Bjarke Ingels

Bjarke Ingels (born 2 October 1974) is a Danish architect, founder and creative partner of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).

Quotes

Yes is More (2010)

: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution, Bjarke Ingels Group

Historically the field of architecture has been dominated by two opposing extremes. ...[A]n avant-garde of wild ideas, often so detached from reality that they fail to become... other than eccentric curiosities. On the other side... well-organized corporate consultants that build... boring boxes of high standard. Architecture seems entrenched between two... unfertile fronts: either naively utopian or petrifyingly pragmatic. ...BIG operates in the fertile overlap between ...opposites. A pragmatic utopian architecture... creation of socially, economically and environmentally perfect places as a practical objective.

Architecture is never triggered by a single event... conceived by a single mind... shaped by a single hand.

Ideas migrate, structures grow and concepts develop in a form of architectural evolution.

It is through improvisation and adaptation to unanticipated obstacles that we make our biggest breakthroughs.

Sustainable ideas crystallize through an immensity of wasted efforts. ...Good ideas are sometimes resurrected from fossils of past evolutions.

The work an architect gets to realize... is the result of random opportunities and chance. ...We have to respond to accidental challenges, through opportunistic improvisation, mutation and migration of ideas. ...Often the story we tell is ...post-rationalization or hindsight.

What if we could focus on examples where sustainability... increases the quality of life? Where a sustainable life isn't pain—but pleasure!

What if we didn't have to adapt our lifestyle to sustainability, but adjusted our sustainable designs to the way we want to live? Instead of trying to change people, we could change the world.

We need a new manifesto for hedonistic sustainability!

Architecture is most appealing with simple lines and clear ideas. A city... becomes alive when it is rich with experiences and surprises. So the paradoxical challenge is to... create simplicity and variety, difference and coherence... a city in the building.

We are preparing to start phase one of our most significant project... the first carbon neutral island in Central Asia. ...BIG has become a sort of urban laboratory where we develop prototypes, breed species and evolve ideas that will... add to the topography of Zira... [and] the ecosystem of Azerbaijan.

Bjarke Ingels Lecture (Jan 27, 2020)

A lecture by Bjarke Ingels, founding partner of Copenhagen, New York, London and Barcelona - based Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) with response by Amale Andraos, Dean of Columbia GSAPP Sources: 1) Columbia GSAPP 2) YouTube Columbia GSAPP channel A Creative Commons Attribution License

Starting with the smallest project that we have created... but maybe also one of the most complex. This is René Redzepi... he pioneered the... regionalistic cuisine with his restaurant Noma... in Copenhagen...Noma is short for Nordic food, "Nordic smell" in Danish. He... rediscovered the Nordic landscapes, the flora and fauna of Nordic nature... to see how those plants and... animals could... be seen as ... a cuisine that's been dominated by French and Asian cuisine. ...[W]here we ...aligned with him was ...this idea that healthy could also be incredibly delicious. We have this notion... hedonistic sustainability, that sustainable can... be more enjoyable. Sustainable cities, sustainable buildings can be more enjoyable, not just good for the environment, but also great for the people living there. He's... done that to food.
- Ref: noma

He came to us because he wanted to move his restaurant... to... Christiania, this kind of hippie commune in Copenhagen. It's part of the old fortification... a historical landmark... The hippies invaded in 1969 and never left. You can buy mild drugs openly... The main part of the building is an old... mine storage. ...We thought the city was going to give us a medal for trying to make it nice, but the city had this attitude that as long as it was only deteriorating organically, everything was fine... [A]s soon as we started trying to repair it, everything was incredibly restricted.

René... was not only going to be regionalistic. It was also going to be seasonal, so... New Year to April, everything from the sea, because everything else is dead... so... seaweed and seafood and anything that can be fermented or pickled. May to September, vegetable season... the October to January, game and forest, so... venison, berries and roots. ...His idea is ...rediscovering traditional Nordic elements. ...[T]he context ...this ...self-built hippie commune in the old Navy yards. This is... what... traditional Nordic villages look like... Even though Scandinavians like to dress in black they like to paint their houses in bright colors... [W]here the southern Europeans push them together to create urbanity, in the Arctics, in the Nordics, they're... spread apart... [O]ur... inspiration came from this... typical Nordic farm... an accumulation of individual houses, each... built for its own purpose... for the main family, for the children as the family and the generations grow... for the potatoes, for the animals, for the workshop...

[W]e could only place buildings in the footprints of where there had been buildings in the past... a very limited repertoire.

Pine can't be outside untreated so René and his chefs, we were so behind on opening day... the chefs with their crème brûlée torches treating the outside against the elements... [T]he torched wood makes it capable of being outdoors.

The lounge... fireplace... is... traditional Danish red brick, and to make it bright on the inside... a white clay brick...

The grill, the barbecue is... a cross-ventilated chimney so... chefs can stand... as cold as possible with the fire...

[T]rying to... take the entire sensibility and... philosophy of René and noma and trying to create a portraiture or capture the essence... the architectural equivalent of what René has created, and a powerful manifestation of this... urban ecology... in the middle of Copenhagen, but the honey is made there, most of the ingredients...

A radically different example of hedonistic sustainability and urban ecology... that we spent the last nine years making... [T]his is the cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world.

Denmark has become a... pioneer in... that only 4% of our waste goes into a landfill, 42% is recycled and 54% is transformed into district heating and electricity. As a power source, 6 pounds of garbage from your kitchens turns into 4 hours of electricity and 5 hours of domestic heating.

[W]hat was mesmerizing... was this... marvel of modern engineering... was going to be the cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world. No toxins coming out of the chimney. So we thought maybe a mountain of trash could become an actual mountain. Our nearest ski slope... is 6 hours away in Isaberg... Sweden... We could put 2/3 of Isaberg's main slope on the roof of the power plant, and so we did. ...The kind of cliff face of the mountain is made out of these gigantic folded raw aluminum bricks that are... planters. ...Raw aluminum so they... reflect the surroundings, so... the building changes color over the course of the day. ...The entire power plant is ...daylit. 50% of the facade is transparent. ...This spring it's going to open the tallest climbing wall in the world, 300 feet. ...[T]he roof is maybe the most exciting facade. ...[T]he skiing is ...free. It's a public park. If you want to use the lift system, you have to buy a lift pass. It's... designed to... help spread vegetation to the surrounding... post-industrial area. You have hiking paths, different... activity zones. You have... vegetation that changes over the... season. There's more than 400 different trees. ...It's purely indigenous species. If Denmark had mountains this is probably what they would look like. ...[T]he entire roof park has been made for a budget of... $13 million dollars... absurdly inexpensive so everything has... been done with... the least... maintenance and... acquisition cost. ...Maybe the most important material, because Denmark doesn't have enough snow so... we found this Italian company that makes this... mat that has the same friction as a groomed slope. The only problem was that it was... ugly. Also because of the thermal expansion and contraction it had to be split in... 7x7 foot squares. So we sat down... with the company and... managed to develop a... new product... by joining every two circles [holes in the material] in two... directions... This... simple geometric invention... now the standard product of the company, meant that we could have a continuous surface on the... roof... We color-coded it so that the brighter the slope... the less likely... to crash... [E]ventually the grass grows through... [T]he grass... holds the mat to the roof, so eventually it's going to be like skiing on an alpine meadow. ...What is amazing ...it ...shows this ...world-changing power of architecture ...[M]y son is ...never going to remember that there was a time when you couldn't ski on the power plant in Copenhagen ...[F]or him and his entire generation, that's going to be their normal ...the starting point from where they start having crazy ideas about their future. ...A landmark for this ...idea of hedonistic sustainability, that a sustainable city can also be, not just better for the environment, but better for the people living there.
- Ref: 1) Amager Bakke 2) Isaberg ski resort

[T]his... relationship between the pragmatic and the utopian, or... the utilitarian and the social. One such example... This is where the Granville bridge touches downtown Vancouver. We got invited to look at turning it into a mostly residential and also educational development. So we just started mapping the constraints. There are setbacks from the streets... from the bridges. The city has a rule that you cannot build residences closer than 30 meters, or a hundred feet to the traffic on the bridge. There's a park where we're not supposed to cast any shadows, and finally we were left with this tiny triangular footprint, almost too small to build. So... we started thinking... If the purpose of the 100 ft setback is a minimum distance, once we get a hundred feet up in the air we can grow the building back, so... the triangular footprint... turns into a rectangle. ...[W]hen you drive over Granville bridge it's... as if someone is pulling a curtain aside, welcoming you to Vancouver.

[U]nderneath the bridge we worked with a series of local artists. You have... a university in these two triangular buildings... wedged between the legs of the bridge... Rodney Graham proposed to... turn one of his video art works into a giant urban art work with this gigantic chandelier that... twice a day it... drops and spins dramatically... above the main street... [O]nce open the entire underside is going to turn into... the "Sistine Chapel of Street Art"... trying to turn the otherwise negative impact of the bridge into a positive. So that what ends up looking like this... surreal silhouette is... like a... precise analysis in response to a very difficult... urban situation. It is... one of the most striking places in Vancouver. ...[T]his is an example of... social infrastructure, the idea that infrastructure can have positive social and environmental side effects.

Almost the opposite, if a bridge can turn into an art museum upside-down the opposite could also be true. A project we did in the same space of time... is a project for a small art museum and sculpture park in Norway... [W]e could... place the sculptures on either side of the river. There's an old historical mill, and we could place the museum anywhere we wanted... [O]ur proposal was to turn it into the bridge that turns the entire complex of parks on either side into one single loop. The museum has two galleries. One [is] daylit galleries with views over the water and one... more vertical... enclosed gallery. The transition from one to the other becomes this... distortion, a 90° rotation... [W]e had this idea that the museum could be seen as one of the biggest sculptures in the sculpture park. ...[O]nce we started getting more intimate with how to make it span its 250 ft... column-free span... The cross sections are incredibly rational, like a series of rotated rectangles... The raw structure had... this... Eiffel Tower aesthetic that wasn't... what we were looking for. It looked more... muscular than the... effortlessness that we had fantasized... So we tried to imagine how could we finish the building... [T]he idea became... taking a lot of... standard elements, standard aluminum profiles on the outside, standard wooden sticks on the inside, and... shift them... slightly so it's... traditional, conventional... structure. In the joinery of the wood we... resolve all of the... technical installations. ...[L]ike very classic ...Norwegian wood carpentry ...creating this ...precise, complex geometry... a hyperbolic paraboloid. As the floor turns into the wall it reveals a gap that... becomes the ventilation, the sprinklings, the light installations, the security. Everything that makes it a contemporary art museum is also integrated in this... rectilinear logic. So even though you see curves and arches everywhere, every... element... is completely straight. ...Somehow ...trying to hack the ...conventional, traditional building techniques ...to create something ...extraordinary, out of the ordinary... [T]he skylight zips and turns the more vertical part of the building into ...completely introverted ...[O]n the outside this... extruded aluminum facade that you put on... warehouses, so... the most conventional, traditional... barn... put together in a way that it describes this... acrobatic geometry. ...[T]he irony is that we spent the same amount of time on this building as we did on the power plant, and it ...shows how undiscriminating you are as an architect with... your time... trying to make a building, a small art gallery over a river, or trying to turn a power plant into a ski slope. ...[F]rom the other side it has this ...even more abstract ...sculptural quality that ...makes it like one of the sculptures in the sculpture park. ...Another example of... this idea of social infrastructure that one thing can also be the other, that something cultural can also be infrastructural and vice virsa.
- Ref: Kistefos Museum and Sculpture Park

Event though we come to each project with a... consistent attitude... so much is discovered in the process... conditions are always so different... What you have to respond to is so different that it ends up creating... different vocabularies.

An almost invisible building is... a bunker museum on the west coast of Denmark. It's... a giant nature reserve... The only exception is this old German bunker... from the Second World War, a gun turret, a gun was delivered from Krupp in Germany and was supposed to be installed on September 9, 1945... and next to it inside the dunes, we were asked to make a museum telling the story... {B]ecause it's an entirely listed landscape, our proposal became to make these... precise incisions and almost imagine the opposite of the bunker. If the bunker is a heavy artifact in the dunes, the museum this... light absence as you slice through the sand, the sand becomes concrete and you have this square, entirely transparent, bringing daylight deep into this... underground museum. You descend into this narrative of the Second World War, the occupation of Denmark, using only materials that are already found in the bunker, so the concrete, the raw iron, the raw wood solving all of the... technical installations for the museography in the tectonics of the concrete work so that all technique: all sprinkling, all lighting, all hanging is done within the tectonics of the formwork. Daylight being sucked in so that even though you are underground it feels... light and airy, almost the opposite of the bunker... [F]rom here an umbilical cord takes you deep into a bunker where you can... explore what's left as this... giant artifact from the Second World War. So you can say, almost like a disappearing act, and the discretion becomes... the most characteristic of what makes the building stand out and... also makes it disappear.

[T]here's the thing about architects... part of the pleasure of the profession and... often we talk so much about the social... or the environmental agenda, or whatever, and then there's also just... the pure thrill of making something... as nice as you can possibly get away with...

This is a site not too dissimilar from the other... not depicting the story of the Second World War but... the cradle of watchmaking in Switzerland. It's where Audemars and Piguet started making watches 150 years ago... I never had much of an interest... until I went to visit their workshop, invited to make this proposal for a small... competition, and I met this... master watchmaker... [H]e made me aware... that today we're so used to the divorce between hardware and software. Between... form and content, that the hardware is... this neutral, always identical and it's the software that gives... attribute... character and use. But in watchmaking and... architecture the hardware is... the software. It's the geometry and the interlocking of gears... materials, and... spaces that makes the clockwork... and the building work. ...[T]hey had this idea of a linear chronological exhibition, but that you should be able to... dig through and make shortcuts, so we... coiled the chronology into this... double spiral that leads to a central gallery in the middle, and then unwinds again. The roof follows the slope of the landscape bringing daylight and views deep into the floor plate. ...This resource spirál, which is the element inside the watch, that makes it store kinetic energy and... tick. There's not a single column in the entire building. It's as if a spiral is floating above you. The glass is... load-bearing. ...[O]ne of the elements of watchmaking is to provide the maximum impact with a minimum of material, skeletonization, minimization... is all about reducing the amount of material... [Y]ou can...look over the shoulders of some of the expert watchmakers, and ask them questions while they're trying to put very small things together... [A]t any time you can jump from one part of the chronology to the other. So you have this... surreal experience where the entire roof seems to be hovering over your head. You enter from the existing historical building and enter into the spiral. It's this... Minergie, environmentally high performing building, so we needed to provide passive sun shading and develop... undulating ribbons of brass, but have the effect that from the angle of the sun, they're opaque, but when you look at them straight from the inside they're entirely transparent, almost to the point where they... disappear... [F]or any architect who dreams about potentially doing something that is close to a perfectly built building, working in Switzerland where practically everybody is a watchmaker at heart, for watchmakers, is as good as it gets. ...[W]e've never seen concrete... metalwork or glasswork like this. ...[A] building for the pure thrill of celebrating the craftsmanship of watchmaking, and of architecture.

[A] last smaller building before we escalate is a cultural institution which just opened in Bordeaux... bringing three different cultural institutions together in a new building: a library, a media tech, a performance space, and a contemporary art center. The art gallery's on the top to... access skylights, and connected by a shared lobby on the waterfront of the Garonne... and... the library and the theater creating the two pillars. The art museum [is] the bridge to enclose a big public [outdoor] room. The... building finished in prefabricated concrete. You can... see that the French invented steel reinforced concrete because they are so incredibly good at it. Also the sand in the south of France is so insanely beautiful. That's why Unité d'habitation in Marseille is maybe the only truly beautiful of the unités that Le Corbusier did, because of the quality of the sand. ...[T]he three institutions enclosing this giant outdoor urban room, where the... institutions, but also the city itself can invade. On the inside it's... 150,000 sq ft building with a $40 million dollar budget... so we had this... positive side-effect that all the finishes inside are... insanely raw. It's... concrete in different shades. ...The most important part of the building is what's not there. ...Even the furniture is cast out of concrete, some of it tiled. ...The ballerinas can look out at the square and vice versa. ...The theater ...this mosaic of tarred wood, hot-rolled steel and black concrete to create the perfect... acoustic mix, and finally this... art barn at the top and a sculptural park... [I]n this very... simple building... the main gesture... providing this... new shaded and covered outdoor space for the cultural life of the city.

[E]scalating in scale and impact, one project is... for a new baseball stadium for the Oakland A's. ...[S]tadia ...these ...massive venues in a giant sea of parking that are only active a few days a year, baseball more than any other sport, roughly a hundred in a year... {W]e thought what if this new stadium could... be... the cultural foundation for the city? What if we could bring the ball park back into the park? ...[B]aseball started in parks and... at some point a guy got the idea to build a fence around the park and charge [for] tickets. So we thought, what if we could... bring the park back, so instead of this... enclosed stadium, what if the main concourse was... Main Street? ...[B]ecause baseball is an asymmetrical sport with the outfield, what if the entire stadium could open up to the city and the water and the views? ...[I]magine as the roof dips down it... becomes... Oakland equivalent of the High Line, a public park that is part of the experience of the game, but 250 days of the year it's... a park for the citizens... [I]magine that 365 days a year this is part of the enjoyable space of this new neighborhood. ...[N]ormally the seats that are the furthest away from the game would be the lousiest. Her they have this amazing experience of... being a part of the park... so... that a hundred days a year they shut down access to the park, like if you have a concert in Central Park, and it becomes part of the spectator experience. All the restaurants and cafes open up to the park. ...[T]he other days they open up to the park so you can... have a coffee... So you have this... connection from the inside to the out. Above... the running track on game day is part of the circulation, and on a non-game day it's part of the experience of living in Oakland. The same for the pinic lawn... [T[he stadium doesn't become this... massive... empty white elephant, a kind of void in the city, it... becomes a... bringer of life and energy into a new neighborhood... [B]ecause of the... asymmetry in extreme you have this... incredible view out over the port towards San Francisco... For the facade we wanted to spend as little money for the enclosure as possible... [W]e need to provide some shelter from the wind, so we came up with this idea of this... louvered structure... facing the predominant direction of the wind... {W]here we have the concessions... the circulation, we need to provide wind protection so it... becomes this series of scarfs wrapped around the building... providing only the necessary protection... [E]ven if you were only trying to make this... skeletal non-building it ends up having... elegant expression. ...[W]hen you arrive, you... walk over the edge of the stadium and onto the arms of the field. To provide access and... minimize... parking, because it's part of an urban neighborhood, we can share the parking. But also we have the BART... only... a mile away, but you have to cross a 12 lane highway, and a freight train, so the simplest way of connecting is by putting a single mast... We can put a gondola that takes you straight from the BART, across both highway and train tracks, lands you on Jack London Square, and... you walk... across the perimeter park and into the game.

[I]n many ways... this idea of social infrastructure and the utilitarian and the social, and bringing it together into a... new hybrid... [F]or the poster... [T]en years ago I was so keen on getting some buildings built, that I didn't care about master plans because they took forever and they resulted in nothing, at least in the horizon that I could overview. Now that I an older and more patient, and I realize that two decades go quickly, I have more appetite for master plans... [T]here's a lot of things that can only be dealt with... on a... wholistic level at a certain scale... [W]e had an unfortunate encounter with Akio Toytota... and he had this idea of turning the site of two former factories at the base of Mount Fuji into an experimental city, where we would look at studying the potential impact on cities, from advances in personal mobility, mobility as a service, autonomy, robotics, smart homes, ...creativity through AI, multi-generational, assisted living, hydrogen powered infrastructure, academic research and incubation... [W]e... started... to look at the typical city of today. ...[T]oday the street has... everything: bikes, cars, pedestrians. We thought, maybe... to tailor different... experiences: one street-only autonomous vehicles and pedestrians, one for mixed personal mobility... more like a promenade, and finally a park, only for pedestrians... [E]every third street varies, and leaves in both directions. You can... walk through the entire city moving only through a park, or only along a promenade. ...[T]he roofs are powering the city with building-integrated photovoltaics... [A]ll these different intersections between the three different kinds of streets allows Toyota and collaborating companies to test the Toyota connected city traffic management system. There's a matternet for the delivery of goods.

[W]e seem to be... incapable of dealing with the climate crisis, and we were thinking why? Because humans have... shown to be... capable of taking... resource-demanding multi-generational efforts like building cathedrals. The great cathedral in Køln took 632 years to complete... We laugh at the Catalans because they're still building Sagrada Família, but they've only been building for a 137 years, so they're not supposed to be done yet. ...[T]he Romans were capable of building the... Roman aqueduct system for more than 500 years bringing fresh water to all of their urban settlements. ...It's because there was a master plan ...[W]hen the first architect of the Cologne Cathedral died, the next worked... on those same drawings, and the next... and you probably went through 20 different architects... or more. ...[O]ne of the problems of climate change and climate action is that it's the realm of... climate scientists that are mostly academics... [T]hey're very good at science and academic accuracy but not so much at entrepreneurship and action. ...[T]hen you have politicians... not so good at... a 50 or 100 year commitment because they have election cycles of 4 or 8 years... [E]ven a short architectural project takes longer than that. ...[W]e thought, what if we, because architects make master plans for buildings... city blocks... neighborhoods... for cities... regions... even for coutries. Why not make a master plan for the planet? ...[N]ormally we get hired to do things, but in this case there was no obvious client, except maybe Greta Thunberg. So we started it ourselves... [C]limate change has been going on catastrophically since the dawn of planet earth, from a... ball of lava to... heavy bombardment of meteors 4 billion years ago, to the snowball 2 1/2 billion years ago, the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago, much more like current... present day. When you look 500 million years back... there's always been... fluctuations in ${\ce {CO2}}$ related to fluctuations in temperature.... If you look at the last 500,000 years... the ice ages are always valleys in the ${\ce {CO2}}$ levels, separated by peaks that also correspond to rising temperatures, and vice versa... [I]f you look at the last 500 years you see relatively stable, and then... 150 years ago it really starts escalating. ...It's 407 particles per million, and we have to go back 20 to 30 million years before we find the same levels of ${\ce {CO2}}$ ... Regardless of global warming, at 1,000 particles per million the... ventilation in any room kicks in, because it becomes unhealthy for humans to breathe... So we're... not just warming the planet, we're also making it less inhabitable...

[Y]ou have different kinds of greenhouse gases, 4 of them affected by human activity, and of the 4... carbon dioxide and methane... nirous oxide loop and... F-gases... [I]f you have 610 gigatons of carbon in our vegetation, you have a million times more in the sediments, and that's... what we're releasing by burning fossil fuels. So you have two carbon dioxide loops, one takes millions of years as volcanic activity, but then becomes sequestered in rocks and sand and it's then... sedimented on the ocean floors and it's pushed back through tectonic movement into magma... [T]hen you have a more annual loop, which is... living beings absorbing ${\ce {CO2}}$ and then... releasing it through respiration, decomposition and... human emissions... [C]urrently we are releasing our ${\ce {CO2}}$ emissions with 4 billion tons per year.

In a similar loop, methane only stays in the atmosphere for 9 years, but because every year we're releasing another 10 million tons, primarily because of rice fields and ruminant animals, it's also adding to the equation...

75% of the greenhouse effect is attributed to ${\ce {CO2}}$ . This is the biggest problem, 14% to methane and the rest nitrous oxide and F-gases. ...F-gases are 3,000 times more impactful than ${\ce {CO2}}$ . There's just a lot less of it.

[I]f you want to look at how much carbon we're releasing into the atmosphere every year, ...a 2 x 2 x 2 kilometer cube... of solid coal, or 35,000 oil tankers.

There's another aspect, which is the shine effect. So vantablack, the Anish Kapoor patented black, the least reflective material on earth, had a shine effect of zero, and perfect white, of one... [A]n ocean or a parking lot has almost no shine effect so it absorbs a lot of heat. So the more open ocean... the more parking lots, the more heat is absorbed, whereas fresh snow has a... good shine effect... [T]o give you an idea of how impactful this is, if earth was all ocean we would have an average temperature of 27°C. Today it's 15°C... If 1/3 of the planet was glacial, it would be frozen. So 1% of change in the shine effect of earth is the equivalent of doubling the amount of ${\ce {CO2}}$ in the atmosphere. So it's also an important factor that... now works against us.

So what are our energy sources? We have 4... the sun, that provides photovoltaics, solar heating, fossil fuels, wind power is all... solar energy; Earth... thermal energy..; the moon, tidal turbine energy... because of gravity; and nuclear energy... So... all the different forms of energy are related... Gravity creates pressure, nuclear activity through fusion provides sunlight. Through photosynthesis sunlight is translating into chemical energy that can... be burned to provide heat, that with an engine can be translated into kinetic movement, that can then be turned into electricity... [O]ver the years we've been... mastering more... of these translations... [A]ny kind of energy source is translation... so a water mill or hydropower is gravity turned into kinetic movement and from there into electricity. Nuclear fission is nucler energy translated into heat and from there into mechanical and electrical. Batteries: from chemical to electrical... [I]f you look at the energy storage vs. batteries... It's not very efficient. 1/2 ton of batteries has the same stored energy as 5 kilos or 10 lbs. of hydrogen.

Today we spend 153,000 terawatt-hours per year. ...1/3 ...from electricity, transportation and agriculture ...85% of our energy comes from non-renewable... but of the 15% of renewable 2/3 of it is... burning wood...

[W]e started looking at how efficient are the different sources... also... at whose the biggest culprit. Today this is China... But... historically, the last 200 years the US and the EU have... contributed...

It's not enough to provide 153,000 [TW-h] because we're going to be 10 billion people and everybody will eventually have the quality of life of Singapore... currently the highest living standard. ...[W]e need to have 750,000 [TW-h]. ...[A]t current technology for solar, we could provide ...that with [7.5 million km² compared to 510 million km² earth's total surface] or with... [20 million km²] of windmill parks or... [322,000 km² expanded to 76 million km²] of real estate for nuclear... because of the plume exposure pathway emergency planning zone... hydroelectricity... [108 million km²] We don't have enough hydroelecticity, or biomass [224 million km²].

Also there's the idea of planting forests to sequester carbon, but we would have to plant the entire land mass of earth every third year... so it can only be part of a solution.

If you look at the different renewables, they've all gone down [in cost], especially solar; massively over that last half decade, except hyro, which has gone up... Hydropower currently provides only 3% of our power. It's believed that there's a bigger potential, but... not enough to provide the entire earth, but 71 of the countries on earth could... be delivering European living standard with the amount of hydroelectricity they have available. ...The biggest [35 TW-h/yr] hydro-station in the world, Churchill Falls in Canada... You could provide the same amount of energy with solar, with a much smaller area [102 km² vs. 7,000 km²].

Wind power: only 0.6% [of world energy production] and you have a very large untapped potential... Mostly the closer you get to the poles, the more wind power potential, especially offshore.

[S]olar power... since the 70s the price has gone drastically down [PV prices: $76 down to $0.30].

So of all the different sources wind and solar seems to be the best...

[T]he intermittence problem... 99% of the earth's populaton lives within this zone [10,000 km]. ...If each 24 hr zone could provide 1/6 of the power of the planet, the site that has light could... power the other side. ...With current high-voltage connections you lose 3% of the power per thousand km. This means that the maximum loss, you lose... 1/3 of the power if you're going all the way to the other side. ...You already have regional grids. ...[T]here's plans to connect ...northern Europe and north Africa and the Middle East. There's plans to connect the [US] east and the west coasts and Mexico. ...[Y]ou have all of these partial plans. ...[W]hat if you could ...create an entire worldwide grid. The sunny side could power the dark side, or the windy side could power the less windy side... This kind of grid could... unite us all energy-wise...

[W]e started looking... at water. This is how much water we have [1.4 billion km³ compared to earth's volume of 1,100 billion km³]... [V]ery little of it [2 1/2%] is freshwater... and of the fresh water, very little is surface freshwater, 30$ is groundwater and 2/3 is glaciers... [O]f the surface freshwater 3% is in the atmosphere, 1/4 of it is in all living things... 1/2% in rivers, 6% in soil moisture, and swamps, 20% in lakes, and... 2/3 in ground ice. So basically water is saltwater and freshwater is ice.

In the last 100 years we six times doubled our consumption [0.7 trillion m³ in 1900, to 4 trillion m³ in 2018] of water. ...Most of it goes to agriculture, and of the agriculture, most goes into meat.

[W]e are getting increasingly dry zones and... it's expensive, energy-wise, to desalinate. ...[I]f we would have to desalinate the increase of water consumption to reach 10 billion people, it would be 20% of our current electricity supply.

Every hour we produce a pile of 38 meters. This is Burj Khalifa and this is the cone of plastic bottles, every day, and every month we can bury the tallest tower on planet earth in a cone of plastic bottles... [W]hen you look at the flow of plastic, the vast majority is discarded after a single use. A good part of it is still in use in different components. The stuff that gets recycled, quickly gets discarded again, and then a small fraction becomes put to... more constant use or incinerated for the energy value. If you look at the sources of energy, the vast majority of mismanaged plastic is in Asia Pacific. The global river plastic input to the oceans, massively Asia... and massively packaging. So these are the sort of mismanaged pollution hub spots, and these are the outlets into the global oceans creating this kind of distribution because of the currents of plastics, where the biggest... is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

[W]hat we're trying to do... is try to apply the kind of tangible, practical thinking. We almost took the... way we would normally approach an architectural project and a master plan. So this is the kind of index... for the master plan of the planet, and going through it with this kind of pragmatic utopian approach, hoping that we can develop insights, and ideally a master plan for the planet that could be... handed... to corporations and governments with a much more tangible and... promising concrete plan of action than the reports or sort of political agendas that... exist today.

Urban Talks: Bjarke Ingels (Jan 30, 2024)

| From LEGO House and Masterplanet to Vltava Philharmonic Hall, Center for Architecture and Metropolitan Planning channel. A Source.

This idea of a power plant so clean that we can turn it into a mountain meadow is part of an idea that we call hedonistic sustainability... that clean technology is not only better for the environment, it also is much more enjoyable for the poeple living there... [W]e discovered this idea more than two decades ago when we completed our first project. ...We designed the Copenhagen Harbour Baths, extending the life of the city into the water around it... [W]e also designed the harbour bath in Aarhus... [T]here was something special happening... that a clean port is not only nice for the fish, it's also amazing for the citizens... they don't have to drive... for hours to get to the beach... They can... jump into the port in the middle of the city.

A decade after, we opened the Danish Pavilion in Shanghai. The subject for the World Expo was "Better Cities, Better Life," and we thought of the pavilion as a condensation of all the things that make Danish cities more sustainable and... more enjoyable. ...We recreated the harbour bath ...and we were looking for common denominators between Denmark and China ...[W]e found that in the Chinese public school curriculum they have three fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, one being... The Little Mermaid, the national symbol of Denmark, so we proposed to move the mermaid [statue] to China. I had to go to Parliament to argue the case, and... we got her.

One... way to explain... the power of architecture... is to explain the Danish word for design, which is "Formgivning," which... means "form giving," because to design something is to... give form to that which has not yet been given form... [i.e.,] to give form to the future. ...We're giving form to the world which we would like to find ourselves living in ...Design becomes much more important than style or aesthetics and fashion.

This is one of my favorite photos. It's all the richest people in Denmark and me. It's... the family that makes Lego. It says something about a country when the richest... make Lego, but they asked us to imagine the home of the Lego brick, an architecture where you could unfold the potential of Lego. ...This is the ...building. We tried to ...imagine an architecture ...as inviting... engaging and inclusive as Lego ...itself. ...Lego is a tool, not a toy ...that empowers the child to create his or her own world and ...inhabit that world through play, and to invite her friends in... cocreating and cohabiting that world. ...[T]hat, at its best is exactly what architecture should be.

As human beings we have the power to imagine our world, to create... and cocreate... and to cohabit it.

This is Tirana, the capitol of Albania... [W]e were invited to imagine their National Theatre. ...It is pinched to perform a gateway between the Plaza... and... City Hall on the other side, and that... wrinkled opening creates a covered plaza that is the entrance into the theatre. ...[A] very simple ...public gesture that becomes an invitation... shading from the Mediterranean sun, made out of... red upcycled concrete. ...The national color of Albania is red. We found this beautiful red stone ...locally sourced. ...The main hall is faceted out of hot-rolled steel ...a mixture of perforated and reflective surfaces creates the perfectly calibrated acoustics, almost like an origami of black steel. ...The second auditorium can ...open its backstage out to the roof, and the ...roof becomes a ...starlit, open-air performance space. ...[W]e've tried to squeeze as much creative energy and performance possibility into the smallest possible volume. It's currently under construction. ...[I]t's going to be a building that looks different because it performs differently.

This is an art museum we designed in Norway, in a sculpture park... on two sides of a river, and we suggested that the museum could be the bridge... from one side... to the other. ...As the building crosses the river ...it zips closed the daylight. ...[I]t's made out of standard extruded aluminum profiles ...to make warehouses... A lot of identical elements put together in a carefully orchestrated way. Inside it is... white painted 2x4 timber... and again, by gently shifting the orientation... by leaving half of them open, we have all of the... ventilation for state of the art... climate control, all the lighting... It's... creating something extraordinary out of a lot of ordinary. ...[A] museum that is also a bridge that is also a sculpture, in a sculpture park.

We designed and built MÉCA, la Maison de l'économie créative de Aquitaine. It's a... regional art foundation, and a library and...performance center... on the waterfront of Garonne in Bordeaux... next to the first bridge designed and built by Gustave Eiffel. ...As you walk along the Garonne river the museum lifts you up, allow you to pass through and continue your journey... The theater and the library become the pillars that carry the art museum. ...It creates this urban room ...shaded from the Bordeaux sun... gently lifts the public up through the building and out. It creates... effortless seating in the shade of the building overlooking the river. ...[J]ust by opening the facade a tiny bit ...all the programs that need daylight are visible from the outside. ...All the finishes ...almost like Le Corbusien ...raw and simple material. ...[Y]ou enter ...a little storytelling pit ...It's really like a warehouse for the arts. ...As you ascend up, the theater with the skylit stage, so for rehearsals they have daylight, and finally the art space on the roof and the beautiful view of the city. ...[A]lmost like an extension of the industrial neighborhood behind, bringing the city and its life all the way down to waterfront.

[A] decade ago I got invited to make a proposal for a building on the waterfront of Manhattan, and we took that as an opportunity to move to New York, and open our studio there. ...[W]e thought we should make a courtyard building. All buildings in Copenhagen are courtyards... a little oasis in the middle of the city. It's communal, so it's shared by... all 700 apartments... The court-scraper... the height of a skyscraper to the northeast and... the height of a handrail in the southwest. So everybody who lives around the courtyard has views of the sun setting over the Hudson river... almost like bringing the communal qualities of a Copenhagen courtyard with the... verticality and density of an American skyscraper.

In Amsterdam we... opened the Slicehouse. ...We put a floating solar farm in the water... There's a public promenade where people can overlook... Amsterdam. It's... completely framed by photovoltaics. ...[W]e lift up the courtyard so you can sail into the city block. The local kids can swim. You can dock a boat. It becomes... a... fusion between the public realm, the port, and the private. The facade is made out of maritime aluminum... so the facade continues into the water. ...[T]o let in sunlight some of the apartments become houses with gardens, and you can walk... up to the public promenade... [T]he building... becomes an extension of the city landscape of Amsterdam. It's... piled on energy piles extracting heat and cold from the port... to heat and cool the building.

This is only a fragment of the plan for the planet that we've done as an in-house research project... to answer some of our own questions... [W]e don't have any jurisdiction over Earth, so no one asked us to do this. So what's the point? ...[D]oing the plan for the planet has given us an insight and a clarity... and we started aligning the projects... with the principles of the plan... [P]roject by project we're beginning to give form to a future that is more aligned with the principles...

In Sevilla, the hottest city in Spain, we are building the Joint Research Centre for the European Commission. It's half a public square and half the... Commission. It's covered by this... canopy of photovoltaic panels that creates a shaded square, which means that we can make the facade in one of the sunniest places in the world entirely out of glass, because it's... shaded... It's a naturally ventilated square... The building... produces twice as much energy as it consumes... [T]he photovoltaics are funded and maintained by the local energy company... It becomes... an energy machine or a decentralized power plant...

Google Bay View complex (2022)

For Google we created this... canopy of photovoltaics... next to the San Francisco Bay, and the landscape is... root zone gardens, so the roof canopy collects... rainwater, then all the gray and black wastewater is... filtered through the landscape and... let clean into the bay. The only material is photovoltaic tiles... a Swiss product that... has a textured surface... making power out of light... [T]he structure is a grid shell that has a catenary curve, because the natural sagging is the most materially sufficient way to make a long span, so minimizing... how incredibly thin the roof structure is... [T]he smiles are proportioned to let in... the perfect amount of daylight...

[A]ll of these projects are examples of how... the future can not only be more sustainable, but... more fun to work in and more beautiful to live in.

[T]he idea of the Vltava Philharmonic is to... celebrate the journey of the Vltava river, the Vltava symphony, the journey from the stream, the source in the mountains... through the Bohemian Forest... through dams, through cities, and eventually to [Prague]... Imagine an architecture that... is... a journey from the river to the roof... as public... engaging and inviting... To bring the... the life of the city center down to the river. Create a landmark... for the neighborhood, for the city. To resolve this... Gordian Knot of trams... trains... highways... metro stops... pedestrians and cars, in a three dimensional city, to create a literal and accessible connection to the river, to provide... an active social environment for the fine performing arts... also for the popular culture... to create this... perfectly tuned instrument for the performance and delivery of symphonic music. ...[F]rom this incredibly rational, orthoganal diagram, use the public realm, the canopies, the porticoes and the terraces to create a public destination, and similarly in plan, to blur the distinction between inside and outside by pulling out the canopies to connect with the environment to create a zone that is neither indoor nor outdoor, that is protected from the rain and shaded from the sun... [T]his kind of very basic principle created this building that... starts at the edge of the water and winds itself up to the main level of the city and the bridge, and from here creates a series of destinations and lookouts... to the top of the city. ...[A] music student can walk all the way up to class on the outside of the building. ...[T]he highway... has... been overflown, so instead of having cars dominating the waterfront... it becomes public life. ...[Y]ou don't really know where the building ends or the city begins, and you have... generous spaces where public life is invited to enter and linger. ...From the city side you can see into... green rooms, rehearsal rooms and... a culture hub with musical studios. ...[A]t night the... transparency... illuminates the wooden... [ceilings] made out of locally sourced timber. Towards the water... pulling out the balconies and... terraces you get these... lookouts... almost at the... water's edge. [A]... pavement made out of locally sourced stone and the... integration of greenery... blurs the distinction between what is park, what is plaza, what is building... [S]tepping of stones create a series of... hangout spaces or... informal performance spaces. ...[W]hat could... sometimes be construed as a... fine art, highbrow cultural institution becomes a very... welcoming and accessible landscape of... familiar local materials, and an abundance of places with views... shade... sun and shelter. ...[O]n the plaza level between the city and the traffic of the main street... a very permeable zone that also becomes an informal hangout space, so before performances or after, a place to linger... [W]hen the [day]light drops and the... [interior lighting] energy arises the building... comes alive when it starts... inviting guests for the performances. ...[E]ven though all of the... sloping roofs are... gentle in their ascent, at certain angles it... becomes this... incredibly dramatic overlapping of forms. ...Arriving across the bridge you... have the choice to connect... to the plaza... passing through the trees of the plaza that provide shade... having a major arrival plaza in front of the foyer. The foyer wraps the city and the riverfront... [A] building without a... back side.

[A]t its best, architecture is like the art of portraiture. In the sense that... Is the Mona Lisa an expression of da Vinci as an artist or is it an expression of Mona Lisa, the woman that it portrays? And... the answer is both. ...[A] great portrait can capture not only the likeness, but also the character, the soul, the potential of the subject, and... what we try to do... is to create... an architectural portrait of how we see Prague. In that sense it... has that kind of inherent Pragueness, from the river to the roof, the kind of 21st century equivalent of the Prague Castle... You can dream... In the architectural design process, a lot of people... worship the idea of the genius sketch on a napkin, and... that the whole project is conceived in a single eureka moment. ...A lot of the ideas that will be striking ...in 2032 have not been formulated yet. ...A lot of the ideas that haven't even been framed yet, that's what makes it very exciting ... to not just create the vision, but acutually go through with it ...[S]o many ideas... experiences... contradictions and surprises actually occur when the purity of the initial vision starts encountering the nitty gritty reality of real life. ...Some of the most striking experiences are yet to be invented in the next couple of months and years.

Quotes about Ingels

Wealthy real estate developers who might otherwise be coerced into adopting more stringent waste reduction techniques or buying more ecologically resilient building materials are offered a more appealing option by firms like BIG who provide an appearance of greenness that does not conflict with the corporate ethos. ...The phrase greenwashing... always seems to point to the... impossibility of making something inherently bad for the environment appear ‘green’ and responsible. The material formation of the architectural process has to be reckoned with, and so far firms like BIG have not been leading the way. ...The starchitect class has been fatally captured by the interests of high powered finance and industry that got humanity embroiled in the crisis of climate change in the first place. They are... our opponents in the struggle for a more just and resilient future.
- Alexander Hadley, Bjarke Ingels and the Art of Greenwashing, Failed Architecture (Jan 28, 2020)

Marc Lore and... starchitect Bjarke Ingels... plan on creating "Telosa"—a... city... home to 5 million... on 150,000 acres... lush greenery amidst a desert ecosystem. ...Bjarke Ingels and ...BIG ...are ...prone to serious cases of greenwashing. ...Telosa is a ...colossal ...painted green. From a sustainability standpoint, little of this ...makes ...sense. ...As the Western United States grapples with a drought of historic proportions ...placing a city in one of this region’s driest localities is difficult to understand. ...Bjarke Ingels—and similar architects who present their unrealistic, grand proposals as solutions for the world’s impending environmental crises—are arguably the least radical designers... They do not call for systemic change; they call for visual change. Instead of designing interventions in existing places to make them more sustainable... equitable, and more resilient, they give up. The desert is an easy place to go. ...The problems of the old city—the sprawl... pollution, racial discrimination—These can be avoided simply through design... No need to end capitalism... to stop... exorbitant consumerism... to curb our lavish way of life. ...[S]imply abandon the old city and start fresh. ...[K]eep the systems. But... the buildings...'ll be way nicer.
- Ethan Olson, Bjarke Ingels, I’m Tired of Your Eco-Porn: We Can’t Innovate Our Way Out of This The Climate Change Review (Oct 26, 2021)

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