What Would Morten Do?

My teacher for 20th Century Danish Architecture is a peculiar man named Morten. If you were acquainted with him, you would know why I use the term “peculiar”; he’s not crazy enough be termed “eccentric” and he’s not unconventional enough to be termed “weird” or “bizarre”. No, there’s nothing particularly strange about Morten— just slightly… off.

It’s something I’ve come to expect from teachers that have anything to do with the arts— architects especially. I’m guessing it has something to do with the way their chosen profession requires them to think and view the world; you know something’s not completely normal in your brain if you can look at a crumpled ball of paper and see a building (Frank Gehry, I’m talking to you…). It's something that has me worrying whether I’m going to end up just as odd as the rest of them after years exposed to the profession (although I suspect it's already started).

The thing about Morten isn’t really anything he does per se, but rather the things he says. He’s one of those people who has somehow managed to absorb an entire encyclopedia into his brain and therefore knows something about everything. Consequently, he’s prone to random tangential, well, not outbursts so much, but rather wanderings.

For instance: he’s telling us about the old Kastrup Airport— a very nice building designed in 1936 by Vilhelm Lauritzen— when he mentions how in the old days, airports used to have grass runways. “How did they maintain them?” he asks us rhetorically. They used to keep sheep on the runway. And when the planes came, the sheep would simply run away. “It was very economical,” he adds jovially, clearly enjoying the mental image of sheep grazing as planes swoop in above them. Meanwhile our entire class is struggling not to burst out laughing.

Morten is also a subscriber to the, as our TA puts it, “As Far as You Can” Rule. Meaning, when visiting a building (or doing anything, really), go as far as you can before getting chucked out. He’s regularly advised us to jump fences and ring doorbells (completely unannounced) of strangers in order to visit good architecture— even if the building is governmental property. He’s a man that seems completely oblivious to trespassing laws. And really, if you talk to him, you are left with the impression that he never believes that anything he does is wrong— not in a scary self-righteous kind of way, but rather in a naïve, child-like way.

There’s really no other way to explain how, some years ago on a school sponsored field study, he wandered right over the perimeter of (what was at the time) a German missile silo, and, instead of being arrested by the guards, somehow wound up having a pleasant and in-depth discussion about the architecture of the building and of the site.

His ability to get out of trouble is so absurd that it has therefore become a running joke within our class to ask ourselves, when faced with a particularly strange or difficult task, “What would Morten do?”