Bjarke Ingels On the Power of Architecture | WIRED

I just want to say that I'm actually incredibly excited to be here with Wyatt at the Skywalker Ranch it's like to live long obsessions coming together this is my office in Copenhagen we're inside a cow's burg factory where they used to make the least interesting part of the beer the bottle cap we're also in New York these are my American colleagues we architects but we also do haircuts and basically the way we work is that we always try to mine as much information out of a situation before we intervene in a way we start looking for what could be the greatest potential or what could be the biggest problem and then we use that information to inform our design decisions so they're not arbitrary stylistic choices they're always informed by something specific and I'll just give you two examples we did a sports hall in my old high school and we could either put it on the football fields or in the middle of the courtyard but in Denmark football is the national sport so it would be like a political suicide to put it there so we had to dig it under the courtyard and it's a handball hole and on the perimeter you need 15 feet of clearance and in the middle you need 25 feet of clearance and actually we got the commission from my old math teacher so as a sort of homage we based the architecture of the dome on the mathematical formula for a ballistic arch so the sort of a graceful curvature of the glulam beams is actually shaped by the mathematics of the sport everything you see here is actually it's not designed essentially it's just simply tracing the sort of a the natural geometry of a thrown handball and as a result it leaves an imprint of in the courtyard it becomes like this informal furniture that has actually sort of invited people to start hanging out so like almost like this or cascade of effects there's like basic tracing of the of the mathematics of handball suddenly creates this this new space in in the courtyard another example is the Hamlet's Castle Combe ball north of Copenhagen it recently became unesco world heritage and the Danish Maritime Museum used to be inside the castle but they had to put it somewhere else and they suggested put it inside the drydock where they used to build ships and it was kind of a dilemma because UNESCO said that we couldn't stick out of the ground as much as a foot to not block the view of the castle but of course the museum wanted some kind of an architectural masterpiece to attract people to come and check it out so we got this idea to use the museum as a way of preserving the dock turning the dock inside out we turn it into a giant void all we have to do is design a series of bridges one that stops the water from coming in one that connects over to the castle and then one that sort of takes you down into the museum we could actually build all of the bridges in a Chinese shipyard and then sail them in and click them into place so in a way the architecture is completely sort of manifesting all of the aspects of shipbuilding from the steel of the bridges to the concrete of the of the dock you have this sort of descent through different spaces of intimate scale on vast scale you get this like clash of the old and the new the lightness of the steel and the glass clashing with the heaviness of the concrete and anyway the sort of this is the grown-ups auditorium that sort of extends under the stage and becomes an auditorium for the kids the dark extends into the restaurant and you have this sort of a holes of coexistence of the sort of the Shakespearean heritage on one hand and this is like ultra contemporary universe below the horizon the sort of an inverse Titanic moment looking into a and essentially like like once we've defined what the key criteria is like the proximity to the UNESCO heritage we don't necessarily have the answer it's just a question we've formulated so we have to do tons of models we always have to like make tons of models to test it and sometimes we make huge models and sometimes we make the models out of Lego so like if you just go around our office everything is sort of Lego everybody even our signage is made out of Lego so when we got approached by Lego actually Lego made one of our buildings in the Legos door we're not going to file a suit it's actually the highest compliment you can get us an architect but when they approached us to to look at making a Lego house which would be sort of looking at all aspects of culture through the eyes of Lego we were sort of incredibly excited we went completely to town and we really had to get this job it's going to be like well Lego is from in in Pilon in in Denmark and essentially what what really excites me about Lego is that Lego empowers children and everyone like playing with Lego to create their own world and then to inhabit it through play and that's exactly what architecture is supposed to be about it's in a way of like finding ways to empower people to influence their physical environment so that they can actually live the life they want to live the Lego house is on a construction this is me this is like the foundations of like these concrete Lego bricks this is me standing with all of the richest people in Denmark the Lego family and if you if you can't wait it's going to open in two years but if you can't wait you can actually build it yourself but sort of a way to sort of get people involved it's this sort of idea of like crowd-sourced design in a way we did an urban space in Copenhagen and it's it's in the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in all of Denmark it consists of what we call the Red Square the black market and the Green Park and you have sixty different nationalities living here so the importance of the project was really to involve the local community and create a sense of ownership so we got this idea that it would be strange if the Danes had done the best pinch and the best trash bin and the best lamppost so we reached out to the local community through different media and through meetings and had people recommend elements from their other home country and the basic idea is that we don't eat Chinese food to be nice to the Chinese it's because we crave Beijing duck or noodles or dumplings and we didn't put a Moroccan fountain in the middle of Copenhagen to be nice to the Moroccans but because they have an amazing heritage of architecture water features so you have a Jamaican sound system the neighbors hate it a Thai boxing arena you have Iraqi swings little boxes from Great Britain bollards from Ghana like bicycle racks from Finland the sign on the Red Square is actually a sign from the Red Square you have like an amazing Cossack bus stop way cooler than a typical Danish one we found palm trees in China but actually grow in a Danish climate this octopus like really serve reveals the the diversity of the neighborhood and the sort of impact of playing when you look at the benches this s curved love seed from Mexico where you can look the person you're sitting next to into the eyes there's a Belgian bench where everybody looks away from each other so and they're like even down to the lighting we have these neon signs that advertise stuff you can't buy in Denmark this is a Qatari dentist like something from the socialist countries we even made an app so people can get the stories of the different objects and in a way like it really reminds how like amazing it becomes when you outsource the creativity to the community to actually have an massive impact on their own environment so we took this idea with us when like you probably remember like a bit more than two years ago sandy hit New York and cost a lot of devastation it wiped out all of lower Manhattan creating a new neighborhood in Manhattan South how south of power and and essentially like suddenly the Sandy happened because the sort of Atlantic hurricane build is expanding because of rising temperatures and because of the geometry of the New York Bight you have this sort of 90-degree funnel shape like all of this sort of storm surge is channeled into the most densely populated region in all of America putting 50% of New York at risk and if you look at this map of lower Manhattan you can see since the 17th century we've been expanding Manhattan through landfill and this landfill is exactly the area that is now flood prone so you can say the areas that we have been responsible for creating also the ones where we need to take greater responsibility in in protecting them so the question is like how can you protect all of lo Manhattan without creating this seawall that segregates the life of the city from the water around it and we thought maybe we could learn a little bit from the High Line the High Line is a piece of decommissioned infrastructure that has now turned into one of the most popular promenades in New York City we were thinking like what if you can actually instead of waiting for the infrastructure to get decommissioned before you add the program what if you could actually think of the resilience infrastructure for Manhattan as sort of the dry line to imagine it that it comes from day one with a lot of extra sort of sort of positive social and environmental side effects so when you look at the flood map you have these like natural pinch points where the flooding doesn't get very far into the island because of the topography so we use these as a way to create compartments just like you have compartments in a ship each compartment can sort of be sort of solved on its own and then when you look at the sort of urban development of New York its characterized by this David and Goliath encounter between Robert Moses aka the power broker and Jane Jacobs Robert Moses he did a lot of the the necessary infrastructure investments of Manhattan like a lot of the highways on the waterfront a lot of the social housing projects but they were very very top-down and they were like really very sort of instantly successful they often like cut the people off from like different neighborhoods got cut off from each other or like you couldn't reach the water and one day he tried to cut a highway through Greenwich Village and he met Jane Jacobs who mounted this grassroot opposition and eventually she defeated the plan and Greenwich Village is still there but we thought you know in this case it could be interesting to think of this resilience infrastructure as the love child of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs because you know to provide you know eight contiguous miles of waterfront protections you need holistic big-picture perspective but it needs to happen rooted in the local communities and essentially the main challenge is to resist a certain amount of storm search you need a certain geometry but this geometry could make could be made in so many different ways so that when you go there you won't notice that this is actually part of a dam it could be like a piece of landscape that also becomes what protects the the city from flooding it could be like various artworks or like almost like furniture landscaping you can imagine like the the median of the West Side Highway could become this art piece that also sort of protects the the city from from flooding and as a way to do this we went a step further we went to the Lower East Side Louis side was like really massively hit by by Sandy these are the areas that got flooded and when you look at the 100-year flood and the 500 year flood actually two-thirds of this neighborhood is is flood threatened its it's a primarily residential neighborhood and it's this is actually a map of all of the public housing or the affordable housing on lower Manhattan it's all inside this neighborhood it's also the most ethnic diversity board it's the most socially challenged neighborhood it's like rather under serviced by by public transportation but in return it has a highway cutting it off from from the waterfront and even though it appears green it actually has a lot less Park that any other neighborhood in in Manhattan 95% of the surface is impervious which also makes it more flood prone and when you walk down the waterfront you can see that it's like tortured by the sort of relationship to to the infrastructure so we sort of created this process where we sort of reached out to to the local community we had a series of workshops with the people from the Lower East Side trying to test different ideas we made this of smorgasbord of different solutions and together we formulated a series of strategies so because one idea was in the East River Park simply to create like raise the ground of the pact to protect the pact from the north of the highway and also protect the city from from flooding it be a phase one of a phase two to eventually submerge the park and integrate a new subway line underneath it submerge the highway we're sort of moving the bicycle lanes into the into the park side the existing bridges that are these caged highway bridges become like high lines sort of extending you know we integrate a DA accessibility into the natural topography you arrive in this like sloping pack that takes you out into the water we're also creating a 10th Street Harbor bath because the Hudson is actually or the East River so clean you can swim in it underneath the FDR we got this idea so actually turn the underside of the FDR into some like an asset like you have a lot of spaces in New York that I actually beautiful when you look up so we got this idea of creating these add pieces hanging underneath the the bridge so you know normally you just look up and you have like local artists and you know it illuminates and make the other side more friendly and then you know some of them can flip down and create temporary enclosures for like a Christmas market or they can become what what saves the city some places all you need is actually four feet of height to resist the 50-year floodplain so they can be like undulating benches serving different activities and then they also becomes what saves the city and they can serve as sockets for bigger flood barriers when you have a 100 year or 500 year flood coming further down we're proposing to create these little pavilions that animate the space underneath the canopy of the of the highway so like galleries and markets that sort of make the underside more friendly and lively but also protects the the city from flooding their place so that you will never block the view from the side streets coming down to the water so you always look uninterrupted down to the water but then you have these like sliding walls that can come out and actually stop a flood from coming in and finally when you reach the south tip of Manhattan we're working with a battery pack to create sort of a series of little events in the pack that creates a natural topography we're sort of integrating a new Harbor school and what we imagined to be a Museum of cities on the water where the big order thorium could actually be this like inverse aquarium giving you a view into the different flood lines of different storms so essentially the thinking is to take all of the hard infrastructure that is necessary to protect Manhattan from flooding but then to always design it in close dialogue with the different residents of the different communities so that as you move around you won't sense that we've sort of incarcerated Manhattan in a flood wall but we've actually sort of reanimated Manhattan so that when the next Santa comes it's going to remain a lively city this project has just been sort of granted three hundred thirty five million dollars from the federal government so we're going to start phase one but but I often get the objection that this is a little bit too much like science fiction so just to give you an example of what we call social infrastructure that is actually happening right now this is downtown Copenhagen we're doing a waste-to-energy power plant that basically turns trash into electricity and district heating when you look at it as a resource one ton of trash equals one and two thirds of an oil barrel in terms of energy so it's a really valuable resource but the they operate on an economy of scale so they're ugly boxes that cast shadows on the neighbors and block the views this is going to be the biggest and tallest building in Copenhagen so it's going to be right next to the marina and it's going to be right where the local boys go waterskiing so we thought like in Denmark we love skiing we have snow but we have absolutely no mountains but we do have mountains of trash so we thought we have to go to Sweden for four hours to Iza bail but because of the sheer magnitude of this power plant we can put 2/3 of Iza bail on top of the power plant we know how big the machines are so we decide in this like sloping roof that has like an elevator takes you to the top of a bit green a blue and a black ski slope we plant trees on top of the column so it really becomes like a a man-made Mountain insanely we won the competition based on this idea so suddenly we we had to figure it out just to give you a sense of scale you can see this is an Olympic halfpipe so some of you might have noticed that Denmark got zero medals in in Sochi we hope to change that because now we can actually practice at home also for the people not skiing there's a hiking path you can do picnics you can enjoy the view of your otherwise completely flat City we're including the tallest climbing wall in the world 300 feet for those who have the balls and basically like the reason we could win the competition based on this idea like it's essentially turning the whole power plant into this man-made ecosystem where not only do we locally exploit the resources also together with the city of Copenhagen it becomes like an urban metabolism but the reason we could win it was because this is going to be the cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world the smoke coming out of the chimney is completely non-toxic it only contains a little bit of co2 and some steam so that's why you actually have fresh mountain air on top of this power plant normally you want to be as far away from a power plant as you can here it's actually completely clean but finally as a way to completely we we sort of configure the perception of a power plant we've worked with the realities United and Copenhagen suborbitals to design the chimney in a special way so that basically it's steam and when like at regular intervals it puffs a gigantic smoke ring so essentially something that used to be a symbol of pollution becomes something playful of course we couldn't find a smoke ring contractor so we've been struggling quite a bit with figuring out how to do this and just to finish off we we recently did a test at the end of August trying to figure out how to do this and this is how it went we got addicted so yeah so I think maybe like the I mean I just think this let this smoke ring is maybe like a good symbol of what architecture is is really all about because it is somehow this idea like it has this element of world-changing that you take something that is like a wild idea like pure fiction and then you suddenly turn it into to hide fact and I really like this idea that you know like when we came with this idea it everybody felt like that's insane but then like in 2017 that's just how it is you know people who say like in Venice people say in gondolas through streets of water and they New York people sort of inhabit the resilience infrastructure like pavilions or parks and in Denmark people ski on their power plants and they they puff giant rings of steam so in a way I get HR at its best it's really the the power to turn you to make the world a little bit more like our dreams thanks

Channel: WIRED

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Keywords: wired design conference 2014, wired, wdc 2014, bjarke ingels, bjarke ingels design, bjarke ingels architect, bjarke ingels architecture, bjarke ingels abstract, bjarke ingels big, big architecture, bjarke ingels urban design, bjarke ingels worldcraft, bjarke ingles denmark, urban design, bjarke ingels group, bjarke ingels orestad, bjarke ingels google, bjarke ingels ted, big ted, bjarke ingels world trade center, bjarke ingels new york, bjarke ingels lego, bjarke

Id: n9rye_X-qhY

Length: 21min 40sec (1300 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 03 2014