Hans Ulrich Obrist – My last question, Olafur, is one I’ve asked you many times before: what is your favorite unrealized project?
Olafur Eliasson – I would like to build a museum–to reevaluate the nature of a museum and build it from scratch, not renovate an old one. It should be both an art school and a museum and in between the two there should perhaps be a little hotel–a place where people come and spend time.
HUO – A relay?
OE – Yes, and maybe the rooms themselves will be the artworks. Maybe the way people end up spending time in the hotel rooms will be what the students do and the museum shows. Maybe the life in this building is what, from a museological point of view, will be the performative element. And the building itself is just the form — it’s a content machine.
HUO – Ah, yes–another vessel! This is our vessel interview, and that should be part of the title.
OE – A vessel interview–it’s its own vehicle.
HUO – Thank you so much.
from “The vessel interview, part II: NetJets flight from Dubrovnik to Berlin, June 2007”, published in Olafur Eliasson & Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Conversation Series: Vol. 13 [also in pdf: part II]
Especially interesting since Olafur was just coming off a soon-to-be-unrealized renovation of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington.
Also, I would like to see this blanket of which they speak, Skyblue versus landscape green, the one NetJets Europe commissioned from Olafur in 2005 in exchange for use of the plane.