.
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And in the end, humans are using putting it.
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We have to be aware that energy, the difference between natural materials and manufactured materials, like brick.
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No?
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Even brick is a manufactured material.
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It's it energy goes into it, whether it's cement, aluminum, whatever.
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Energy goes into it, a raw material.
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All materials come from the earth.
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Whether it's wood, whether they grow, whether they're alive or they are dead, who knows if they are dead, even stones.
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We don't know, really.
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They they may be inert to some things, but they also change and keep forming.
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So there's some kind of life going on.
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All these materials have their properties, and humans have added energy to them to make their properties to uh or to amplify something or to make to create new things with that, in that alchemy.
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And energy is an input and waste is an output, and those become materials to be also managed then.
00:14:04.080 --> 00:14:07.840
You did this exhibition at Louisiana about time.
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And it was very beautiful.
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And you talk about time.
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Why is why is that so important to you, Anupama?
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Like what what does time mean to you?
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Time it is eternal or it's running out.
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These are concepts.
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It's not a given, you know.
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Some people uh it's relative, like, oh, it sounds like Einstein.
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Suddenly I realize.
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But in the sense that some people feel how much is how much time is a lot of time, you know?
00:14:34.159 --> 00:14:45.679
Everything you can't speak anything about it because it's all about how the person is, you know, trying to squeeze a lot of activities in a given time or it's these are just notions.
00:14:45.919 --> 00:14:57.519
The reason I spoke about it is because in our times I found that there is a narrative, underlying narrative, which I don't subscribe to that I wanted to make a point about.
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Uh because I I have my own way to deal with time and matters to do with time, including calendar and making time for what matters, you know.
00:15:07.519 --> 00:15:12.639
In fact, on my WhatsApp uh thing it says, there is time for what matters.
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Is what I what I I like to feel this quality that I feel I'm I'm rich because I have time at my disposal because I can always choose to prioritize what matters more.
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And so but I have seen increasingly um in the profession and also as a professor, because I have to deal with uh students, and I see that there is a a kind of narrative that is being, you know, taken as an assumption, you know, that time is money.
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Like whenever you need something to be better made, or you need to some where where you know, okay, this could have been much more clever.
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Then you say, no, but that would cost us another couple of human hours.
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I didn't agree with this perspective of time is money.
00:16:07.519 --> 00:16:28.320
I thought it was a flawed concept floated in the times of industrialization and all these capital drivers of, you know, and the way economy is being explained, you know, that uh, you know, that I think scarcity mindset, you know, of of trying to, yeah, to to cut back on things that people like doing.
00:16:28.559 --> 00:16:37.200
And then the creativity has to be extracted and things have to get mechanical and repeated so that people have to hate their jobs and all those things.
00:16:37.360 --> 00:17:04.720
And I felt, and especially for the for the from the economic angle, I think that that that is a flawed idea because actually when people work, I mean, I'm talking about craft and all that is that we love, that is being uh we are make being made to feel that it's a luxury we don't cannot afford to have, that we can have another human being giving their attention and care that it's impossible to pay for.
00:17:05.039 --> 00:17:12.880
But I wanted to float instead, um I wanted to discuss that aspect, you know, that that is a flawed idea.
00:17:13.119 --> 00:17:27.279
Because I think on the contrary, the people and their work, the work that people put in creates value, and that value is what is capital, whether it's in not equally in everybody's hands or whatever, that's a question about capital.
00:17:27.599 --> 00:17:43.440
But in whichever situation we are, time we even if you have only one hour, let's say eight hours are booked in an oppressive job or whatever it is, time is your only resource that is truly your own that you can do something with.
00:17:43.680 --> 00:17:49.759
And time is a vehicle to to do everything, including every little action, small and big.
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Because each action will shape the next create the track for other things.
00:17:56.640 --> 00:18:16.400
So I think the first thing to take back is time, to get your time on your hands and to not feel like you're running out of time and to see, think that, okay, to to pull down that argument, I ask myself, if we are supposed to save time of people, where did that time go?
00:18:16.559 --> 00:18:17.839
Why are people more stressed?
00:18:18.000 --> 00:18:20.079
Where did all that time go that you saved?
00:18:20.240 --> 00:18:23.680
You know, are we a are the buildings better?
00:18:23.839 --> 00:18:25.039
Are the more beautiful?
00:18:25.200 --> 00:18:26.880
Have we created more beautiful cities?
00:18:26.960 --> 00:18:31.039
Are are people now with the free time that they can do other things and devote it?
00:18:31.200 --> 00:18:34.319
It's so good because time for me is like a friend, you know.
00:18:34.480 --> 00:18:36.799
I have tried to befriend time.
00:18:37.519 --> 00:18:41.200
That, hey, don't make me under pressure, you know?
00:18:41.440 --> 00:18:46.880
You should be like surfing or you know, just let it flow like float on the time.
00:18:46.960 --> 00:18:51.599
Like just try to have a good time also.
00:18:51.680 --> 00:19:02.720
And one very good when it's very hard in the beginning, one of the things I ask people to do who ask me this question is just like th just first of all stop doing what you hate.
00:19:02.960 --> 00:19:05.200
Whenever you hate something, just stop.
00:19:05.359 --> 00:19:06.000
Don't do it.
00:19:06.160 --> 00:19:07.359
It will find a way out.
00:19:07.519 --> 00:19:10.480
It's an indicator, you know, it's not making you feel well.
00:19:10.720 --> 00:19:11.359
Don't do it.
00:19:11.519 --> 00:19:14.160
Find organize some other way around it.
00:19:14.319 --> 00:19:15.039
There's no need.
00:19:15.200 --> 00:19:19.839
Our life is so short, why should we fill it up with things we don't like to do?
00:19:20.000 --> 00:19:21.039
That's how you gain time.
00:19:21.359 --> 00:19:24.000
You're always an oracle to me, Anupama.
00:19:24.240 --> 00:19:26.319
We start somewhere, we go somewhere else.
00:19:26.559 --> 00:19:34.880
I want to ask you if you have a desire or a dream for something you really want to shape.
00:19:35.119 --> 00:19:39.599
I yes, actually, I would love to do a co-housing project.
00:19:39.920 --> 00:19:48.960
Because I believe that there is a way of living in beauty, you know, where the architecture supports you to slow down and make your life long.
00:19:49.039 --> 00:19:55.599
And instead of having friction, just through the architecture, you can create conditions for harmony between people.
00:19:55.759 --> 00:20:16.799
And that's why I like the idea of co-housing, because there is a way to live together which is not in that old model of, you know, nuclear families, the husband and wife and the bedroom for the children and the whatever apartments provide.
00:20:17.039 --> 00:20:21.680
There's a way, and of course in Copenhagen there's so many examples of co-housing anyway.
00:20:21.920 --> 00:20:49.200
But I think there is really a way of architecture that I imagine always where the individual each individual can have this very good contact with themselves, have spaces for that, contact with others because each individual, it's not that there are social places and individual needs, every person needs both.
00:20:49.839 --> 00:21:07.200
So how can you design that that person's daily experience where where the the the in the social noisy, lively will not come will not c have a conflict with the quieter, solitude, it etcetera?
00:21:07.359 --> 00:21:08.799
So everybody needs everything.
00:21:09.119 --> 00:21:11.279
So I think architecture can navigate that.
00:21:11.440 --> 00:21:26.079
So contact to oneself, contact to others, but also contact to the world at large, you know, to see a patch of sky, the to walk on the bare earth without shoes, you know, on a daily basis, you know.
00:21:26.240 --> 00:21:42.799
And with architecture that is porous, where you know, not sealed, where if you cut a section, you the air in my lungs is continuous with the rest of the uh different temperatures everywhere, but no walls.
00:21:43.039 --> 00:21:44.559
Everything is breathing.
00:21:44.799 --> 00:21:46.240
And there is a way to do it.
00:21:46.319 --> 00:21:48.000
I I imagine that way.
00:21:48.160 --> 00:21:52.799
And I would like to live with others who are ready in such a situation.
00:21:54.480 --> 00:21:55.039
Where should it be?
00:21:55.119 --> 00:21:56.559
Should we do it in Copenhagen?
00:21:57.440 --> 00:22:34.880
Because Copenhagen has such a long history of co-housing and I think for the wealthy countries I've seen people um I love to come here because I I I think there is there is a sense of progress and wealth but it's not at the cost of the kind of intimate c encounters you see people having or there is a very uh personal quality to a lot of things that a lot of big cities don't have uh don't seem to hold on to.
00:22:35.200 --> 00:22:36.880
I'm glad to experience it like that.
00:22:37.039 --> 00:22:45.599
I think some of the things we're known for in the Nordics in general is that it takes more time to connect with strangers.
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When you do, I think people are very open, but there can be moments of withholding.
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And so I think there could be a lot of benefits to create an architecture of belonging.
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Do you have something that you think you know has been a meaningful truth to you or something you've taken with you or collected along your way that you maybe can share with us and maybe it finds resonance in someone else?
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What I would like to share is a kind of realization that a lot of our disturbances or conflicts have to do with you know our experiences and our words sometimes being in conflict, you know you know like um it was spoken at the previous program that I just attended where you know people ask you through storytelling how to sell an object, you know, or how to market, you know, something.
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And what I would like to say is that I think that the stories we tell ourselves and each other are very, very potent but they're also the the zone of manipulation to some extent, you know.
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So I feel I would like to share with the listeners, you know, that I realize that to value my experience more when the body responds to something, when you cringe, when you feel just you feel like goosebumps or you feel you know actually.
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So I think uh I would like in this age in which we are spreading stories around and cross-pollinating everything.
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I think it's good to be rooted in our own deep experience in our body to be grounded and listen to the experience and to feel and encourage that authenticity to grow and to to recognize this experience and to let that be an indicator you know of uh which stories are helping and or harming us is what I would like to share.
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This podcast hosted by Veronica D'Souza was recorded live in Copenhagen during three days of design 2026 Denmark's official design festival thanks for listening.
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See you in Copenhagen June 9th to 11th 2027
