Büro Ole Scheeren Group is an international architecture practice that provides architecture, interior design and urbanism consulting as well as research and project management. With offices in Hong Kong, Beijing, Bangkok, New York, London and Berlin, Buro-OS designs and realizes pioneering building projects and urban developments worldwide.
To date, Ole Scheeren has completed projects with a combined area of more than one million square meters. Our buildings have won numerous awards, including World Building of the Year 2015 and the inaugural CTBUH Urban Habitat Award 2014 for The Interlace in Singapore, the global CTBUH Best Tall Building Award 2013 for the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, as well as the CTBUH Award of Excellence for DUO and MahaNakhon in 2018.
Our projects are prototypes that engage new conceptual possibilities and explicitly manifest how the spaces in which we live and work can be reimagined. We see architecture as a matrix of hybrid narratives from which to construct future realities. From city-defining structures to intimate spaces, our work embodies a rigorous search for new potentials to realize specific and unexpected solutions inhabited by the lives of people and cities.
Recently completed projects include the Guardian Art Center in Beijing, a hybrid arts space and the headquarters for China’s oldest auction house; MahaNakhon Tower in Bangkok, a mixed-use high-rise development that upends the conventional typology of the skyscraper and stands as an emblem of the city’s rising status as a modern metropolis; and DUO, a large-scale development in Singapore which actively engages the surrounding urban space to create a new civic nexus for the city. Further projects under development include Fifteen Fifteen, a sculptural residential tower and a new beacon for downtown Vancouver; Riverpark Tower in Frankfurt, the transformation of an existing office building into an expressive residential high-rise; a major urban redevelopment and super-tall skyscraper in Shenzhen; and Empire City in Ho Chi Minh City, a large-scale Observation Tower complex that presents a symbiotic vision of nature and living in the space of the city.
we like to build
and we believe in reality.
but we also believe in possibilities.
we imagine alternatives
and we rethink the givens.
we search for meaning.
we think of architecture
as a place of habitation
as a social construct
as a space for the life of human beings.
we see beauty in rawness and refinement,
in dematerialization or even monumentality.
we are interested in how architecture creates memories
and how it creates stories.
we are interested in narratives,
in the stories that could be imagined
and that could unfold
within the spaces we create.
design is simply a tool
it is the tool we use in our work,
but it is not our work’s meaning or content.
architecture should connect
the people that inhabit it,
the people that imagine it,
cultures and natures,
technologies and materials,
psychologies and experiences.
we are inspired by complexity.
by its beauty and freedom,
by its subversive nature,
by its inability to be completely defined.
but we are also committed to clarity,
to a strong rationale and logic,
and to a thorough understanding
of whatever is at stake.
we are professionals,
but we question our own assumptions.
we don’t simply tell you what you want to hear,
but we try to identify what you should know.
we do not only observe or analyze,
but we engage and become involved.
and we change our own position
while we change our environment.
architecture is about responsibility
and it requires the fullest commitment
to its realities and its fantasies,
to its demanding and intricate process.
we are partly european
and partly asian.
our minds and experiences
are a hybrid of different cultures
and contexts.
we are interested in what we can learn
and how our own position
creates links between the multiple realities
the world is embedded in.
we engage in an exploration of strategies
rather than the implementation
of predefined methods and matrixes.
knowledge is as important
as the ability to think things anew
and differently.
we believe in our intuition
and we believe in its utmost importance
for everything we do.