Bjarke Ingels "Hedonistic Sustainability"

just very briefly about our school it's medium-sized school in a European context with some 600 students architectural students and we used to say we are medium-sized dog with a big dog attitude about today are going to make very short introduction and say a few words of also about our collaboration with the Oscar property we're really happy about this and specifically with Oscar Engelbert and Oscar properties this very ambitious company producing high quality apartments INSCOM and actually this is our second joint event together and we really hope to develop this in the future I also would like to introduce professor who like a calzone sitting here she's setting the program in architecture and she will be moderating the questions after the lecture so there will be time for some some questions and maybe some discussions afterwards okay we're very proud to host the Erica Ingels here today the arc a Ingles group big they are located in Copenhagen of course but also in New York with projects all over the world will see very soon including the two projects in Stockholm going on right now Stockholm is Putin and our grounds caught on which the arc is involved in both and also I heard that you just want the competition of Kimball Art Center in Utah in the United States so congratulations first time I listen to you the arc was in a European meeting in sintra six years ago do you made this brilliant lecture and I was totally impressed by your enthusiastic way of speaking and describing your architecture it was like a totally new thing for me that someone could be not only a talented architect but also an extremely talented speaker and also sort of giving a big show or a big event and also being very precise and very clever about discussing architecture personally I like the projects in a restored a lot specifically the mountain dwellings and the eighth house I think there is enormous ly lack of fantastic buildings and structures in our cities there is a lack of fantasticness so to speak and to me the projects in our store they exemplifies the architects as a wizard in a way which is a good position for our young students to develop in the future I think so it's something to learn of Erica Ingels on hedonistic sustainability actually when I was when I was in sintra it was kind of a historical moment because me and my former partner she had just decided to split up from plot and that day I was negotiating the the guy who had hem start the domain picked at DK and I finally got him to cough it up for like 5000 euros or something so it was like the birth the genesis of big I'd like to we're sort of Iran on the invitation of of Oscar properties because we we're starting to do a project in Yad it and I'd like to try to show like a few a few of the projects that we've been developing over the last maybe five years and maybe talk about some of the this of the big ideas that we have sort of developed and and that somehow govern our decisions in our work the first of all so being them the role of the architect are or what role can architecture play in society and this is a project we did for its diagram for persecuted called seven year Denmark's where we try to organize all of Denmark as a single ecosystem because we really believe that architects should be designers of ecosystems not just like pretty facades or expressive sculptures but systems are both economy and ecology where we channel not only the flow of people through our cities and buildings but also the flow of resources and the importance of this role you can sort of deduct from the atmosphere in this photo it was taken at the United Nations conference on on climate change if it's possible in any way to dim the lights on the screen that'll be that way brilliant excellent so so it was taken at cop15 in Copenhagen and if you look at the faces of a brown America especially Sarkozy Obama it wasn't exactly a party it was a it was a complete failure all of the goals that had been established for the summit were like mist and the channels of discussion about sustainability was drowning in this sort of general misconception that sustainability is a question of how much of our existing quality of life we're prepared to sacrifice in order to afford being sustainable essentially this traditional Protestant idea that it has to hurt to do good so when we were asked to look at the the Danish pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo where the the subject of the expo was sustainable cities we thought what about a different kind of sustainability what if sustainable cities would actually increase life quality and would actually increase human enjoyment that would make it a sort of a lot more desirable agenda and we decided to design the danger villian as a sort of condensed streetscape that condensed all of the elements of Danish cities that make them not only sustainable but also more enjoyable this is the Swedish pavilion right next to it and and the Danish Pavilion was conceived as this sort of a Danish streetscape complete with the blue bicycle lanes of Denmark the danish city bikes that we've had for like 20 years so you could actually sort of bicycle through the experience sort of through the exhibition experiencing how nice it is to buy through the city like 37 percent of all the coconut nuts commute by bike so they're never stuck in a traffic jam two years ago there was a traffic jam in shenzhen that lasted 11 days so some some guy was like stuck in his vehicle for 11 days that's the opposite of human enjoyment and it was designed so you could actually bicycle through the exhibition itself making it the ultimate museum for impatient people because you could actually get through the entire exhibition without missing anything in two minutes it works and also Copenhagen and Shanghai are port cities but in Copenhagen our Harbor waters become so clean you can swim in it our first project was the Copenhagen Harbor bath that extends public life into the water we try to recreate this experience at the heart of the pavilion so the visitors could experience how clean if not how cold Danish Harbor water is this is actually if my partner Jakob and myself testing the facilities and we we discovered as a way of sort of trying to sort of lure the Chinese into to learn and experience how a Danish sustainable City can actually increase your your life quality we were looking for common denominators between Denmark and China and we found that in the Chinese public school curriculum they have three fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen so all of the 1.3 billion Chinese actually grew up with the story of the Little Mermaid the national symbol of Denmark so we proposed to move the mermaid not a copy but the actual mermaid to China for six months when the Danish nationalists part he was just sort of the Tea Party of Denmark heard about this they tried to pass a law specifically against moving the mermaid and I had to go to Parliament for the first time to argue her case and as you can see we we got her we also had to get her through Chinese customs and and into the pavilion actually in in her absence we invited the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei to make an art installation as a sort of cultural exchange and what he did was he installed a Chinese surveillance camera in the pavilion this one and it's it's the same brand that the Chinese state has installed in front of his house to keep an eye on him he's like as you know very Pro Liberty of speech but this one was part of an installation he called the mermaid exchange there was basically transmitting live footage to a Copenhagen where she normally sits so that tourists going in vain would see that she was okay but more importantly as a political statement it was a sort of a loophole in the Great Firewall of China because for six months it was the only uncensored live TV feed from China to the rest of the world so this was the first time we sort of sort of started working with this idea of trying to really focus on how sustainable cities and architecture can actually increase the quality of life we've been pursuing this in various ways one of them is what we call architectural alchemy that you can create if not gold then of these added value by mixing different ingredients that are traditionally kept separate we did the first VM houses in Koberlein but the mountain is where we sort of coined the idea it's essentially a hybrid between a hundred apartments and a big park parking building all of the apartments have been turned into this or mountain of homes houses with Gardens where you have a penthouse view but a suburban lifestyle where you can run out and play in the outside and this this man-made mountain is made possible simply by placing all of the apartments on top of the parking so the parking occupies all the deep space to the north there's a single funicular elevator that gives access to all the apartments and the parking is naturally ventilated and naturally illuminated so we clad it with an aluminum a perforated aluminum facade essentially the the probably the cheapest you can put on a building but by Mick by varying the whole size in six different sizes and because the holes look doc on the on the bright aluminum from a distance it turns into this gigantic urban artwork for free so we commissioned this Japanese Himalaya photographer to give her this beautiful photo of Mount Everest that really turns him literally into a mountain this idea we took one step further in collaboration with our client Pere if nur for a project called the aid house which is in this new neighbourhood at the edge of Copenhagen City this Lake delineates the end of the city and you have a big pack very much like like yeah actually in in Stockholm it's gotta be part of this new neighborhood and we decided should have worked with this idea of like trying to see how the different programs could occupy different positions like shops and offices are placed on the ground to the north they become a four-story office building and we also explored the difference in depth that commercial spaces have deeper floor tapes that in residential spaces to create this path it's really placed on the on the edge of the city you have this clash of life forms but more importantly what what we discovered with the eighth house is that this idea of architecture alchemy doesn't only allow us to optimize the conditions for the individual programs like lifting of the townhouses with little gardens in front up into the Sun and the view sitting on top of a four-story office building but it also allows the possibility for spontaneous social encounters or the creation of community that is traditionally restricted to occurring on street level it's actually invited to invade the three-dimensional space of the urban block so the 8th house is not just like a beautiful facade design or an interesting of expressive sculpture it's really like a three-dimensional urban condition that invites public life to invade the three-dimensional space of the block and create all of these different niches and and terraces and and little intimate urban spaces throughout the the freedom space of the of the city block and basically we're the eighth house the figure-eight crosses it itself in the middle basically the the two buildings block each other's views so we didn't build any of the of the floors there we just made a social tower that connects the entire building from the bottom to the top where we consolidate all of the amenities of the of the building that ties the entire building together from the ground to to the roof terrace where there's like this big shared social space for the tenants and you see if this idea was designed to sort of increase the interaction between people living there so a child living on the penthouse could actually walk down and play with his or her neighbor but because Copenhagen is this flat we have absolutely no Hills there is no place in Copenhagen where you can there's like no Moussa back or like someplace where you can go and enjoy the view of your city except now people actually go to the eighth house on the weekend and and go for a walk actually sort of seriously increasing the revenue of the cafe that's out there because it really becomes sort of a man-made extension of the landscape of Copenhagen and the general idea of the architecture is always synergy the the facade of the of the officers become the handrails for the for the street the actual handrail itself becomes the street light so each part of the program sort of is tied together in this sort of a collaborative or interactive composition and sort of so of course we've been stopped working increasingly with with various ways of working with density and also like this way you you move around or through a building can have a massive impact another place that we since we opened our office in New York again a half ago we've been working with the various projects and this is in in Vancouver in Canada that has exactly the same climate as a Copenhagen or or Stockholm but a very very different residential density basically the downtown you see here it's not like office skyscrapers its residential high-rises it's this beautiful Peninsula here's a Granville bridge which is the main bridge that reaches the the city and right next to it our client own the property property and when you build a tower and the city was expecting a similar tower they were both going to be 480 feet and create sort of a gateway into Vancouver and because of a affluent Chinese immigration when Great Britain was going to give Hong Kong back to China or the Hong Kong Chinese started panicking and they started purchasing property in Vancouver since then it has become so the main gateway 35,000 Chinese arrive every year with a $200,000 minimum so real estate prices are really high if you take an 85 square meter apartment and you move it one flow up it increases in value with $15,000 so 20 floors it's $300,000 and finally right next to the side there's a PAC where the city doesn't want us to cast any shadows so you can see the site that our client owns is pretty tortured it's like being shredded by this bridge so he had been working on it for a year and it wasn't really getting anywhere with something he liked so we started mapping the different restraints the setback requirements the setback from the highway another setback which is a 30 meter setback from any highway because the city wants to make sure that nobody looks straight out on the heavy traffic and finally there's the park where we're not allowed to cast shadows so we are left with a tiny triangle 600 square meters which even for Vancouver is very small so we were sort of looking at this and then we were thinking if the 30 meter setback has to do with making sure that you have a minimum distance to the traffic since our client owns entire site as soon as we get clear of the highway we can come back out and essentially maximize the amount of the really nice apartments at the top as if you solved when you drive over a Granville bridge it becomes as if somebody is drawing a curtain inside and sort of welcome to Vancouver essentially this like like a normal high-rise that it's that is wedged into a triangular footprint so basically it's it's a completely rational structure you have like this like composition of balconies that creates this almost like feminine silhouette even though everything is actually 90 degrees only when you leave the city this sort of striking landmark in a way it's not some kind of crazy design it's simply a question of optimizing the the efficiency and the inhabitation of this of this site when you look at it on the skyline of Vancouver you can see it's really one of the boys but it has this more feminine silhouette to it it also reminds us a lot of the this like one moment in New York's history that created a condition where because of increases in value of real estate steel structure and elevators suddenly this difficult triangular site certainly became developable and the Flatiron Building became the striking landmark in in Manhattan and has now become the namesake of the whole neighborhood this is like a very similar condition except ours we call it the fat iron because it's sort of bulging out at the top you can see like in a lot of our work there's like a very intimate relationship between the building and the surrounding city like even in the 8th house where it invites public life into the realm of the of the city orbit with a fat iron where it's really the way that public traffic flows through the site that actually shapes the the architecture in a handful of projects we've been working very specifically with the public as the goal of the project or the client one of our first projects that we built was the maritime youth house and the waterfront Copenhagen where a polluted site we were a third like a third of the building budget was research for picking up a meter of the topsoil because they used to paint boats here as part of the marina and then when you move anything you have to put it in a state deposit and pay a deposit tax in this case we had to drive it a kilometer away on a truck dump it back into the water and then pay a tax and it seemed kind of a silly way of spending resources moving up the problem around we found out that the pollution didn't vaporize it didn't admit any gases so we could simply when you when you serve replace the topsoil it's like putting a lid on it so we basically just proposed to cover the entire site with a big wooden deck leave the soil where it was and create this sort of undulating June landscape out of wood that becomes an informal playground for the local the local kids so change it by moving resources from the problem the pollution into a potential for public space we could actually sort of create this new new public destination in Copenhagen where the the local people actually go in and hang out at night also in Copenhagen there's a rule you're not allowed to build closer than 20 meters to the water because the city saw all of this as public space you can actually walk on the roof we were allowed to scoot it all the way to the to the water's edge and another kind of project where it was really like it was all about the public and the public interaction was a project we did for Tallinn the the city hall of Tallinn in Estonia and Tallinn has this beautiful medieval city that's unesco world heritage and the idea was to make a new Town Hall right next to it we thought instead of having this traditional dichotomy of the the people outside and the politicians inside we would hover the Town Hall above this sort of continuous public domain inviting people to enter into what we called the the public service marketplace where they can go and interact with the public servants and see politicians at at work each department has its own building creating a public village but they're like condensed to overlap so they create a continuous public institution and finally in the master plan they anticipated a spire this is what the city hall of Tallinn looks like today there is they were somehow imagining a tower like northern european city halls look like so we thought like let's put the city council inside the tower let's give them like an incredibly generous space for political reflection like the ceiling is made as a giant mirror which means that when the politicians have to make difficult decisions all they have to do is sort of look up and then they get a perfect periscope overview of the city that they're messing with as a side effect when the angry citizens gather to demonstrate they can see exactly what's going on at City Council like dirty deals being made people are sleeping or playing Angry Birds on their iPads so we call this the democratic periscope because it combines political overview with public insight and to our great luck the City Council likes the idea and we're breaking ground in in the spring because like you know when you're doing a city hall it's all about you know what kind of identity does this sort of post-soviet democracy want to project in terms of political transparency and public participation so even though it's in this case it's a quite large building but you know even small buildings can have like very big impact in terms of their symbolic meaning we were invited to compete to design the the National Art Museum of Greenland as you probably know Greenland is part of the Royal Danish Kingdom but they recently acquired independence and the first thing that they they wanted to do was to to build a National Museum for Contemporary Atlantic art it's it was stationary to be located on the waterfront of nuke it's like an incredibly beautiful rocky landscape and sitting right next to these social housing from the 70s where the Danish would move the fishermen and put them in these sad Danish apartments we proposed to make them to make the museum as a perfect circle because all Arctic building topologies are circular you know to create a maximum interior volume with the minimum circumference but simply this perfect circle is then sort of a melting so it like gently follows the the specific topography of of the landscape essentially opening up the interior courtyard to frame the view of the of the bay you see like the the nice Danish heritage that sort of dominates the the city image of nuke and essentially like by making it completely enclosed from the from the exterior and having it open interior that then opens up to the surroundings we could push it all the way to the water's edge and sort of following the general topography of the other site we lift up the the circle inviting people to sort of a continue inside the the museum we have a big sloping picture gallery that turns into a circular ring of large exhibition spaces some with daylight some with artificial lights but the main sort of political statement of the project is that as soon as you go into the into the the ring you find yourself in this sort of it because of the melted geometry you this framed view of the of the fort you have a courtyard in the middle you have like the Greenlandic nature the Greenlandic local flora and fauna you have the kinetic sculptures and the green olympic artworks inside and and all of the Danish architecture has been edited out of your view so it becomes this sort of a Cecilia and in the middle of a city sort of ruined by the English architecture paradoxically then again designed by a Danish architect but you know we're collaborating with a green land office so you can say like in some cases public participation has been a major concern for a project but in one case we try to really make it into the driving force of the design taking it sort of to extreme these photos were taken on the street where our offices in Copenhagen some years ago you might remember the cartoon crisis where a sort of a provincial Danish newspaper commissioned ten cartoonists on a sort of slightly misconceived crusade for liberty of speech to show that in Denmark were so liberal and so well integrated that we can make fun of everything including the Prophet Mohammed like a billion Muslims severely disagreed this is from Syria and this is this is basically where our office is in Copenhagen and this is a group of local Islamic boys that were very frustrated about the cartoons so it became clear that Copenhagen is no longer like this like homogeneous culture where you know everybody thinks the same we have like a lot of different people with different backgrounds calling Copenhagen their home so we were invited to make a competition for a new urban space right next to where our office is it's the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in all of Denmark there's 60 different nationalities living around this this plot of land and I'm not going to explain all of the aspects of the project sort of briefly we we decided to turn it into what we call the the red square it's currently under construction so this is actually not a Photoshop collage it's a it's a photo from an airplane the red square where everything is like different shades of red including the trees the black market where everything is black and the Green Park were even the sidewalk and the bicycle path is green but in this like very simple color coding we thought like instead of plastering this urban space with a Danish design if we become a strange if the Danes had designed the nicest bench and the nicest lamp and the nicest trash bin we thought like if if we consider all of planet earth as a gigantic urban laboratory where there's constantly being conducted experiments and how to inhabit our world in different ways in different cultures and different cities we reached out to the local community and asking people to recommend or nominate elements from their other home country to create this sort of almost like an urban exhibition of global best practice and the idea is that you know we don't eat Chinese food or Indian food to be nice to the Indians it's like it has nothing to do with political correctness it's because sometimes we really like feel like Indian food and it's the same like we don't build a Moroccan fountain to be nice to the Moroccans we do it because like Morocco has a like a very long and sophisticated tradition for architecture of water features so so now we're building this Moroccan fountain in in Copenhagen we have a mussel beach that combines elements from from Venice Beach in LA with elements from from Thailand China it's like crazy Estonian swing where we are actually having some liability issues with this wing also we found this slide in Ukraine it's actually from Chernobyl so we had to do a copy because the original is radioactive the the sign on the Red Square is the sign from the Red Square and even if you take something as banal as bollards from Ghana when you put them in a grey Scandinavian context they become these incredibly exotic objects and became like the Safari of finding cool stuff from from different places like a bicycle rack with a bicycle pump from Canada it's a brilliant invention I can't understand why we didn't come up with that also be like the majority of the immigrants have an Islamic background but everybody has to be represented from Israel we chose a manhole cover basically like an inch of steel so it's impossible to destroy it and if you look at the benches it becomes like this off social project like a Mexican bench formed like an s-curve so you can see the person you're sitting x2 into the eyes a Belgian bench that does the opposite everybody's looking away from each other project we have like a nice one from Sweden I think this is this a Sweden I don't know is for Sweden we found this a play octopus in Japan a crew of Japanese workers came and built it also from Sweden you're ensuring we have a snow cannon birdcages from Holland red trees in the Red Square we even found palm trees in China that actually grow in snow so now we have naturally growing palm trees in Nabu and in the last element like one of the mains of reminders that you're in a foreign culture when you travel is actually the advertisement so as a series of very sculptural lamps we recreated these billboards that advertise stuff you can't buy in Denmark my favorite is this one it's for it's a sign for a dentist in Qatar and of course the red square accumulates all these elements from Soviet and communist countries including muscovite which was one of the worst cars ever produced so you can say in a way like the this of Copenhagen urban space like rather than perpetuating this sort of a petrified image of Denmark as a homogeneous culture it really truly reveals the the the real cultural diversity of contemporary Copenhagen and turns this diversity into the driving force of of the design it's its opening it's already partially in use but its opening in in May that brings me to sort of the the last category of projects that that currently interest us quite a bit which is what we call social infrastructure and you have like a lot of sort of examples where the infrastructure of the past can be reinvented as infrastructure for culture and leisure in the in the present we recently did a project in Park City Utah and Park City used to be a mining town and actually the first ski lift I didn't know this before we went there the first ski lift in the world was actually a repurposed mining infrastructure it was essentially lifts that had been designed to drag silver down from the mountain and when the silver ran out they had to do something and they started dragging ski hills of the mountain so essentially that's what happened to to Park City the plumes of smoke of the past has become like clouds of snow cannons in in the present you probably know Park City from the Olympic Games in 2002 in Salt Lake City and also the Sundance festival that has made its home in in Park City and in the middle of the city the Kimball Art Center is another repurposed infrastructure it's a former garage that has turned into an ad museum and we were invited to look at making a new sort of expanded art museum for for the Kimbell this is the the garage where the Kimball is today and here in the background you see a building called the coalition building it was the tallest landmark structure of Park City when it was a mining town it was where all of the silver lifts came in and you unloaded the silver onto the trains it was like an 80-foot tall structure like this big wooden cabin that rose above the skyline of the city tragically it burned down in the 80s and have now sort of disappeared and if you look at Park City's development historically the Kimball Art Center is right here in the middle and recently the main arrival from from Deer Valley Drive the main road that goes through the the mountains actually sort of arrives right in this point so the Kimball absent does not only like culturally the the sort of the pivoting point but really physically and infrastructurally the the center of Park City so in short we proposed to sort of keep the existing garage as it is just refurbish it and so preserve the the cultural heritage of the of the industrial past and then consolidate the entire new building on a small footprint making it into a almost like a tower the same size as the as the coalition building it consists of two main galleries one gallery for media art without daylight that we place along Main Street and then the opportunity that we place at the top sort of facing Hiba Avenue so it becomes the first thing you see when you're out arrive to town almost like a friendly building that turns it heads to to greet visitors all the public programs sandwiched between the two galleries and then we start started like how can we integrate a new contemporary architecture into this traditional mining town how can we sort of a anyway harness this sort of raw charm of the of the industrial heritage and turn it into something contemporary most of the immigrants that went to Utah were actually Scandinavians and they brought with them this of log cabin construction with overlapping massive timber they used this construction to actually reinforce the the silver mines and to build the homes and this technique has been sort of verified and sophisticated in this case it's a silo where these square Timbers are still like use the interlocking corner joint to create this like really nice elegant techtronic so replacing proposed to like to harness this way of building actually to use the fact that wood isn't necessarily just a veneer that you use inside to make our interiors look friendly but it could actually be it not only at the structure but also what insulates and what finishes the the building also the Hogan's the traditional hearts of the Navajo Indians in Utah used massive timber to create more sophisticated forms and finally the Southern Pacific railroad used to have a rail track going across the Salt Lake and it was founded on these big timber piles they were like ramped deep into the Salt Lake and there they've been marinating for like decades in saturated with a with salt they have become what because what's now called trestle wood there's a company that basically extracts the old wood that is perfectly preserved and all the salt and it's gotten this like incredibly rich texture so we basically propose to sort of a really like extract this this wood that is a remnant of the of the railroad infrastructure and use it use the sort of the older lock construction to to build this this new add museum so essentially the new building you have the the stack logs and as the as the sort of our gallery it turns basically using the thickness of the logs we can actually just by rotating each lock a little bit we can actually create like this sort of a organic curve in a completely simple and traditional building technique the upper galleries and the and the roof garden it becomes like this sort of incredibly traditional way of building used in a very very contemporary expression also like the old sawmills actually were big wooden frames with a steel structure inside and essentially the galleries and the artworks they require more precise climatization so the two stack galleries are simply a steel structure nested inside a wooden wooden frame and all of the circulation is really sort of integrated in this turning wooden structure so so we just presented the project and as you just learned we we won the project a week ago and so hopefully if you go to to Sundance in in the summer like in the winter of 2016 you'll see this this gallery turning its head looking down Main Street when you enter into the lobby you follow the the raw timber of the facade up onto the the restaurant which is like sandwiched between the galleries you can extend out on the roof terrace on the under garage and continue up with the light washing down the the solid wood passing the work spaces of the of the galleries and then finally the the APPA calorie which is this big beautiful day lid space that has like an impressive view for four people sort of arriving they'll be able to see what's happening in the upper exhibition and be able to look into the lower part so it becomes like this incredibly inviting little art museum so essentially this sort of general idea that in this case once infrastructure has been decommissioned we totally know how to reinvent it for for cultural purposes another example is that we we got invited to do a competition for the Danish Maritime Museum today it's located inside Hamlet's castle in combo but it just became world heritage like everything in Europe is becoming unesco world heritage so it's getting very hot to do anything but essentially the museum had to get kicked out because when Hamlet was there like he was actually never there but like when the king was there there was no Maritime Museum in the in the castle so they proposed to put it in this old drydock where they used to build ships the problem was that the museum program was twice the size of the dock itself so we would basically drown the the dock in museum program creating this of claustrophobic Museum we thought if we could rather keep it as a big industrial void it was like a hundred and fifty meter long space 25 meters wide like wide sunken ten meters into the ground and also when we started reading the technical reports the dock was in such a bad state that to keep the walls from caving in we would have to make a new dock inside to take the pressure or put new dock walls outside to to take the pressure before it hits the the old duct structure so we thought if we're gonna make a new dock wall anyway why not leave enough space between the new and the old dock walls to incorporate the museum essentially to turn the museum brief inside out creating this like big industrial void this is the original shape of the of the dock also it became the answer to like an unresolvable dilemma that UNESCO said that the museum had to be completely invisible so we wouldn't block the view of the castle but of course the museum director and the sponsors they wanted some kind of architectural masterpiece that would attract people to to visit the museum and by turning it into a void we could combine the need for invisibility with the sort of desire for exposure a visit you would like walk down this six leg bridge that would take you into the museum each bridge contains programs for the museum for exhibitions for auditoría for for restaurants and the bridges also bring daylight into the into the exhibition so even though the entire museum is actually ten meters below the surface and eight meters below the water it's like it's very open and daylit space when we sort of submitted this project we thought that it was a little bit tricky because there was one condition in the brief and that was that you couldn't build outside the dock and we put the entire museum outside the dock but the jury liked it and we won the competition but then something strange happened the Danish architects Association which is basically my union they suit the client for having chosen a project that broke the conditions of the brief which seriously made me reconsider my membership of the Danish Architects Association but happily the clients had gotten so excited by the idea that they thought okay we cancel the competition and we hire big as our architects so so now we broke ground and we're building this surreal project like now the what used to be a void has become like almost like a ship sitting in an even bigger void it's also paradoxically the tallest structure we've built in Denmark but from 0 and down it's pretty it's pretty absurd that takes me to the surface to the last category of of social infrastructure which is the biggest project we've done now which is the loop city in Copenhagen we were commissioned by the ten municipalities of metropolitan Copenhagen to look at tying these different municipal cities together with a new train line and we thought like instead of just looking at Copenhagen or even just looking at Denmark right on the other side we have Sweden we have a bridge connecting the two sides it's the most sort of economically active areas in in southern scandinavia and by just adding a small five kilometer bridge we can turn it into a continuous public loop where no area is further away than 40 minutes by public transportation and it becomes not only an infrastructure for public transport also for waste management water management a smart grid that combines the hydroelectricity of sweden with the wind power of Denmark also like joining all of the most prosperous businesses in in the region into this sort of new by national capital city that were also introduced pink in a Scandinavian flag for the first time and has exactly the same size as the San Francisco Bay Area and the main idea is like so basically it's only because of the national divide that we haven't been considering this a single metropolitan region until now and one of the ideas it's really to mix all of the different infrastructure so the train line the smart grid everything is really nested into this very dense new urban loop the first kind of project we are going to be realizing that sort of embodies this potential is in downtown Copenhagen we want a competition to design a waste-to-energy power plant and essentially it transforms household waste three kilos of waste turns into four hours of domestic electricity and five hours of heating seen as a resource a ton of trash is also almost the same as two barrels of oil if you look at these waste-to-energy power plants they're like ugly boxes and if they have to be in the middle of the city you somehow have to be very careful about it it's gonna be the tallest and biggest building in copenhagen it's right next to the copenhagen marina and right next to this place where the local boys go waterskiing and and Danes actually I'm sure that both Norwegians and Swedes laugh about this but Danes really love to ski we just don't have any Hills we have snow but we have no slopes so we thought we might not have mountains in Denmark but we have mountains of trash so we basically decided to check I think it's easy bail I'm not totally sure can anyone recognize it no but no sweets can recognise their own hills I think this is Isabel it's a it's a it's a hundred and fifty meters vertical drop we have 95 meters so we make a mini pot version saving the Copenhagen is like five hours on a bus and essentially we just wrapped the machinery with a continuous sloping roof instead of making a visitor center where schoolteachers would drag children and force them to listen to how trash turns into energy it's an elevator that takes you to a green a blue and a black ski slope and actually allows you know you will simply have to look out for for Danish alpine skiers in the world championships from 2016 because because we'll be able to practice at home now miraculously we did win the competition based on this idea like seen as an overall the facade is a green facade where the vegetation actually filters daylight into the work spaces of the of the power plant and you can say like the the slide I opened with this idea of creating cities as ecosystems is very close to coming to fruition here it's like not only to be harvest the resources locally the rain water the the daylight the natural ventilation but also together with the city it forms an entire ecosystem finally like it's going to be the cleanest waste way energy power plan in the world smoke coming out of the chimney is completely clean but it does contain co2 and working with the German artists realities United we developed this idea of the mouth of the chimney is designed so that each time there's a hundred kilos of co2 it puffs a gigantic smoke ring and of course on one hand we like this idea that it's the ultimate artistic expression of hedonistic sustainability the chimney becomes so clean that it becomes something playful that puffs smuggling's but more importantly one of the main drivers of behavioral changes knowledge that if people don't know they can't act and you know nobody knows what co2 is it's uncountable if you come to Copenhagen in 2016 you just have to count the smoke rings and when you've counted 10 of them we just emitted exactly one tonne of co2 actually since then we took the the sort of this this technology here or like the idea of skiing on the roof we're doing we want a competition to design a ski resort in lavey in Lapland in in Finland and the main idea is that all of the penthouses plus everybody else can take the elevator to the to the roof and then the this is the the roof of the buildings a part of the of the ski slope no surface has a slope less than 7% so you will never have to walk it really takes the idea of ski in ski out to the extreme you can actually ski from your apartment out into the ski system and of course the sloping roofs create these like charming spaces this is scheduled to break ground actually almost this year according to the and and and in three years you you should be able to do some serious serious roof skiing this brings me to to Stockholm we've we've been sort of involved in Stockholm like since since the very early beginning we we spent quite a substantial part of our lives trying to work on sluicin in vain but but in a way not so long ago we got invited to look you know have got we got an idea to look at a project that could be like sluicing 2.0 it's Stockholm sportin it's the main entry into metropolitan Stockholm from the northwest it's a huge area and they wanted to create some kind of a landmark where the two highways across each other and you come out of the tunnel like the first thing you see when you get to Stockholm but it's such a big space here we try to map the two highways into and then we took the the Arc de Triomphe and the whole neighbourhood in Paris as you can see it's a gigantic area more than a landmark what they really need is an urban master plan and finally the two highways are of course going to be separating all these like different parks and different neighborhoods from interacting with each other so if we could master plan a way of creating connectivity between the different spaces that would really work work well so if if they wanted a landmark and what they needed was the master plan what what they had a lot of was excavation material after like digging like miles and miles of tunnels so we basically proposed to to sculpt the excavation to create a man-made valley that would take the noise from the highways and allow the city to actually move closer to the rim of this new landscape essentially creating these expansion opportunities for the the new neighborhoods allowing the city to grow all the way to the edge of this like landscaped crater he was sort of a life on the edge of the pack you could imagine a series of public institutions that would sort of inhabit this circular promenade with all the sort of the the park spaces in between but this didn't really make any landmark and also more importantly the whole idea of creating this lively park space for for social life around the the highway was going to be completely invisible from the elevated highway so we were like thinking how could we do something also we didn't want to put some kind of big building in the middle it would make any sense because like the program was going to be on the perimeter so we finally found this this gigantic weather satellite developed by NASA in the 60s or the material is this very very resistant chrome film we imagined could be like a giant road mirror so that when people arrived to her to Stockholm they see this immaterial object hovering in the sky that actually shows all of the pack and the life of the city around them a sort of hovering in the sky like a Lupin 2.0 this time taking off from the ground they're essentially making the whole master plan visible to the to the cars we have to confess we did the we did the competition right before Christmas a you know half ago so we had model materials in the in the office and essentially this this immaterial landmark is tied to the ground creating some some piston power and also the the solar exposed hemisphere is embedded with photovoltaics that can deliver a lot of energy to the to the expansion of the neighborhood but 10% is taken as a small tax to keep a pump and a heating element running to ensure enough pressure and enough up drift to keep this giant balloon hovering it has a single stick and like these three cables I keep it in place so if there's a catastrophic failure it's not going to land on the on the cars so basically we proposed this idea that you know we allowed us to design this like big beautiful secret valley around the park and have this immaterial monument hovering above the highway to reflect the life around the stock homes gate and to our complete surprise we won the competition and and are now happily engaged with trying to figure out how to actually do this it's a it's a it's kind of a wonderful wonderful challenge moving a little bit closer to to town yeah it is this like like this big Green Park and not unlike the the site we're building in an early start right across from sail sinks a nice film Museum and right next to the to the harbor that's also gradually sort of converting into spaces for culture and an inhalation and we were asked by Oscar to to look at at creating a building on this corner and of course we had this sort of amazing opportunity that you have 270 degrees of a pack I mean we thought like maybe we would sort of try to sort of in a way create an overlap between the city and the park to consider the entire site as one form of landscape simply lifting a part of it to create private gardens for the for the residents while leaving the courtyard public allowing people to pass through the the building and then essentially we propose to sort of lift up the perimeter to match with the surrounding city and so as a way of sort of redistributing the building mass we propose to push down the southwest corner opening up to the park and in return move that building volume to the northeast corner creating almost like a man-made pool overlooking the the roof scapes of of the surrounding cities so it becomes like this sort of gently pixelated the undulating landscape and you could really see the sort of the extension of the of the facade lines of the neighboring buildings being carried through and only deeper into the plan it sort of rises up opening up basically everybody to face the face the view looking at the apartments themselves like this sort of pixelated roof landscape becomes like this cluster of little private gardens design in such a way that like three to five of them like group together to create like these like three-dimensional gardens for the people living there design in such a way that you can actually step straight out of your apartment and then sort of visit these different levels you get this like very sort of exciting garden of plateaus and essentially almost like a it becomes almost like a very low resolution photo of a hillside where you have like these different kinds of landscapes occupying the different pixels hard pavements or plants and essentially we're like one of the main concerns when you do housing is that if you're trying to do something that is a little bit more interesting than your typical stack of apartments sort of laid out in a nice box you have to be like very careful about costs and sort of the the whole project is really based on this sort of a like Universal application of a building system that has like the possibility within it of an incredible variety so it's all based and it's like incredibly rational and an efficient system it's still being developed right now but what the current thinking that we definitely want to use is some form of geothermal and also the fact that the Roof Gardens severely delayed the water the stormwater overload on on the sewage system in the evening you'll see like light seeping out of this sort of a little manmade the hillside and if you look at the rest of the apartments the facade are made like this sort of a 6 sec module like essentially to take advantage of the corner sight all of the apartments are oriented towards the southwest looking out towards the pack also like providing the apartments with views in in two directions but to ensure like privacy from one Terrace to the next up from one apartment to the next the the wooden facades basically facing away from the south or the west the facades are wouldn't they're covering the wall here and then the the boards are flipped out to actually allow the possibility to to see out from from within the apartment and this logic is actually reversed in the inner corners where suddenly the most attractive view is shifting suddenly the the orientation of the apartment is shifting as well so you have this sort of a inversion of the logic so that means that when you are approaching from the east or from the from the north you see that you saw a vertical wall of wood when you're looking out from inside the apartment you can see like you look for the sub trellis that actually ensures a maximum transparency from inside out but it ensures that you're never going to be looking at the at your neighbor again like coming from the from the east you see this like sloping landscape of wood and from the park itself is like this sort of completely open a facade with all these like pushed in balconies and the sort of an inhabited the roof scape like it's like very very gentle facade the lines that are made out of something completely modular and an orthogonal and finally like not gonna explain the plans but like within this like modularity we have like an incredible variety possible and if you sort of move off through the the floor plans you can see this sort of a it's like moving a tear escape that that creates this of continuity of private gardens and finally the roof becoming like a public space for all of the all of the tenants in so in a really banal way it almost becomes like an architectural echoing of the of the landscape of the of the park itself like this sort of hybrid of Park and an city creating sort of a national transition again you see this sort of a Twin Peaks kind of element and sort of quickly run through them the whole project once again also trying to serve the whole idea of trying to introduce wood as the main perceived material in a large building is relatively new and also like you can see like even though it does go a little bit above and beyond the roof scape in general you actually have like these industrial structures you have the silos of the port right next to it that somehow completely dwarfed it and it becomes as this very sort of a gentle little extension of the park up to the roof of the city so we will be quite optimistic about this project and hopefully in three or four years this could be a view walking down in a Colleen Notley movie and as the last thing I'd like to share with you and maybe you could test the volume or you did it perfect baby's gotta be very loud that could be excited normally like having moved to America I've often like some showing some of the work we've done in Copenhagen and now what we're doing in and in Sweden people sort of quite often dismiss it as that yeah you know of course but you can only do this in like socialist Scandinavia where even the developers do care about profit server asked has a very visionary developer but I'm sure that he also cares about the profit but a year and a half ago we got invited by Manhattan real estate developer and as you probably know man hadn't real estate developers are notorious for being like very shrewd businessmen darkness thirst our client he has a house in West Palm Beach where there's actually sharks in the water and he says he goes swimming anyway because being a Manhattan real estate developer he gets professional courtesy from from the Sharks but he asked us to look at this neighborhood in in Hell's Kitchen on the on the west side of Manhattan it's a wonderful site on the Hudson River with a beautiful views over the water facing west and south but also right next to a power plant and a sanitation plant so we thought like this place really needs some kind of a sense of place actually like almost like an oasis in the middle of this very noisy neighborhood the West Side Highway is taking off right there so without like having spent ten years of our careers trying to escape the tyranny of the typology of the Copenhagen courtyard this sort of northern european typology of building around green space in the middle we thought that it might actually be quite interesting in new york because you could say in the courtyard is at the architectural scale what Central Park is in an urban scale I can urban oasis in the middle of the dense city so the whole project became about what happens when you marry and a New York skyscraper with a copenhagen courtyard or how could you actually create a quartz creeper so since we place the courtyard next to the Hellena we try to preserve the Helena's views because not only is it owned by our client it's also named after his daughter and then to give it Manhattan density in the northeast corner we lift it up to 460 feet and very similar to what we're trying to do in yet it but in a sort of Manhattan typology it retains the views from like the sunlight exposure from the south and and the west and also the views over the Hudson River and and the sunset creating this like quite exciting new typology on the skyline of of the West Side of Manhattan this sort of a quite unusual silhouette of a tilted courtyard building with a giant courtyard in the middle traditionally the courtyard is some kind of a secret that is kept for the tenants of a Google Earth but here you'll actually be able to see it from the outside it becomes a spire from from the east and in this case it's a continuous it's a very steep slope so it's a continuous roof where the the terraces are sunken into this roof plane and because of the asymmetry all of the apartments actually have views even the court at itself has views over the the Hudson so anyway you can say this sort of e2v nation that's happening on the waterfront of Manhattan this seems to be invading the city fabric of the urban city block itself we've gone through the whole works our client in this case I've been working on the site for two and a half years and he wasn't getting rezoning and we we now have the excavation and foundation permits and are breaking ground in in March so with a little bit of luck on our sides in exactly four years this could be the view driving up and down the the West Side Highway [Music] right next to the narrow but I'll be good fella I'll babysit nitro and since i made it here i can make it anywhere they love me everywhere i use the Connells right the elbow broadway pull me back to that mcdonalds took into my stash spot 560 space street catch me in the kitchen like the simmons whippet a street that she would live any moment in the world trade long the king [Music] [Applause] [Music] and actually so like as an architect you will if you don't already realize this it happens quite rarely that you get to build anything we've been around for like eleven years and we've built ten structures but actually the first structure that we got to build in Manhattan like yesterday it was Valentine's Day hopefully some of you experienced that but we we got invited to do this public art work in the middle of Times Square I'll just essentially it's a it's a sculpture of four hundred acrylic tubes some of them have LEDs inside and when people touch this this plate it starts beating and when more people either touch the plate together or touch each other it measures the amount of resistance as it goes through all of the connected bodies and it beats stronger and stronger the more people get get engaged so here's a small sample and it's even though it looks like there is a three dimensional hardens there it's just a forest of columns that create this solution so here's a small taste of what at the what it looks like [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you hear me thank you very much Bianca for a very engaging lecture and I'm sure there are very many questions in the audience but I'm gonna take the opportunity to ask the first question and I mean you're having a very engaging lecture and it relates and you're very very historical and not only verbally but also the projects are very versed Oracle architectural rhetoric why it's the the project seems to have a clarity there are legible the figure is present and I wonder how you work with that differently in the design process as well as in the process with a client or is that something that is are they totally in tandem like am I mean I think first of all the way we work and I think the way all offices work but I think in many ways we have really taken the consequence of this we always collaborate even internally in the office like I'm here with my partner Yara blah and my colleague Katherine Wong we were responsible for the yarid project so and and I think more than then those two there's like two more people that have been part of the team maybe even a handful more during a stressful moments so so in that sense it's always a collective effort and my old Danish teacher which would be the equivalent of your old Swedish teacher I guess she always used to say that if you don't write clear it's because you don't think clear and I think if I think we do discipline ourselves quite a bit in trying to think clear and speak clear and draw clear so because i if everybody is unclear then the only thing that's clear is that everything is unclear like and nobody will understand each other if like if Kat cannot express what she means I won't understand it and it's gonna be this like nightmare of a frustration so in that sense we we do spend quite a lot of effort in like reiterating what is this project all about and also the the way we interact with the clients in this case like yeah that for instance it was not mmm it was not a competition it was a commission so we had the luxury of actually having multiple meetings with the clients and we could present some ideas and some ideas were more successfully received than others and and that allowed us to sort of strengthen the arguments towards why did we go this way and why we're not going this way and so I think that says it's not like we we sit down and think and then we make the project and then we make a presentation the the design process is actually a continuous reiteration of what ends up being the presentation interesting any questions audience hi actually um when I see your presentation and all the things that picked it on the website that when you design some project you have a really clearly like directly principle but as we know when we do the architectural designs that is kind of complicated experiences so maybe sometimes we'll met some problem which is like kind of try to broke your first principle so I'm kind of wondering how to how you solve that problem did you get the question I got slightly lost the two thirds into the question maybe just recap the main it was like okay so it's like you have like really clearly and directly principle we know try to design some project but sometimes the process is not that simple is really complicated so if there's some issue try to broke your first principle like maybe they can satisfy this aspect but not satisfy that one which which is also necessary aspect how you solve that I mean I think also I think I get it I mean I think there's this like different there is a certain like we made a book about our work that we called yes is more which is the sort of manifesto for an inclusive approach to architecture not only in the city they know that building can be inclusive invite people or life or the city to to engage but also that the design process a big is inclusive in that it actually invites and incorporates input from outside the the office like from you know the clients or the neighbors or the politicians or the building regulations or the financial limitations or whatever it is to inform our design decisions and I think in the beginning when we look at a lot of different approaches it also becomes a question of trying to find out what can this project be all about it's of course a question of establishing criteria what's going to be the biggest problem in this project what's gonna be the biggest potential what are the the key criteria that's gonna inform our design decisions but I think quite often architecture suffers from the fact that you are trying I like the image of you know an angry baby that's sitting with this baby tour where you have to combine a brick with a certain shape with a hole that has a similar shape and it's trying to train the baby to recognize a circle and put it in a circular hole but sometimes the baby is going to try to smack the square through the circle and and you know no matter how much it insists and it may it might even like hammer through but it's going to destroy both the the square and the circle and I that's often what architects is very much like that you're trying to take a preconceived idea and you're gonna try to force it through and every single condition that you encounter becomes like an obstacle and each time you get some kind of feedback it becomes something that like grinds your idea down to the lowest common denominator and you end up with a skwerkel and I think what we try to do is to delay the the preconceived idea and try to really find you know it's it's gonna be much easier to fall in love with a girl if she already loves you so like if anyway were you if you if you if you fall in love with an idea that that can already happen rather than insisting on some stupid idea that you should simply just do somewhere else I think there's a major part of it and so in that sense paradoxically quite often we manage to get away with things that are quite outside of the ordinary but it's outside of the ordinary that is very specific to this context like I think all I could dream about doing and a skyscraper that's twice as big at the top us at the bottom but you know you can never get the clients to do it because it's like stupid and expensive unless you have a stupid site that has like a triangular footprint where you can actually increase the amount of your real-estate value by turning the triangle into a rectangle so something that would normally be a stupid idea suddenly becomes a really smart idea in this specific situation so that was like the one chance we're probably ever going to get to do ask why angle any other question thank you we're wondering about the structural engineers do you have an ongoing collaboration with a specific team or do you work with different structural engineers for different projects we've been working quite a bit with a Katie in London and with Arab and with bureau health and I think we're pretty promiscuous when it comes to engineers apparently I don't know but I life it was like hanifa Kara from a Katie well I think it's part of the school also in some way has been like incredibly supportive from day one like he was very early in being potentially in US and we've we've done quite a few things together sadly a Katie have become very good at getting a good face which has made it a little bit difficult to ensure their jobs in some projects but we're working with them actually on a project in Umi Oh right now so so it's it's like it's a it's a long ongoing collaboration that hasn't materialized too much in bill form yet do you normally get to pick the structural engineers and and work together for from day one yeah like it's essentially like what typically happens is that a lot of our work is pre-qualification so we we apply as a team and and there it's essentially the business development apartment that the teams up sometimes the engineers find the job and we go with them and of course like the stuff we've been doing in China we've been doing it with Arab Shanghai and an Arab Beijing so it also a little bit depends on who is strong in what region but but of course it it makes perfect sense to to keep up good long collaborations but actually also on the other hand I think actually once in a while to like you know you always try harder on the first date so so that's also sometimes works in collaborations do you have any more questions in the audience I'm one day yes so it's a question a little bit about how the office works and sometimes working in a design team you develop nice design that is clear and everything but it just happens that the boss doesn't like it and you just have to start over so so don't that notion you have a very clear language but it also seems like the architecture also follows like a narrative and sort of from the book just is more so would you say that you try I mean what I'm trying to ask are the designs there that are interesting and has the clarity and everything but you just say no let's not do this let's do more this because it's in our language or is it more really that all the architecture that comes out this sort of sort of based on the process more that's a it's an easy question I'm gonna I'm gonna have either Jakob or cancer I [Laughter] don't I I mean I think there is a distinct language that we do use but it's not something that's so conscious it kind of arises from a lot of parameters and the way we respond isn't so much a language as kind of trying to think more for this social kind of benefit there's always kind of I think I'm in America I'm an American so I see architecture a little bit differently and I ended up in Scandinavia is there is kind of a air for um social good you don't see in the States and out of the work isn't so much wants to kind of um trying to create a social good as for kind of coming up with a design and having it knocked over if that's what you said earlier I don't think very satisfying we don't want to go into one case where no but I actually think I think the guys at the office worked very well as editors in a way where they kind of enhance it's not so much about a language but rather about the idea about what kind of enhancing the idea instead of knocking over any designer language brilliant anymore it's the truth a couple of more questions but but I actually like it want one specific thing like we do actually sometimes simply not allow ourselves to do a certain thing because somebody has done it in a similar way where we would be in essentially like and it's a kind of silly thing but it's also like you know it's like for us the the joy of the journey is the exploration of uncharted territory and sometimes because we we do return to submit you anyway you can see that the the building we're doing and Stockholm and the building we're doing in Manhattan it's the same typology it's a an asymmetric courtyard typology but it's because they're in different contexts they're quite different still as architecture but but they're somehow a similar DNA but one has been living in a very tall building like butall City and one has been living in a and a more sort of a friendly Scandinavian city and that creates like very different architectures so sometimes we do revisit the same vocabulary again and again and again until we're really done but but certain things if if it's too much the turf of one of our colleagues somewhere we wouldn't really go there I actually had a very interesting experience last night I somebody sent me a letter to the editor that a lady called Katarina wrote she's from chess pet studio in memory in architect in does anybody read I've taken well I do the Swedish architect and it was it was quite charming was like with with recent events we have won a lot of sort of attention even outside the realm of architecture and now suddenly some my mind really like low-level blogger from one of the tabloids in Denmark has put a lot of attention on trying to you know it's too suspicious that we seem to be doing interesting things even on a global scale we must be cheating or stealing or whatever and he had found that a spade studio designed a spiral bicycle parking for members that you know has curving ramps with bicycles like our danger of Union and Shanghai so his statement was that we simply stole the design and he tried to call them up and try to have them say that we stole their design and they didn't want to do that they sort of disagreed and they also so like she also writes a whole essay about exchange of ideas and an originality and and so and so forth and then and in general it's just like being a really nice and sort of friendly colleague as I wrote her some kind of a thank-you mail for being so nice but uh because I actually do think that since what we are trying to do is discover things if you go where everybody else has gone you won't discover new things and in that sense sometimes there might be a really brilliant solution to something that we like really really attractive solution but we simply we're not going to go there we're gonna we're gonna focus our time on one of the other directions because it's less explored yes I had a question as sort of drawing back to yours and also when you're talking about the baby with the circle and square and you know not a lot of em you know you're based in Scandinavia and you've done a number of work here but you've also done it abroad but now you've opened an office in the States and it's a much different context there there's not the same kind of social responsibility and my question was do you approach projects there differently knowing that you don't have the same kind of structure infrastructures that you have in and instead of just designing a building or an idea but try and read it out in a in a larger context are you that way I think I mean one of one of the things we we discovered like I serve in it if you're doing an urban space in you know what I feels like the the number eight it was quite clear also for the client that the challenge of this neighborhood is if it's gonna be lively or not because it's like a pioneering neighborhood so the whole idea about even walking up into the building was embraced as an idea of creating community and that actually really works in Denmark and we did notice that in New York we kept drawing benches and places to sit and and they just kept saying that's gonna attract the homeless people so there's and of course you you have to somehow work with that reality you can't just be like blue-eyed and lame mean it won't be nice if there's a you know a crackhead sleeping in front of your daughter's apartment in on the west side it's like it's gonna be really not nice and then she's not gonna live there and then so somehow I have to try to find ways of working with those mechanisms one thing I do actually realize is that because in Scandinavian socialism social responsibility is also to a large extent state sanctioned or like and you know we expect the state to take care of culture and social issues and of course I also agree but one of the things that exist in an America much much more is private philanthropy and cultural entrepreneurism and social entrepreneurism that the people that actually have certain capacity are naturally expected to be involved in these things so there is also a kind of dynamism or maybe there's like a social entrepreneurship entrepreneurship in terms of philanthropy and your cause for philanthropy social philanthropy is something that is less known in and I think it's can Olivia you more have like some kind of state body that takes care of that whereas if you have an idea for something you know even have an idea for something in in Denmark it's gonna be hard to write a letter to the social Minister whereas if you have an idea for something in in America people will actively do something about it and fundraise it and and get it to happen so I think the two systems have have various a possibility I guess what I'm trying to say there is that yes you get the financing you know like you can say you can fundraise and you get the private backing but it's more project specific where here you have much more of an infrastructure so if you build this area out in the outskirts of Copenhagen the mission of how municipality before they've even okayed it they're gonna make sure that there's a bus system getting out there that there's a the Train is going to get out there so that it's going to eventually connect with the city and in the state's it's you know my experience I grew up there is it's a little bit more not quite organic is the wrong word but you know things can crop up and then they can become a codel oasis and they never connect to the city or there's not the bigger picture yeah well I think I think a lot of the things that that maybe we take for granted here I actually really popping up there like everything I mean Bloomberg has been I mean I know New York better the other cities in in the States but you know Bloomberg has been incredibly good at hiring really really good people so like Amanda Burton the chairman of the Department City Planning jeanette Sadiq on the Department of Transportation they've been like very visionaries like you know they do talk about transit oriented development they are building a new subway line on Second Avenue they you know they've paved more bicycle paths than we have in Copenhagen now over the last five years it's also a bigger city but it's they have planted like 700,000 trees in their plans to reach a million trees so in many ways they really do care about these things and I think the typical sort of don't give a about the rest kind of Free American idea is more maybe the the middle of America or maybe even something about the past and okay Manhattan is it's actually social democratic we pay 40 percent in text so it's like it in many ways it is quite different from from so difficult to use in New York as an example since it's it exists much more like a European city but if you go to the Midwest where you know you have large medium-sized cities in May by American terms and they barely have public transportation let alone bike paths and it's just a question if it's something that you're engaging in as you've starting a practice over there something that you're thinking about because I would imagine your approach to those kind of projects would be different no I mean we're not going to go into politics but uh but but but I do think that one of the reasons that we have that we have a fair amount of opportunities say that microphone before she states the question you know like I think one of the reasons that we're actually getting like quite good opportunities is that I actually think that America is in a bizarre way been really split between having like 99% super corporate officers and then the God was you know westcoast crazy like sort of funky shapes that are like difficult and expensive but don't really do anything in terms of their you know performance they just look amazing or whack and and I think also like times with the crisis everybody was asking us why why on earth are you opening up of office in America when you should be opening office in China because that's where all the growth is I actually think that America had an interesting moment where post you know financial crisis and Bank collapse the this sort of America got so challenged as a superpower that that everybody sort of naturally started questioning all of the recipes of the past and this sort of you know big car model that mates of most of the car companies crumple they have now like sort of started spawning a lot more innovation and they're sort of so I think also America is in a very interesting moment where social responsibility and environmental awareness is actually seen as an incredible resource and following the typical American market model that becomes a competitive advantage if you bring these things to the table so in that sense I really believe that America has a quite unique capacity to turn around quite quickly and in that things it's a it's a very dynamic place to to be as an architect going out thank you Bianca thank you very much for wonderful lecture [Applause]

Channel: KTH Arkitekturskolan

Views: 219,888

Keywords: bjarke ingels, sustainability, kth arkitekturskolan, kth school of architecture

Id: PpMDkQbye0A

Length: 97min 1sec (5821 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 09 2012