Mapping Utopia

The liminal space between analog and digital, natural and manmade, is fertile ground for Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, collectively known as DRIFT. Throughout the past 17 years, the art duo have honed a dynamic visual language that captures their endless fascination with the universe. Kinetic sculptures that flicker, swarm, and hover offer new insights into the mechanics of everything from starlings to dandelions to a Volkswagen Beetle to a vintage Nintendo. The latter is an original work for Family Style and a continuation of their “Materialism” series, in which the studio reduces everyday objects to material states in the form of minimal cubes. A pencil, for instance, becomes a large block of wood, a medium block of graphite, and a small block of yellow paint. Across their oeuvre, man-made artifacts are animated to cosmic ends. A concrete block hovers in the air and seemingly defies gravity in Drifter, 2017. In Meadow, 2017, mechanical flowers open and close in perpetual bloom. Drones swarm the sky like a flock of birds in Franchise Freedom, 2017. For their ongoing series “Fragile Future,” dandelion seeds glow with LED lights. With every venture, technology begets nature, and confrontation leads to contemplation.

The DRIFT co-founders have a kindred spirit in their friend and collaborator Bjarke Ingels, who shares their belief in a holistic approach to the question of nature versus
technology—as well as their distaste for rigid dogmas. The Danish architect built his innovative design practice around big-picture, environmentally friendly solutions within urban structures that are both playful and visually striking. Through Bjarke Ingels Group (B.I.G.), he has built a waste-to-energy plant with a ski slope on the roof, a museum that resembles stacked LEGO bricks, a series of public swimming areas in the harbor of Copenhagen, and a sustainable skyscraper with a coil-like interior in New York City aptly dubbed The Spiral. Together, the trio are part of a new wave of free-thinking innovators who understand that the way forward is constantly questioning the world.

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Bjarke Ingels: I walked around The Spiral yesterday, and ended up at your installation Meadow, facing the park. It’s an exquisite example of one of the hallmarks of your work: You look at the world, find experiences in nature and then use technology to produce similar sensations. That’s something that I pursue in my own practice as well.

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Lonneke Gordijn: We first met at Burning Man in 2018. We hadn’t seen each other’s work yet, but we ended up in a kind of interview-lecture together. It was a big year for both of us. Your floating silver sphere [the Orb, 2018] was the highlight of the festival. It was such an iconic piece, and it was amazing how you pulled that off.

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BI: That was the same year that I saw your swarm of drones [Franchise Freedom]. I looked up and saw this amazingly beautiful swarm of starlings that were actually drones. It was terrifying, and it was beautiful. It was a magnification of the idea that out of many, you can create one, and still have attributes of each individual. At the end of the day, it’s not just the tools that you work with—and we’re in the age of technology where everybody is capable of producing similar effects. The big question becomes: What are you going to do with these tools? It is the human aspect of the artist that remains essential. You just get to play on a new canvas with new pigments.

“Light is moving. Sound is moving. A heart is moving. Life is movement. We’re always trying to move towards that balance we have in our mind, but that balance is constantly shifting.”
— Lonneke Gordijn

LG: What we are researching is life. When does something start to become alive? And when is it dead? We are currently working on a project in which we explore what utopia and dystopia are. We came to the conclusion that dystopia is a setting where there is so much meaningless information coming towards you that it fills up your head, and there’s no space anymore to think or feel. In our utopia there is space for all the different individual energies, like a swarm. You don’t feel limited. You don’t feel overwhelmed with a lot of information. There is a free-flowing possibility. The drone form that you’re referring to from 2018 is actually the system of our utopia. It’s the thought behind it: collectively having a call with completely different individuals with different ideas, but still being able to listen to each other and coexist. It’s a symbiotic relationship.

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Ralph Nauta: Bjarke, what I really appreciate about you and your studio is that there is no project that you’re unwilling to look at. You do these massive projects, but there are still very subtle movements and gestures. They aren’t loud like Frank Gehry buildings, but still do have that same artistic quality. You merge the sculptural power with the usability of a building in a very beautiful way that feels, for me, almost like nature in these urban landscapes.

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BI: I like it when our buildings end up looking interesting because they perform in an interesting way. For instance in our studio in Copenhagen—where you installed the five jellyfish-like lights, Shylight [2006]—every floor is connected to the outside. This creates the possibility of walking from the park on the ground to the garden on the roof. At first glance it looks like a very serious building, but then you realize that it is actually very playful and sculptural. It is expressive but also functional. The two opposites can be part of the same.

RN: They don’t fight each other. The building is in harmony.

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BI: The art of architecture is the art of accommodation. The goal is not a building. The goal is to maximize the unfolding of the life of all species.

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RN: It’s also interesting that throughout history, the rigid mindsets, the sets of rules that people try to follow because they believe they are the most efficient, most logical forms—they never work.

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LG: There is a risk with every new formula. We are always trying to find a way to freedom. Once we think we have the way, it becomes a rigid truth, and we get entangled again. We constantly need to keep on finding our way through to keep afloat.

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RN: At this moment, any artistic form of expression that counters what is being forced upon us is very important. We need to keep the conversation open so we can manifest a free future instead of this pre-programmed future that the large corporations want us to believe in.

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BI: One of the fallacies of any kind of ideology is once you believe that your truth is the only truth, there is no room for dialogue. That’s when you start justifying the means with the end and start doing things that you know are wrong. When I was younger, I always expected that when I grew up, at some point I would arrive at an understanding: This is how it is. The disappointment and the joy is that I don’t think I will ever arrive, and therefore I will never get the easy answers. The good news is that the adventure continues.

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LG: We need to keep moving.

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BI: Equilibrium is not a static balance. It’s a dynamic state. Even when the line-dancer appears to be standing still, they are constantly shifting their center of gravity, and I think that’s a great picture of what life is.

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LG: Even electricity is constantly moving. Light is moving. Sound is moving. A heart is moving. Life is movement. We’re always trying to move towards that balance we have in our mind, but that balance is constantly shifting. I think that’s why we work with technology, because with technology we can activate something.

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RN: Even in a static building, you can create a sense of movement, an idea of how to function and how to bring people together within a space—as you did fantastically in B.I.G.’s new office. Also, we’re talking about the mind. You can stay young by constantly re-visiting the same questions. Nothing is a stalemate. Everything is flowing. The reason we started with “Materialism” is this fascination for the world. We want to understand how everything is made. Take something as abundant as a Volkswagen Beetle: You can take it apart and learn from it. Then that’s already a decade of trying to understand the poetry of a combustion engine and how the whole system keeps itself in balance. The world is endlessly fascinating. I don’t think we’ll ever have enough time to dive into all our personal interests. Maybe that’s why certain creative people connect, because we share that endless urge to research the things we find interesting.

BI: Your “Materialism” series is a great demonstration of the power of design to almost blow life into inanimate matter. It has this ability to animate materials with intent, sensibility, usability, function, and beauty.

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RN: “Materialism” comes from this idea: How can you be bored in the world, or in life, when there’s so much to discover? How can you not ask yourself questions? So, we started taking apart all the objects we surround ourselves with, trying to understand the ever-more complicated world we live in. What is their actual value, and how do they impact society? For this magazine, the theme is Objects of Affection, so we took apart the Nintendo 8-bit, which was released in Japan in 1983. It was a revolution in computer gaming with its crazy graphics and in-game soundtracks, becoming a global phenomenon as kids around the world wanted nothing more than to play the endless amount of well-designed, high-skill video games. Myself included! I was playing Mega Man until the early hours. To this day it remains an object of affection for millions of kids around the world. In a material sense, when you disassemble these objects, you can reduce them to their core materials. This allows you to trace where these materials come from and understand their influence on the world.

LG: What is important is to first understand the whole scope of how this world operates, how things are made, how our environment is built up. The materials we use, where do they actually come from? How are these conflicts on the other side of the world related to the iPhone in our hands?

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BI: Harbour Bath, our project in Copenhagen [completed in 2018], extended the life of the city into the water, because the water had become so clean that you could swim in it. We call this phenomenon hedonistic sustainability, where a sustainable city is not just better for the environment but also better for the life of the people living in it. People often see hedonism and sustainability as opposites, but why not actually see them as the same? It would be more lovely and enjoyable and fun to live in a more sustainable city where you can swim in the port instead of driving for hours, right?

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As we move ahead in the discussion of sustainable solutions, we must try to avoid rigid dogmas and simple slogans. At B.I.G., in pursuit of what we believe to be a sustainable future, we are working with a startup in America that wants to deliver nuclear power plants—and I grew up in the ’70s in Denmark with fears of nuclear power. Now, what was once the symbol of anti-environment may be today’s answer to the energy transition. The important thing is to have patience to actually understand things.

“You can stay young by constantly re-visiting the same questions. Nothing is stalemate. Everything is flowing.”
— Ralph Nauta

RN: I couldn’t agree more. In this sustainable-truth war that we are in, instead of just repeating what everybody is telling us, we should look critically in the mirror and ask the right questions. One large topic that needs to be addressed before anything else is nuclear power. It has a stigma to it, of course, as nuclear power plants are linked to nuclear weapons, but they are two completely different things. In this day and age if you build a nuclear plant, it’s the safest, cleanest method of energy production.

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BI: These issues require patience and a willingness to listen and learn. The only way we can effectively act towards stabilizing climate change is to put our hard-baked truths aside, and maybe also put the traditional left and right wing opinions aside. The environment is the ultimate unifier.

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LG: The question of sustainability and feeling nature in your environment are linked. When you are connected with nature—not only with your brain, but your body— then you will think differently about things. I think that is a very important lesson that we have learned, and recreated through all our different artworks. We learn more and more about natural environments, and also unnatural environments where we use moving artworks to implement a form of connection with the outdoors. Personally, I live on a houseboat here in the middle of Amsterdam’s city center. Every morning when I wake up, I look at the water, and I see the energy of the day. In the water, you see the translation of the air, the lights, and what direction the wind is coming from. Being in touch with these elements is very important, and you can lose it very easily in a city. We need to be very mindful in creating environments where all these elements are present. With every iteration of creating our environment, we learn about how we can be better people and make better decisions.

RN: This morning, I was walking barefoot in the garden with my 3-year-old son. I’m trying to do that every morning: to touch the grass and be grounded. It’s an information flow that you have to have with your surroundings. It’s a very dark and downward spiral if you are not constantly reminding yourself to connect to the living forces around you. I think that is one of our most important missions and something that connects us to B.I.G. because I see it in the architecture.

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BI: It’s funny, actually the other day we had a snowstorm in New York, so Darwin [Ingels’ son] and I ended up running out on the roof garden, barefoot in the snow. One thing that you both mentioned is the physical; and what I love about your work is that even though you are incredibly savvy, you are always committed to the physical manifestation. It would be so easy just to go straight to the software to produce beautiful images, but to go through the hardship of making physical art, especially sophisticated, choreographed movement with physical things: It is incredibly tedious and difficult. That’s why I think you end up making an impact on a completely different level. It’s not just an idea or an image, but it has a tactile presence.

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LG: The physicality allows for a communication between the audience and the object. We fuel the environment with movements. Physicality is very important. You can visualize every idea in a 3-D environment or in an A.I. engine, but information through a screen is so different; it stays here. It doesn’t come to the body. We’ve tried various approaches to digital artworks, and we are still trying, but it just doesn’t land further down than here.