The talk focused on Rintala’s workshop-based teaching method that uses real-life scenarios and where decision making is as important as the actual creation of the project.

Rintala said that architecture is a biological need and part of the search for shelter. He said that through the language of shelter, the landscape can be arranged.

The speaker also reviewed his career and gave an account of some projects carried out in workshop sessions with his students, such as small, temporary pavilions and a treehouse hotel.

He also demonstrated that his way of producing architecture is always closely linked to the surroundings, recycling and ecology. He talked about how the surroundings transform his work and said that sometimes the most ecological approach in a given place is not doing anything.

Rintala has been working with his associate, Dagur Eggertsson, at Rintala Eggertsson Architects (Oslo) since 2008. He has also lectured as a professor of Architecture at several universities specializing in art and architecture.

On this occasion, those sitting on the front row were professionals such as Pere Buil (a professor of the 2012 ESARQ Vertical Workshop), Anna Bach (a compatriot of the speaker), Boris Bezan and Hector Mendoza (from a Catalan architectural firm that is currently building a contemporary art museum in Finland), Hector (a professor of Projects and of last year’s Vertical Workshop), Arturo Fedriani, and Josep Ferrando.

Pau Pedragosa, a speaker at the previous ESARQ Forums cycle and a good friend of this year’s speaker, closed the forum. He said, “I’m still drawing the same way I drew when I was young. I haven’t changed, but I’ve strengthened my own way of perceiving and creating architecture”.