OLE SCHEEREN THE ARCHITECT WHO MADE THE BUILDING TELL A STORY

 

OLE SCHEEREN 

THE ARCHITECT WHO MADE THE BUILDING TELL A STORY 

When Architecture Stopped Hiding Its Interior — and Started Performing It to the City 

By Arindam Bose  | Architect / Designer Spotlight | BeEstates Intelligence| Part 20 | AUGUST 2026

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Last in this series found Rem Koolhaas at 81, still reading the metropolitan condition the way a journalist reads a scene — arriving after the fact, deciphering what a city has already done, and writing the theory the buildings were waiting for.

This week it finds the architect who stood next to him while he did it.

Ole Scheeren joined the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam in 1995, at 24. By 2002 he was partner and director of OMA's entire Asian operation — Beijing, Hong Kong, a decade running the most consequential regional practice OMA has ever had. As partner-in-charge, he led the design and thirteen-year realisation of the China Central Television Headquarters, a building so structurally and programmatically radical that it remains, two decades later, one of the small number of buildings that changed what the word "skyscraper" is allowed to mean. He directed OMA's work for Prada in New York and Los Angeles. He co-founded the practice's entire presence in a continent that did not yet have a name for what OMA was about to build there.

In March 2010 he left to found his own studio, Büro Ole Scheeren, and spent the next fifteen years proving that what he had learned at OMA was not Koolhaas's discovery alone. It was a working method — and Scheeren has since built it into pixelated towers in Bangkok, honeycomb-carved twins in Singapore, a vortex-shaped headquarters for the world's largest messaging platform in Shenzhen, and a hybrid auction house folded into the hutongs beside Beijing's Forbidden City.

Koolhaas gave this series architecture as the practice of aggressive reading — the conviction that the metropolitan condition is a text to be deciphered before it is a problem to be solved.

Ole Scheeren gives it something adjacent, and distinctly his own: architecture as the practice of narrative construction. Not reading what the city already says. Writing what the building itself will say — to the people inside it, and to everyone who will never set foot in it but will still, every day, watch it perform.

His own phrase for it, repeated across three decades of interviews, is disarmingly simple:

Form follows fiction.

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THE PARADOX: THE STUDENT WHO TOOK THE MASTER'S THEORY AND MADE IT PHYSICAL

Every architect this series has profiled arrives at a signature move. Koolhaas's was retroactive theory — finding the manifesto already latent in something built, and writing it down so the future would notice. It is, at its core, a literary act performed on buildings that already exist.

Scheeren's move inverts it. He does not wait for the building to exist before he writes its story. He writes the fiction first — the narrative of what a tower, a museum, or a headquarters should mean to the thousands of people who will inhabit and pass it every day — and then engineers a form precise enough to carry that fiction at the scale of steel and concrete.

This is not a semantic distinction. It produces a structurally different kind of building. Koolhaas's Seattle Library asks what a library's spatial organisation should be once books stop being the only medium — an argument built from research into what already changed. Scheeren's CCTV loop asks what it feels like to work inside a television station where every department can see, physically, that it belongs to the same organism — a fiction about solidarity, engineered into a diagrid exoskeleton leaning six degrees off vertical in two directions at once.

Born on 6 January 1971 in Karlsruhe, the son of an architecture and civil engineering professor, Ole Scheeren was colouring in his father's drawings by 14 and had completed his first architectural project by 21. But the formative act of his biography is stranger and more telling than either: as a twenty-year-old, before formal architectural study began, he travelled with a rucksack through rural China and lived among locals for three months. Not a study tour. Not a firm's junior posting. A young German choosing, deliberately, to spend a season inside a spatial and social logic that had nothing to do with the European architectural education he was about to receive.

He studied at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and completed his thesis at the Architectural Association in London — the same hothouse that had produced Koolhaas, Hadid, and a generation of theoretical radicals a decade earlier. His thesis, the "MexT Project," analysed social, territorial, and economic phenomena in relation to space, and won the RIBA Silver Medal in 2000. The subject matter is the tell: even as a student, Scheeren was not analysing buildings. He was analysing what buildings do to the people and economies around them — narrative, before it had a name.

He joined OMA in Rotterdam in 1995 and by 2002 was running its entire Asian practice from Beijing and Hong Kong. For the next eight years, as partner-in-charge, he led the most audacious commission of Koolhaas's career: the China Central Television Headquarters and its companion, the Television Cultural Centre — a project whose construction alone would span thirteen years and reshape how the world's architecture press thought about what a headquarters building could be asked to do.

In 2010, at 39, he left to build his own answer to the question OMA had trained him to ask.

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THE METHOD: FORM FOLLOWS FICTION

Scheeren has described his practice's core conviction in terms that would have been unthinkable to the modernist canon Koolhaas grew up reacting against: "Architecture is a kind of body or stage on which human life can unfold." Beyond mere functionality, he argues, buildings should activate the imagination, fantasy, and emotions of the people who live and work in them.

This produces a recognisable set of formal habits across a portfolio that otherwise refuses to repeat itself. Scheeren's buildings are, again and again, organised around a loop, a spiral, or a carved void — a circulatory device that is never merely decorative, because its entire purpose is to let the building's interior life become visible to the people moving through and around it.

At CCTV, the loop is programmatic: administration, news, production, and broadcasting are stitched into a single continuous circuit so that ten thousand staff experience their work as one organism rather than isolated departments stacked in a conventional tower. At MahaNakhon in Bangkok, the loop becomes a spiral of three-dimensional "pixels" that carves upward through all 77 storeys of the tower, converting what would be a sealed glass shaft into a building that visibly erodes to reveal terraces, balconies, and human activity to the street below. At Tencent Helix in Shenzhen, the loop becomes a vortex — four towers spiralling upward from a shared "Vortex Incubator" that Scheeren has explicitly described as evoking "the DNA of life," a origin myth engineered into a floor plan.

The consistent conviction underneath all of it: a building's interior should not be a secret kept from the city. It should be the city's evidence that the institution inside is alive, connected, and worth watching.

This is where Scheeren's inheritance from Koolhaas is clearest and his departure from Koolhaas is sharpest. Koolhaas reads bigness as a condition to be theorised — the point at which a building's scale exceeds any single architectural idea and becomes, instead, a field of unrelated programmes coexisting under one roof. Scheeren takes bigness and asks it to perform coherence rather than accept incoherence: the loop, the spiral, the vortex are all narrative devices for making an enormous, otherwise fragmented programme legible as a single story with a beginning, an interior, and an ending the public can read from the street.

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THE BUILDINGS: WHERE THE FICTION BECAME ENGINEERING

CCTV Headquarters, Beijing (2012)

Two towers rise from a shared production platform, each leaning roughly six degrees off vertical — not a formal gesture but the visible expression of a diagrid exoskeleton of triangulated steel carrying loads that a conventional vertical tower would route through an internal frame. The towers meet at their base and, seventy-five metres above the ground, at a cantilevered bridge connecting their 234-metre tips — the loop closing in mid-air.

The loop is not sculptural. It is the entire process of television-making — acquisition, scripting, studio production, editing, broadcast, and administration — arranged so that the physical journey through the building mirrors the informational journey of a news story from idea to broadcast. Ten thousand staff work inside a structure engineered so that no department is spatially isolated from the whole. Beijing residents nicknamed it "Big Pants" for its obvious silhouette; Scheeren has said he was interested in what the loop did to the experience of working inside it, not in what it looked like from a taxi. The building won the CTBUH's Best Tall Building Worldwide award in 2013 and remains, in the architectural literature, one of the defining structures of the century's first two decades.

MahaNakhon, Bangkok (2018)

At 314 metres, Thailand's tallest building for two years, MahaNakhon dismantles what Scheeren calls "the traditional formula of an inert and hermetic totem" — the sealed glass tower that gives nothing of its interior life away — and replaces it with a three-dimensional ribbon of pixelated cutaways that spirals the building's full height. What reads from a distance as an unfinished structure, still under construction, is in fact a precise erosion that generates real terraces, balconies, and floating living rooms where the tropical outdoors and the interior merge.

"Even the very top of the tower is surrendered to the public," Scheeren has said, describing the Skytray — a 4.5 by 17.5 metre glass platform that extrudes from the building's summit and floats 300 metres above the city, alongside a public observation deck. The tower's 150,000 square metres also contain 200 Ritz-Carlton residences and a 150-room boutique hotel, but the architectural argument is the pixelated spiral: that a skyscraper's inner life — its human scale, its terraces, its ordinary domestic activity — can be pulled to the surface and shown to the entire city, rather than hidden behind a curtain wall.

The Interlace, Singapore (2013)

Where the conventional Singapore high-rise typology stacks isolated towers in vertical isolation, The Interlace turns the tower horizontal: 31 apartment blocks, each six storeys tall and 70 metres long, stacked in a hexagonal arrangement around eight large courtyards to form what Scheeren calls a vertical village. The 170,000-square-metre development houses 1,040 units and generates 112 percent green area — more landscape than the unbuilt site itself — through roof gardens and terraces layered across the stepped, interlocking blocks.

The narrative argument is explicit in the project's own description: "you live in a courtyard, a space, rather than a building or an object." Circulation is organised around eight distinct courtyards — the Water Park, the Rainforest Spa, the Bamboo Garden — each with its own character, so that residents orient themselves by place and atmosphere rather than by tower number and floor. The World Architecture Festival named it World Building of the Year 2015, praising it as an alternative to the "generic tower clusters" that define most dense Asian residential development — precisely the critique Scheeren has levelled at his own industry for three decades.

DUO, Singapore (2018)

DUO's twin towers — 186 metres of residences and 170 metres of office, hotel, and retail — do not begin as objects. They begin as a subtraction. Six circular and semi-circular plazas were carved from the site first; the towers are simply what remains of the negative space around them, an "urban poché" that co-opts the adjacent Kampong Glam heritage district into its own footprint rather than overwhelming it.

The deep hexagonal grid across the concave facades does double duty as both visual identity and passive climate system: it shades the glazing from direct tropical sun while the concave curvature channels wind through the plazas below to create cooling microclimates — a strategy structurally identical to Shaun Killa's wind-funnelling towers in Bahrain, arrived at independently, on the other side of the Arabian Sea, by an architect working the same physics of tropical urbanism. DUO won the CTBUH Urban Habitat Award in 2021. Scheeren has called it "a tool of reconciliation within an otherwise disparate and fragmented urban context" — architecture as an act of civic repair rather than a real-estate object dropped onto a site.

Guardian Art Center, Beijing (2018)

Commissioned to give China's oldest auction house its first purpose-built headquarters, metres from the Forbidden City, Guardian Art Center resolves what Scheeren calls "the everlasting tension between history and modernity" by refusing to blend the two registers into a compromise. A cluster of grey basalt-stone volumes at the base — perforated with thousands of circular openings abstracted from a fourteenth-century Chinese landscape painting — matches the scale and materiality of the surrounding hutong courtyard houses. Above it floats a ring of oversized glass "bricks," a deliberately inverted symbolism: brick, ordinarily humble and common, scaled up into a glowing crown that announces the modern city without erasing the historic ground it stands on.

At the building's centre, a 1,700-square-metre column-free hall — reconfigurable through movable partitions — hosts exhibitions, auctions, and events with the flexibility of a "cultural event machine," in Scheeren's own description, while two formal auction halls and a basement of conservation facilities anchor the institution's specialist functions. Dozens of prior redevelopment proposals for this site had been rejected by Beijing's planning bureau over two decades before Büro Ole Scheeren's design was approved — a site whose historical weight had defeated every previous attempt to reconcile it with contemporary use.

Tencent Helix, Shenzhen (under construction, expected 2028)

Chosen ahead of an international field that included Herzog & de Meuron, Heatherwick Studio, BIG, Snøhetta, OMA, Kengo Kuma, Zaha Hadid Architects, and Foster + Partners, Tencent Helix will house 23,000 employees of the company behind WeChat's 1.3 billion users across nearly 500,000 square metres — almost twice the footprint of Apple Park.

Four towers of differing heights spiral upward from a shared base in a form Scheeren describes as emerging "from the spiralling movement of a vortex" — the Vortex Incubator at its centre housing a basketball court, climbing wall, gym, and Tencent's internal academy, deliberately evoking, in the architect's words, "the DNA of life." The building's environmental strategy nests inside the same narrative logic that defines its form: the orientation and spacing of the four towers are tuned to accelerate ocean breeze through the central Vortex Garden, cooling the campus passively in Shenzhen's subtropical heat while doubling as stormwater retention landscape — sustainability engineered into the same gesture that generates the architectural fiction of technological growth spiralling outward from a single origin point.

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THE RECKONING: WHAT GRENFELL TAUGHT HIM ABOUT NARRATIVE'S LIMITS

Scheeren's commitment to narrative has never been permitted to override structural honesty — a distinction he made explicit in the aftermath of the June 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London, which killed an estimated 80 people after flammable cladding, added during a cosmetic refurbishment, helped spread the flames.

"This is a tragic example that underlines the fact that architectural intervention should not be limited to surfaces and facades," Scheeren said at the time, arguing that architects must examine "the inherent structural issues of a building" — not merely its stability, but every aspect of how it functions, what safety it provides, and what social quality it delivers. His own response, unveiled the same period, was Riverpark Tower in Frankfurt: the wholesale reconfiguration of a 1970s concrete office block's interior, moving its staircase and lift core to a more fire-safe central position rather than simply re-cladding the exterior, as Grenfell's refurbishment had done.

It is a small but telling data point about where Scheeren draws his own line. Narrative can shape a facade, a spiral, a loop — but it cannot be permitted to substitute for the harder, invisible work of getting the building's fire-safety geometry right underneath the story. This is the same distinction, arrived at independently, that this series' Twin Cities feature drew between the photograph and the safety logic in Raj Rewal's and Bernardo Fort-Brescia's work: the buildings that survive are not the ones whose narrative is most compelling, but the ones whose narrative and structural honesty happen to be the same building.

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THE INDIA MIRROR: WHAT DELHI-NCR AND MUMBAI NEED FROM THE LOOP

India's major residential and mixed-use corridors are not short of scale. The NCR, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, and Bengaluru's tech belt all produce towers and townships at a volume that would be recognisable to any Shenzhen developer. What they are short of, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is the specific discipline Scheeren's portfolio makes explicit: the conviction that a large, mixed programme needs a narrative device — a loop, a courtyard sequence, a connective spine — that makes its scale legible rather than simply large.

The default Indian high-rise typology, like the "isolated individual towers" Scheeren has criticised in pre-DUO Singapore, tends to stack disconnected functions — residential, retail, office — inside a single podium-and-tower silhouette with little internal narrative connecting them. The Interlace's answer — turning the tower horizontal, organising 1,040 units around eight distinct, characterful courtyards rather than a single anonymous lobby — is directly transferable to India's own high-density residential context, where courtyard logic already has five centuries of precedent in Rajasthani havelis and Gujarati step-wells, as this series' fifteenth portrait on Raj Rewal documented in detail. Scheeren's contribution is not the courtyard itself, which Rewal's generation had already proven at Sheikh Sarai and the Asiad Village. It is the insistence that within a single hexagonally stacked mass, each courtyard needs its own distinct identity and atmosphere — a narrative variety that turns wayfinding into a spatial pleasure rather than a signage problem.

DUO's subtractive method — carving public plazas from the buildable envelope before the tower shape is decided, rather than after — offers an equally direct lesson for NCR's commercial corridors, where a landmark brief is typically handed to engineers to survive after the marketing render is already approved. Scheeren's discipline reverses that sequence: define the civic space the tower owes its neighbourhood first, and let the tower be whatever geometry is left over. A Gurugram or Noida commercial tower designed this way begins by asking what plaza, what shaded gathering space, what pedestrian connection the site's context demands — and lets the tower's silhouette be the residue of that civic commitment rather than a pre-decided landmark shape imposed on whatever ground space remains.

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THE TWENTIETH PORTRAIT: ARCHITECTURE AS THE PRACTICE OF NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION

This series has now produced twenty portraits. Rem Koolhaas gave it, last week, architecture as the practice of aggressive reading — the metropolitan condition as a text to be deciphered before it is a problem to be solved. Shaun Killa gave it architecture as pre-conditioned form, the desert's physics answered before the aesthetic argument is made. Raj Rewal and Bernardo Fort-Brescia gave it the geometry of survival. David Chipperfield gave it civic trust.

Ole Scheeren gives this series its twentieth dimension, and its most direct answer to the architect he once worked beside: architecture as the practice of narrative construction.

Not narrative as ornament, applied to a form already resolved by engineering. Narrative as the generative act itself — the conviction that a spiral, a loop, or a carved void is not a stylistic signature but the physical resolution of a story the architect decided the building needed to tell before a single structural calculation was run. Koolhaas found the manifesto Manhattan had already written and made it legible. Scheeren writes the manifesto first, for buildings that do not yet exist, and then spends a decade making sure the steel can carry it.

He was in the room — Koolhaas's room, at OMA, for fifteen years — when the discipline of reading the city as text was being refined into some of the most consequential architecture of the century's turn. He left it to prove that the same discipline, run in reverse, could write buildings the city had not yet learned to ask for.

Form follows fiction.

The fiction, in Scheeren's hands, has to hold a diagrid exoskeleton leaning six degrees off vertical, or a vortex spiralling four towers around 23,000 employees, or a hexagonal grid channelling ocean breeze through six carved plazas in the heart of Singapore. It is never merely told. It is always, eventually, engineered.

That is Ole Scheeren.

— Arindam Bose 

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If Rem Koolhaas showed us architecture as the practice of aggressive reading — the understanding that the metropolitan condition is a text to be deciphered before it is a problem to be solved —

And if Shaun Killa showed us architecture as pre-conditioned form — the conviction that in a hostile climate, a building's shape must be the engineering solution made visible, not a decoration applied after —

Then Ole Scheeren shows us architecture as narrative construction: the conviction that scale becomes legible only when it is given a story to perform, and that the loop, the spiral, and the carved void are not gestures but the physical apparatus through which that story becomes structure.

He learned to read the city from the man who invented the discipline.

He left to write buildings of his own.

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GLOBAL REAL ESTATE INTELLIGENCE — ARCHITECT / DESIGNER SPOTLIGHT 

→Part 20: Ole Scheeren — The Architect Who Made the Building Tell a Story (this piece)

Previous in the Architect / Designer Spotlight Series: 

✅ Shaun Killa — The Architect Who Built the Future Before Asking What It Should Look Like (Part 19, UAE Week) 

✅ Rem Koolhaas — The Architect Who Made the City the Brief (Part 18, Netherlands Week) 

✅ Ralph Erskine — The Architect Who Built Dignity Into the Frost (Sweden Week) 

✅ Sverre Fehn — The Architect Who Listened to the Mountain (Norway Week) 

✅ Carlo Scarpa — The Architect Who Made the Joint a Masterpiece (Italy Week) 

✅ Raj Rewal and Bernardo Fort-Brescia — Two Cities, Two Masters (Twin Cities Week) 

✅ David Chipperfield — The Architect Who Made Permanence a Radical Act 

✅ John Portman — The Architect Who Built a City From the Inside Out 

✅ Smiljan Radić Clarke — The Architect Who Built From the Edge of the World 

✅ Kazuyo Sejima — The Architect Who Made Walls Optional 

✅ Renzo Piano — The Architect Who Taught Buildings to Breathe Light 

✅ Thomas Heatherwick — The Architect Who Tried to Make Buildings Feel Again 

✅ Tatiana Bilbao — The Architect Who Made Geometry a Conversation 

✅ Jeanne Gang — The Architect Who Made Buildings Breathe 

✅ Alejandro Aravena — The Architect Who Built Half and Changed Everything 

✅ Francis Kéré — The Architect Who Built Dignity Before Buildings 

✅ Kengo Kuma — The Architect of Disappearance 

✅ Shigeru Ban — The Architect Who Tore Helplessness Into Building 

✅ Liu Jiakun — The Pritzker Prize Winner Who Turned Architecture Into Humanity 

✅ Bjarke Ingels — The Impossible Made Inevitable

By Arindam Bose  | Architect / Designer Spotlight | BeEstates Intelligence| Part 20 | AUGUST 2026