FORMGIVING with Bjarke Ingels | SXSW 2019

[Applause] thank you I'm very excited to be here today and I have I prepared a few things that I'd like to share at an incredible speed to download as much visual information on you guys and then we can have a conversation afterwards I'm an architect from from Denmark and my mother has always reminded me that I have the proportions of a lego man and and she does have a point and so you can imagine and the interesting thing about Lego is that Lego is a company that has succeeded in making everybody believe that Lego is from their home country but it is from my home country so you can imagine the excitement I felt when I got approached by the Lego family to help them design and build the home of the brick here we are laying the foundations like sturdy concrete Lego bricks this was the first architectural model we we built and this is what it looks like today and we tried to design the Lego house as inviting and as interactive as Lego itself so the the roof is a series of interconnected playgrounds where everybody's invited to climb and sort of enjoy the views over the the sort of the town of Berlin also the Lego house these like blocks lift up liberating the ground creating a square that is also open to the public so the the citizens of Berlin can roam around freely inside the square and and only if you actually want to go to the galleries do you actually have to buy a ticket otherwise it's it's just a public space it's also I think interesting because it's probably one of the only museums in the world where you have to touch the artifacts you can also descend down into a vault underneath the the Lego house where you can find the treasures of LEGO history including probably the coolest Lego set ever built the yellow castle from 1979 my first Lego set and and and then of course I was incredibly you know I almost shed a tear when I saw that we had become immortalized that our creation is now part of the vault which is probably the highest honor any architect can ever dream of but but I think what's what's important about Lego is that Lego is not a toy it's a tool it's a tool that empowers the child to create his or her own world and then to inhabit that world through play and to invite her friends to join her in co-creating and cohabiting that world and at its best that is exactly what architecture is we have this incredible power to realize the world we like to find ourselves living in and the Danish word for design is foam cooling which literally means form giving like literally giving form to that which has not yet been given form or in other words to give form to the future and more specifically to give form to the future that we would like to find ourselves living in in the future so we have this incredible incredible power just some examples of of how you can shape your world actually inspired by Lego and the sort of modularity of Lego we created this affordable housing project in Copenhagen stacking rooms like Lego bricks but by leaving a little bit of a gap in between them even though it's modular we can actually create organic curbs so you end up having this kind of almost essential feeling they step down to create terraces so anyway the modularity and the repetition actually ends up becoming the what what enables the the variation another example from my hometown Copenhagen the eighth house that has sort of a combined shops kindergardens townhouses and apartments to create a sort of a man-made Mountain where you can walk and bicycle all the way to the penthouse so you have almost like a small-scale community with townhouses and gardens in the middle of the city block in Amsterdam we've sort of turned the the European courtyard inside out allowing the port of Amsterdam to enter so you can actually if you have a straight aim you can sail your ship in and dock inside the building and in New York we try to take the European courtyard building and combine it with the density of an American skyscraper almost like putting a miniature Central Park in the heart of the city block opening up to the views over the Hudson the sunset and and one of the things we've been sort of consistently interested in over the the decades is to try to anyway change the perception of what sustainability is and needs to be because a decade and a half ago we had this feeling that sustainability was suffering from this idea that it was always a question of almost like this Protestant idea that it has to hurt to do good like taking cold showers in the morning so we thought what if sustainable cities and buildings actually increase our enjoyment the first example we designed the Danish Pavilion in Shanghai in 2010 where we tried to demonstrate how what makes Copenhagen more enjoyable to live in also makes it more sustainable so for instance we brought the City Bikes Cook Megan was the first city in the world that had a free system of bikes you could borrow so you we created a museum where you could actually bike through the whole museum making it the perfect museum for impatient people also we thought like in in Copenhagen our first project that we ever realized 16 years ago was the Copenhagen Harbor bath and it's because the port of Copenhagen has become so clean that you can swim in it sort of reminding us that a clean port is not only nice for the fish it's amazing for the citizens because they don't have to sit in the four hours to get to the beach they can actually jump in the port in the middle of town so we move that experience to to China allowing the visitors to experience how clean if not how cold Danish Harbor water is and to attract the Chinese we were trying to find common denominators between Denmark and China and and and we noticed that in the Chinese public school curriculum they have three fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen one of them being the story of the mermaid the national symbol of Denmark so we suggested to bring the mermaid to China freaking out the Danish nationalist party so I am I actually had to go to Parliament and argue her case and as you can see we we got her then we had to get her through Chinese customs and and and finally finally she she arrived as this kind of attraction to allow the the Chinese to feel how sustainability can actually increase enjoyment and life quality shortly after we got invited to design the headquarters for the main energy company in Shenzhen and we just opened it the sort of the volume was given we had to do two towers 110 and 220 meters but the facade we designed it like almost like an EC miyagi fabric like a pleated surface so facing away from the predominant direction of the Sun it's all glass but facing the predominate direction of the Sun it's all opaque but on average it's 5050 so depending on where you see it it sort of glides from being opaque to being transparent and this very simple idea reduces the thermal exposure to the Sun and the energy consumption for air-conditioning with 30% so without any moving parts or any technology purely the form of the building makes it perform so you can say what makes it look elegant is also what makes it perform elegantly another sort of way because you can say as an architect you always designing for someone else you you're rarely hired by architects because they can do it themselves so you somehow have to find ways of engaging with the people you're designing for and in in one case we got invited to do a urban space in Copenhagen it's a one kilometer long urban space in the most ethnically diverse part of Denmark 60 different nationalities so we created almost like an urban canvas what we call the black the black market and then we thought the idea would be true to try to tap into this diversity so they weigh like very often when you talk about integration in Europe these days it's like this the problem of integration the problem of immigration but we thought why don't we actually look at the sort of sort of undeniable positive aspects of of immigration so we we reached out to the local community and asked this the citizen living there to recommend elements from their other home country so based on this idea that you know we don't eat Chinese food or Japanese food to be nice to the Japanese it's because we're craving sashimi or gyoza miso in a similar way we didn't put a Moroccan fountain in this neighborhood to be nice to the Moroccans but because they have an incredible tradition for architecture of water features so now this is like a part of a of Copenhagen there's such a making sound system so you can connect your phone wirelessly and make spontaneous parties it it has triggered quite some complaints from the neighborhood but but it shuts off at 9 p.m. so it's fully within the letter of the law of course there's high boxing ring from from from Thailand Iraqi swing bicycle racks from Finland this like incredible bus stop from Kazakhstan way cooler than a typical bus stop and then we found palm trees in China that actually grow organically in a Danish climate there's this Japanese octopus that shows that play also becomes this incredible common denominator transcending culture and language the the benches become as almost like a Safari on social behavior you have an S curved love seat from Mexico where you're looking the person you're sitting next to into the ice you have a Belgium bench where everybody looks away from each other so even down to the lamps we we ended up sort of sampling these neon signs that advertise things you can't buy in Denmark this is a Qatari dentist for instance and like elements from former socialist countries and we created an app together with turbotech ions and super flakes our collaborators that sort of tells you the story of each artifact where it's from what's it doing here but but essentially trying to turn the idea of of immigration and integration into a positive that actually enriches not only our culture but also our our urban environment another way to sort of tailor the architecture to to its inhabitants is if you sort of try to create the framework for an existing organization and over the last couple of years we've been working with Google trying to imagine the physical framework for the the organization architecture that they already have so Googlers a part of teams of like 30 to 40 people neighborhoods of a hundred 100 250 people communities of up to 500 people and in the first building we started building for them we have 3000 people forming almost like a town typically you have all the support functions meaning rooms snack kitchens labs etc that block the floor plate and intro the communication between the different people so we thought let's let's organize it on two layers imagine a series of platforms proportioned to a neighborhood of 150 people the platform's ducked together creating a continuous landscape of 3,000 people separated by courtyards that are almost like squares in a town the courtyards a one level below where you have all of the busy social activities the meetings the labs the kitchens so you almost have a Medina or casbah on the ground floor a busy market and then you have this kind of contemplative ethic on top finally we drape a canopy of photovoltaics over the entire space making sure that we harvest every photon and only allow the perfect amount of daylight to to reach the building so so the entire facade is actually photovoltaics the canopy extends out inviting people to to enter once you go through the more sort of busy part you can then enter into the these little plazas or court yards from here you can ascend up into this kind of continuous environment and the idea is that each team depending on how a team grows or expands and contracts they can sort of migrate and spread out combining a neighborhood two neighborhoods and they can even sort of express their own character with a sort of a smaller scale of more temporary architecture so this was like our first sort of visual this idea that every photon is converted to power or or daylight and this is what it starts starts looking like now I don't you can recognize the scale of a person but it's like normally in a work environment you have you may have a nice Lobby but then you sort of sit and and and work in in the boondocks here they where you actually spend most of your time it's really this kind of Cathedral then of course we try to transform the same principles but applying them to the City of London a radically different environment which of course has transformed the quite a bit but still trying to sort of realize some of the same qualities that we can realize in in Silicon Valley so that that brings me to the sort of the last subject that I'd like to talk to before we have a conversation and that's this notion about how architecture is almost always created by adapting to some existing situations I think a nice example is a building we are finishing in a couple of months in Vancouver so it's located right where Granville bridge touches downtown you see this try fork that slices the city into these almost useless triangles we started mapping the constraints so we have setbacks from the from the streets we have setbacks from the bridges then there's almost a deal breaker which is that we need a hundred foot setback from the bridges because the city wants to ensure that nobody looks straight into the traffic on the bridge then there's a park where we shouldn't cast any shadows and finally we're left with a tiny footprint of only six and a half thousand square feet almost too small to even bother with so then we got this idea that once we get a hundred meters up in the air we can maintain the minimum distance but actually grow our floorplate to two twice the size this is the result as it looks today as soon as you drive over the bridge it's as if someone is pulling a curtain aside welcoming you to Vancouver or like a wheat growing through the cracks in the pavement and blossoming when it gets light and air underneath the bridge we're trying to turn the negative impact of the bridge into a positive so we're working with the local artists including Rodney gray him to turn the underside of the bridge into what we've sort of nicknamed the Sistine Chapel of street art like an art gallery upside down but essentially trying to sort of adapt and in a way sort of almost like reinterpret the bridge to become an asset for for the life of the city so here you see this kind of genie growing through the mist and up into to the clouds but essentially and an architecture sort of entirely almost evolved through adaptation to to the urban environment so if the underside of a bridge can become an ad museum maybe an ad museum can also serve as a bridge we were asked to do a small ad museum in a sculpture park in Norway and we got the idea to use the museum as a bridge to come from one side of the river to the other so it literally sort of rests between the two embankments you pass through the museum and then you continue your journey and and the museum almost becomes like one of the sculptures in the sculpture park it's gonna open this summer and and and also like one of the things that you can adapt to as an architect with architecture is changes and change can come from from anywhere but obviously as you probably well reminded of after a few days at South by Southwest it often comes from technology and in this case clean technology in one month we are opening a power plant in Copenhagen that is going to be the cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world so clean that there are no toxins coming out of the chimney so we thought like how can we celebrate this invisible fact and we thought it's it's such a big building it's the tallest and biggest building in Copenhagen in Denmark as you can see we have snow it's a cold climate but we have no mountains we have to drive six hours to get to the south of Sweden to find an alpine ski slope but because the power plant is so huge we can actually put 2/3 of the Swedish ski slope on the roof of the power plant so that's what we did this this is a few months ago a group of Danish professional skiers had this kind of accelerating experience of skiing at home for the first time ever and and at least one of them very excited claim that it's exactly like skiing on the Austrian Alps I'll take it but I think it also kind of shows this kind of incredible world-changing impact that architecture can have because like I had a son three months ago and this this powerplant the ski slope opens in one month so he's probably not gonna remember anything for like another year or two so he will never know really that there was a time when you couldn't ski on the roofs of the power plants in Copenhagen so imagine if his baseline and his generation face lines becomes taking for granted that of course power plants that's where you ski then imagine what they would be capable of imagining for for their future so right next to the to the power plant we we actually created our smallest project to date and it's it's it's almost like trying to hijack the global infrastructure of container shipping because containers are these incredibly standardized universally available room sized elements that are designed to stack up to up to eight floors once they've traveled around there were the world a few times you can buy them for $2000 in Amsterdam so we got the idea to take nine of these containers we chose a nice color stack them not for efficiency but to create a community sail them across the Baltic Sea into the port of Copenhagen and docked them as the first specimen of a company we've called urban Riga that it's essentially creating student homes in the middle of the port so a lot of university cities have port areas that are transforming so the students here can have like this lovely you know almost like waterfront or literally waterfront view they can jump from their window into the clean port of Copenhagen they can even get back inside and get so almost like that it's it's probably in some some of their cases going to be the nicest home they'll ever have so there's a roof a shared roof terrace photovoltaics that drive heat pumps in the floating pontoon below that actually extracts heat from the port water and so the entire home for for 12 students is powered by the Sun and is heated by the excess heat from from the water so almost like a floating miniature ecosystem so the next seven of these are coming to Copenhagen then a community of two to three hundred homes in Gothenburg is following and potentially a small floating village for the Olympics in Paris so essentially this this idea of a deployable fleet that of course can be used to begin with to solve student housing but of course can also be deployed in regions that suddenly have an urgency to house large populations so staying in this sort of idea of the transformation of our ports what is it by now I think six years ago hurricane sandy came and wiped out a big part of lower Manhattan shortly after we got invited to see if we could come up with ideas of how to respond to the necessary flood protection requirements make make the city of Manhattan more resilient and we thought how can we imagine protecting Manhattan keeping it dry without creating a wall segregating the life of the city from the water around it and we got inspired by the High Line the High Line in New York which is the second most popular Park in New York by now it's essentially decommissioned train tracks but now that there are no longer train tracks have become this kind of amazing space for the social life and the environment so we thought what if we don't have to wait until we be commissioned the resiliency infrastructure of Manhattan before it becomes nice so we suggested to the city of New York that we would take all of the necessary flood protection measures but design them in dialogue with the local communities to create a waterfront that not only is going to keep Manhattan dry but also make it more enjoyable and more accessible to the people living there and we've made this short film where you can see some of the people we worked with in this process like their experience during sandy and some of their dreams for for their future neighborhood that was actually why sandy was so bad is because of the phase of the Moon it was already a very large high tide as well as the storm surge coming in with the wind and the tide lining up perfectly to give us 14-foot sides instead of eight I'd like to see some type of flood protection in this area that's going to happen more vulnerable obviously between the close to the water something that just brings Wagga more walks different walks of life another escape is the busyness and the housing [Music] there's a great space that could really become community space cultural space and and active uses [Music] [Applause] [Music] everyone enjoys space and in New York and other congested cities it's hard to come by [Music] [Music] anything that makes the city's greener is just such a wonderful thing for not only the environment that people that live in the city to to be able to be around that stays the plans the berming the sense of how it can be come into the natural landscape itself how we want to program that is it's really the next [Music] we are the link near the tip innocence of the big you it's important that the entire waterfront of blower man build in the plans that have been put forward because we can not only fortify this great city of New York but be a model cities all over the world [Music] [Applause] [Music] so the dryline is an attempt to make the necessary climate adaptations for New York City but actually at the same time making the city more lively and more enjoyable for the for the people living there phase one of the dry line the the whole East River portion is scheduled to break ground next year so the challenge is that Manhattan and New York is facing is a challenge that by 2050 90% of the sort of world's mega cities are going to be facing this kind of exposure to to rising sea levels Miami is is famously flooding more and more sort of frequently it's almost like a like a daily weather event Venice obviously and actually on a daily basis there's already almost three million people living permanently at sea there's a handful of experimental cities across the globe that are trying to deal with some of the challenges of the sustainable development goals of the United Nations for instance the HafenCity in in Germany which is a flood proof city the the ground floors are designed to be able to flood a clean water city where the landscapes clean the water in hama be sure start outside Stockholm Seoul a city in Germany so we thought could we maybe combine some of the ideas that we've been working on to imagine a new city that could respond to all of the 17 sustainable development goals of the United Nations so anyway learning from the sort of organic self growing compact nature of a various sort of historical human habitats also learning from nature harvesting Sun capturing water having a sort of a modular adaptive growth and essentially almost like scaling some of the ideas we did with the urban rita social housing up to a city scale so in a way to a kid of paths of effective agriculture aquaponics hydroponics to be able to supply all the food that is necessary to harvest recycle and clean the water to create a man-made water ecosystem to harvest energy in any way shape or form we can get our hands on it strictly with renewable sources and finally create almost an urban metabolism where we can deal with the bay wastes turn some of it into energy recycle the elements we can almost have a an anaerobic digester to really turn waste organic waste into into an energy source so really come up with a self-sustaining sustainable community so we scaled up the the barge of the urban Riga to 500 feet in diameter the hexagonal shape gives it a good sort of trilateral stability it's designed to be able to withstand a category 5 cyclone so it's it's a sturdy Island of course it has the buoyancy to carry the urban population on top it's still completely possible to prefabricate it and then tow it to a location where you can tie it to an archipelago of similar islands and then we manage that we can have these productive and social edges imagine a whole vocab of edges that are tailored to make each island unique even if it has a rationality in the way it's made on top to keep the scale almost like European and scale because you want to keep the center of gravity relatively low so you don't tumble over if you're a floating island we can have some space dedicated to to aquaculture we want to expand the roofs the the first sort of ideas the first specimen of this floating community is designed for a subtropical or tropical climate so there's a rich ability to harvest Sun power but also a desire to create shade use light materials renewable wood bamboo of course any configuration of kotecha on top of this island should be possible we want to maximize outdoor space because we are a small island we want to create as much space for the for the citizens as possible and then we have this batch underneath it where we can store energy photovoltaic panels vertical axis windmills on the roofs sort of fresh water autonomy with the whole system of rainwater collection and recycling a closed-loop waste treatment facility some some aquaculture outdoors some in greenhouse and some using grow lamps in a basement as a kind of backup we can even have vertical farming until underneath like sea farming seaweed fish farming so it can also start actually creating habitat and a reef so so this kind of sustainable floating island can then of course be docked with some other islands to create a little neighborhood that can then can sort of create a town in this case capable of housing 10,000 inhabitants so of course when you get the size of a town you can serve somatically program some of the islands to have other functions that are mall for the whole neighborhood and then of course also by creating a little family of outposts we can create water breaks and these outputs can be recreative or productive uninhabited islands so again like a whole little family of elements to to create this kind of a cappella go so that's essentially the idea imagine a town of 10,000 people where you move around on the water you have the the local block you have this sort of neighborhood and you have the entire city you have an inner harbour with all the cultural and social facilities and then of course I can outer harbour that is where you you arrive and and dock so the smallest cell the neighborhood and the town and and of course it's created in a kind of organic way so you can imagine this little friendly guy for 10,000 residents if it if it becomes a success you can see the scale of Manhattan by comparison you can add a few more this would be sixty thousand people living here three hundred sixty thousand and two and a half million people living in a sort of maritime metropolis so so if you sort of assume in arriving at this floating community the the first one is planned to be realized in the Pearl River Delta adjacent to to Hong Kong in a kind of somewhat protected waters you will start seeing this this whole family of alternate ways of moving around a sort of a whole family of electric vehicles for the water for the land and for for the air you will find you know fish markets and and green markets down by the neighborhood port you can move through productive landscapes as parks also we imagine the green houses can be like Oh harshali's that you can enjoy as a social space but also a productive space and essentially imagine this as a kind of Sargasso City that really could be the seed of a future maritime metropolis to begin with as a completely urban integrated project connected to a nearby urban area but of course also with the possibility that fleets of these islands can be deployed in places where you suddenly need to rehouse a large population because of some kind of environment impact or conflict so so as we assuming out in in scale the last project is maybe a response to the fact that an architect can Samba sometimes become a little bit bored with the fact that the rules of architecture are always the same you know the science is the same everywhere you know gravity falls down water flows down but but sometimes some of the rules can change if you go to another planet and what what other planets to go to then our most immediate neighbor Mars because just imagine 500 years ago it took Miguel and 500 years like three months to sail from Spain to Brazil three months that's the same time it's going to take us to go from Earth to Mars and and that sort of commute time didn't really prevent the Europeans from going to the Americas so I don't think it's gonna stop us from going to to Mars also just looking a little bit at how how Mars actually is mass has relatively temperate temperatures on a nice summer day by equator on Mars it can be 70 degrees Fahrenheit that's like a nice Danish summer day it gets a lot colder though gravity is very light so if a person weighs a hundred pounds and and goes to Mars they're going to weigh 38 pounds the fastest diet you can you can go through by comparison if we go to Jupiter the same person would weigh 253 pounds so and then maybe a miracle the seasonal tilt of of Mars is almost the exact same as as Earth the tilt is what gives us the five or the four seasons mass has the exact same seasons they're just a little bit longer twice as long because the mass here is twice as long and then the miracle is every life-form on earth has adapted to a 24 hour life cycle we have the same 24 hour cycle on Mars except we actually get 40 minutes more to snooze in the morning and and just to tell you how incredibly lucky this is on Mercury the day is not 24 hours it's a hundred and seventy-five days so when the Sun sets it's 88 days before it rises again so this is this is a miracle mass does not have a unified magnetic field so it has a little bit of an issue with radiation but if you compare to all of the other alternatives mass is doing is doing pretty well also mass has half the radius of Earth but because it has no liquid oceans it has the same amount of real estate of course the blue planet the red planet but actually if you strip away all the liquid water and the biosphere you can see on the left that Earth is also a red planet we have very much the same minerals available mass just doesn't have a biosphere and then an amazing thing we already know know the beauty of the sort of the sunset on earth where the Sun goes red on mass it's the opposite because of small particles in the air the sunsets are blue on the Red Planet something I hope that a lot of people in this room will one day experience firsthand and we've actually been going to mass ever since the 60s frequently so we've seen all kinds of things we've seen the poles expand and contract with with ice we've seen craters we've seen lava flows frozen we've seen dried-out archipelagos we've seen landslides tornados across the the surface of the planet and we've been actually having wheels on the ground for four decades so we have a lot of footage we've even seen frost on the desert in the morning just like you can experience it here on on earth so of course there's a lot of things going for Mars but we have a few challenges too much radiation for humans but not for plants very little pressure very low temperatures no breathable air and no ready-to-use water so that there is something to work with so so how can we survive and and just looking at earth since this is matmata in tunisia what looks like a lifeless desert is actually a very lively community of these buildings that are carved out of the bedrock harvesting the thermal stability of of the ground having like protection from the strong burning sun creating these kind of cozy interiors using the local materials another example is the the Canyonlands in Arizona again it looks empty but when you look under the shelves of the rocks protecting from the radiation of the Sun the heat a community sort of nested into into the rocks and and finally in the Arctic's Colusa walk in greenland again start responding to the extreme cold the spherical form of the igloo minimizing thermal exposure by minimizing the envelope for the largest possible area using the insulating attributes of snow so anyway what we need to do is discover a new Martian vernacular architecture and because it's going to cost a fortune to bring anything to Tomas and and buildings are by definition very heavy we somehow have to try to work with what we have first of all if we look at what one person needs two liters of water and some some energy the only way we can efficiently deliver this is to become vegans so Martians are vegans and then basically what we need to do is we need to combine the ecosystem required to sustain human life with the ecosystem required to sustain plant life into one unified ecosystem and basically if we look at what do we have on Mars we have regolith it consists of some facades some some sense we can sort of start sorting the regolith we get some frozen water that of course can provide liquid water we get some rocks we get some sand the water and the sand can be used to create bricks concrete and ceramics so we can start building building things we can sort the sand and get some some iron oxides some aluminum some Silesia the aluminum and and the sands can be used to create glass and an aluminium technology football checks for voltage can generate power and with power and water we can make electrolysis that splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen we have a 93 percent co2 atmosphere on Mars so the co2 combined with the hydrogen allows us to have a sebasi reactor that creates methane that is a perfect rocket propellant together with with water so we can actually go go back home we get some some more water as a by-product and we get some carbon monoxide together with the iron ore we can create steel we can then start up and create plastics have plastics we can make soft plastics of course we're gonna recycle everything we make because we everything is very precious we can then make transparent membranes that we can use to create inflatable environments where we can then have a breathable atmosphere with this we can grow plants we can have root zone facilities that that clean the water so we can also start playing with the water we can have aqua ponics hydroponics we can grow food and finally we can sustain human life so actually bringing nothing we actually have all of the ingredients to create a man-made ecosystem on Mars of course we have to be a little bit more space efficient also there's the radiation issue that it's too much radiation to be outdoor all the time but then we found out that the typical American only spent 7.6 percent of their day outdoor so if we say if we say if we spend 20% in full exposure then we are actually fine then we looked at different different strategies inflatable membranes are great for keeping a contained pressurized environment but they don't resist meteors 3d printed structures sort of provide added protection but it's not really as airtight and finally excavation into the rock provides full protection from radiation but it's not very nice to live underground so each idea is not really adequate on its own but combined they actually functions so imagine day one you create a sort of pressurized perimeter and you start excavating material to create spaces underground you use that material to 3d print new structures you then have to watch how much time you spent in the different areas and and then these sort of habitats can slowly grow together and form larger and larger communities so so the idea of this project we've been doing it for the Dubai Future Foundation under the mass 2117 program and as the name suggests it's the idea of putting a city on Mars by 2117 even for an architect that's a very long schedule so to get going we we're gonna make a prototype in the middle of something that looks a lot like Mars although it is a lot harder than mass it's gonna be the mass Science City it's gonna be a facility for research for knowledge exchange for education and for exhibitions related to Mars and it's going to be built using the same techniques that we imagine will be deployed on mastery you can see that living on Mars is not gonna be like living in a tin can it's gonna have this charming reddish 3d printed architecture also water is is actually one of the best protections against radiation so one meter of water protects the same as seven meters of rock so you might as well have these big underground ballrooms full of light coming through water tanks and then of course different exhibitions trying to sort of educate and promote ultra efficient agriculture suitable for for a mass habitat so just to sort of conclude what why this what are we going to gain from going to Mars because we obviously have challenges on earth but if you look at the 17 sustainable development goals of the United Nations eight of them deal directly with the environment and for instance on earth we have one and a half billion cubic meters of water on Mars we only have five million so we have to be extremely water efficient on Mars we have an abundance of space on earth by comparison we have to be much more compact on Mars and one of the main sources of our challenges on earth right now is our addiction to fossil fuel on Mars you have no fossil fuels so anyway it's very likely that the answers to our challenges on earth may be found on on Mars and imagine in a century or two we'll actually notice that even the Red Planet is also potentially a blue and a green planet and just to sort of finish up I love this idea that they say that that astronauts that have had this sort of experience of looking at Earth from space get this kind of shift in their consciousness and their awareness about our situation as a species on a planet so imagine the kind of feeling of universal citizenry that our children or grandchildren are going to feel when they stand and stare at the night sky of the planet that they now call home looking at this tiny blue dot which is what Earth is going to look like for Mars and being reminded of our earthly origin but also being sort of reassured about our galactic destiny thank you [Applause] so I know that there are some microphones if anyone has a verbal question otherwise there are some questions here that that I can deal with currently we've narrowed our scope to look at the look at Manhattan but but if you would the question was if we were also looking at a Brooklyn waterfront I mean obviously Brooklyn has has had the energy of of the Brooklyn Bridge Park that has been established and now it has a crazy idea about eliminating for ten years the the Brooklyn Heights promenade and we are actually actively trying to see if we can come up with a with the solution that can solve the BQE and also the resilience of the city more on that to follow then a lot there's there's some questions here there's one that says what's the project that's closest to your heart and why the answer is you should never ask your mother to choose between her children but I think maybe a more acute or a more specific answer could be that I think like any other architect I dream of doing you know concert halls and art museums and operas and cultural palaces that have that have the ambition and and sometimes the budget to to make amazing public spaces so if there's anyone out there but I think it is interesting that you know a typical City it has maybe a town hall it has maybe like a church it has maybe a museum but 99% of the city is where we go to work where we live where we go to school where we go to buy our groceries so the kind of every des and I think if if only the 1% the cultural palaces the public buildings contribute to the city in a public way then we're gonna end up living in you know a very poor urban environment so I think actually the the 99% the power plants the affordable homes the the student homes those those projects that are normally not really registering on the spectrum of architecture they actually are this incredible resource that if we if we if we think about them carefully we can actually create something completely extraordinary out of all the ordinary and I think while waiting for for the for the Opera House Commission's we are perfectly happy of making the ordinary more extraordinary I have a question at the microphone back here so how do you form a sense of creative urgency in your teams to create such rich narratives in your projects yeah I think actually a.m. recently we have tried to distill what we do into what is almost like a big recipe and I'm gonna give it to you so you can do it yourself so basically every project has to start by identifying a change that is happening in the world that has relevance to this project because and there's a lot of change going on and you can often just take things for granted because I think the only reason that you're not because you can say like there's been architecture for quite a while like a few millennia so there's some pretty nice buildings already there so the reason you you don't just find the perfect building that has already been built and do one more of them is that everything is always changing so once you identify a change suddenly you can address the consequences the conflicts the problems the potentials that arise from this change and then secondly every project has to give a gift of course if what you're doing is form giving you have to form give a gift and a gift is essentially not philanthropy but it is to respond to the asked of the client or or the tenant so the users whatever with something that goes above and beyond what they asked for because by doing that as an architect it's very hard to have agency because we don't decide ourselves what we're doing we have to somehow design for to accommodate other people's needs and desires but if every time we do it we identify a change we respond to that change and we give a gift that is more than what we were asked for then slowly project-by-project you end up creating a more exciting human habitat have one more question here oh here well some of you answered what I wanted to ask but maybe maybe not so what's your thought process you have a very interesting way of thinking and all that sort of comes up in the architecture and if there is a particular part of the thought process that's most interest to you what is them the part of the thought process yeah the thought process in actually building the the the project and coming up with the ideas because you connect the dots that I haven't seen a lot of architects do and make to make the project very distinctly different to I think I think it's actually I think [Music] maybe more than more than many we have a profound belief that the world is already incredibly exciting and every day is already full of incredibly exciting elements and if you look and listen and find a way to look at all the things you already know and therefore already take for granted and therefore have a hard time seeing but you can't see the forest for the trees you you can sometimes this cover that sitting in plain sight the everyday if put together in a slightly different way can actually become sort of almost like a celebration not by adding any new ingredients but simply you can Cali the architectural alchemy that you create gold or at least life by mixing traditional ingredients in untraditional ways and I think it starts by having the conviction that that every day is already exciting enough all we have to do is is discover and rediscover it I found a nice one here how do you ensure that your presented idea is not present interpreted as complete BS yeah actually I mean we often fail at that I have to say but but I I think if you're trying to do things differently you have to be even more diligent and beautiful in making sure that all the practical issues are addressed so I think ironically rather than you know thinking outside the box and not being encumbered by restrictions we obsess about the restrictions because it's only you know the devil is in the detail it's only by really digging into the specifics that you can find the recipe for something interesting there was another one actually am the examples you gave tackle how to deal with the problem rather than how to how do we eliminate it why have you chosen this approach I mean I think I think at this point there is there is no silver bullet and like almost like all aspects of human creativity and ingenuity has to be mobilized so we will have to deal with source issues but also we will have to deal with response issues because sandy did wipe out a good part of of New York and cost lives and paralyzed the city for for four weeks and months so so there is already an impact we have to deal with and at the same time of course we have to be as ingenious and as creative as we can with with dealing with the root courses but I actually think that the entire family of projects that we are doing that deal with hedonistic sustainability are exactly trying to imagine a future and to deliver a future that is more desirable but also more environmentally performing so I think it's not one or the other it's it's both and we have 21 seconds I'm curious to hear your thoughts on virtual reality and building virtual spaces potentially and how our learnings in architecture and the physical world will potentially inform spaces that don't really rely on physical rules if that's something you're interested in yeah I'll make a very quick answer to a very complex question but we have actually been working quite a bit with with with virtual reality some of our friends within have we've worked with them to create a museum for virtual art to try to find out the what would be the spatial experience if the app doesn't actually have to be some artifacts in a room but I think I would say what's very exciting to be an architect right now is that I would say the last four decades all of the engine of innovation that is Silicon Valley has been caught up in the immaterial and finally it is as if there is a door that is opening and all of that ingenuity is coming into physical space with the Internet of Things with the idea of the mirror world suddenly not just information or social relations but actually everything else is becoming sensory and and available to the power of algorithm and I think suddenly architecture and physical space is acquiring a relevance that is that it hasn't had four for four decades and I'm extremely excited to be alive still at this point where maybe my profession against become becomes relevant [Applause]

Channel: SXSW

Views: 51,287

Keywords: SXSW, “South By Southwest”, South, By, West, Southby, Southwest, Fest, Festival, Austin, Texas, Conference, Lineup, Keynote, Speaker, Panel, Interview, Music, Film, Movie, Interactive, EDU, Tech, Technology, Gaming, Video Games, Media, Entertainment, News, Business, Training, Creative, Entrepreneur, Development, ACL, CES, TED, Talk, Comic Con, Red Carpet, Live, Performance, Showcase, Concert, TV, Television, 2018, 2019, bjarke ingels, formgiving

Id: JwfTgo-itsk

Length: 61min 41sec (3701 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2019