MySpace a place for friends

This profile was established by coincidence - created in order to be able to see a video that showed up to be non-existing. But MySpace looks truly exciting, and I look forward to establish MySpace friendships with people from all over the world and share more about myself, my thoughts, my brushes, my camera, my visions, my antioxidant scanner, and my life in the heart of Copenhagen.

I am an architect, or rather an architectural researcher, studying the relationship between life and form, architecture and man. I live in a little blue house in the very centre of Copenhagen. My house dates from early 19th Century, and the eldest parts of the church across from me came to be back in the beginning of 14th Century. I never tire of exploring this Medieval urban texture with all its layers and traces of human activity through the centuries.

All through my life, ecology and sustainability has been my red thread: the collective awakening to the reality that we have same one world to share with the future. Thus in the early 1980es, I defined my architectural studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts as studies in 'culture ecology'.

In the 1990es, I did a Ph.D.-dissertation, Arbejdets Rum on the relationship between architecture and work, based mainly on Japanese case studies. The full dissertation (in Danish, +500 ill.) is available for download from my homepage. Click the icons below for more information (links will open in new windows).

My aesthetic perspective is deeply inspired from living altogether four years in Japan teaching and studying Japanese gardens, tea and Zen aesthetics. Thus, Kyoto has become my second hometown, and I have spent endless hours contemplating Japanese gardens. As part of the preparations for my Ph.D., I was living for some time in Shinju-an, a 500 year old memorial temple for Zen-master Ikkyu, taking part of daily work and life. In Zen, simple work is considered the ultimate way of meditation. And yes, the daily cleaning of the nine moss gardens of the temple compound did turn out to be a profound meditative experience.

In recent years, I have been working on two major research projects. One of them, Grønne Lunger [Green Lungs], is an investigation into the potential of systematic urban greening in the Medieval part of Copenhagen. After four years, I have just finished the main report. It is available for download from my homepage that can be acessed via the icons below. In the blog section, I am working on a small English introduction.

Green walls are crucially important for the urban quality of life: They are softening and vitalising the environment, protecting the buildings, cleansing the air and lowering CO2 while producing oxygen. They help keeping buildings warm during winter and cool during summer, they add a profound beauty to the urban environment, and in the middle of the urban reality, they reconnect us to the nature that we are all embedded in. Right now I am collecting information on the capacity of plants to absoprp the pollution of ultra-fine particles that have become one the the top urban killers.

My other research project, Lægekunstens Rum, is a project on hospital architecture investigating the potential of architecture to support the healing process. My search for good examples has brought me around the world, but rather than places for healing, hospital settings today are curing factories derived from a highly reductionistic understanding of health and disease, man and universe. In today's world, truly healing places are few.

My readings and analyses of hospitals and places for healing through history are paradigm based. I hope this way to be able to put our present hospital architecture and the underlying inhuman mechanistic 'car repair' model into a proper perspective for changes so strongly needed.

This project has intensified my life-long interest in preventive health, and parallel to this project, I work with Pharmanex BioPhotonic Scanner, measuring antioxidant levels and doing basic nutritional counselling. In my video section, you'll find an introductory video on the Pharmanex BioPhotonic Scanner.

The scanner is a remarkable piece of technology, and in 2005, Pharmanex received a Stevie Award (The business world equivalent to an 'Oscar') for 'Most innovative technology'. By means of a blue laser ray, the scanner is measuring carotenoid concentrations in the skin and this way provides an excellent measure of our total antioxidant status - simple, fast, cheap, and uninvasively. Thus, the scanner is an excellent tool for continued monitoring that our food and nutritional supplements does provide our body a sufficient antioxidant protection. With the scanner, you can easily see how changes in lifestyle, eating habits and nutritional supplementation influences your level of antioxidant protection. Living with the scanner for more than three years by now has made me able to do efficient adjustments to my nutritional habits to the point of almost tripling the antioxidant level in my body.

These years, our understanding of the importance of the complex functioning of the antioxidant network for healthy aging, long-time health and prevention of chronic disease is rapidly growing. And it has become evident that directly or indirectly, oxidative stress is involved in more or less all varieties of chronic disease. Actually I ought to include Dr. Lester Packer, 'The Father of Antioxidants', in my Heroes listing, for his half a century of groundbreaking antioxidant research.

For an architect, a camera is a treasured documentary tool. But ever since I got my first camera more than 25 years ago, parallelly I have been playing with the camera, investigating 'impossible' motifs, capturing with a moving camera eye traces of light from moving motifs. After going digital, especially night photographing has become much more rewarding - and fun. For instance, it has been a true revelation to me how many colours you can dig out from the light of a simple stretch of white neon tubes. I am painting with the lights of night - almost like doing digital calligraphy.

In the column to the left, you find examples from frequent evening strolls in my neighbourhood, Hvidt Lys [White Light], Jorck's Passage, and Beduin Bar (click for pdf-edited series). Below are links to more photo series at Photomax - a wonderful playground for your pictures, where you can store and share up to 5 Mb photos for free.

In the frenzy of modern life, I live a simple yet rich life, with time for reflexion and contemplation - and a stroll in the parks when the sun is out. I belong to the church of no church, and I truly wish for mankind that we came to realisation that God made Man made God - that the myriad of different images of God that we created through history are manmade constructions in an attempt to grasp same one ungraspable reality.

One World. One ...

I hope to meet wonderful people on the way.

And I should very much like to meet people interested in working with the Pharmanex BioPhotonic Scanner as a tool for improving our health. By now, i have held regular consultation sessions around the scanner for 2½ year. We have much fun around the scanner, I can see that it is possible this way to assist people regaining a position of being in copntrol of their health. In case you have interest, please don't hesitate to contact me.