Social Infrastructure | Bjarke Ingels | TEDxEast

and what I'd like to talk about is is the the work we've been doing in our office over the last 10 years we you know we we are architects we actually also do haircuts but and this is our our office in Copenhagen it's located inside a former Cavs burg Factory where they used to produce the least interesting part of the beer the bottle cap but I think it's it's part of this this greater phenomenon that has been interesting over the last decade is that it is a former factory space like a piece of industrial infrastructure that because it's not designed for human beings but for big manufacturing machines it has like large spans and tall ceiling heights that makes it incredible for for actually for for work or for for life so that's this sort of a general phenomenon typically social infrastructure refers to you know kindergartens and nurseries and stuff like that but we mean it much more literally like infrastructural projects that have positive social and environmental side effects and we all know that a piece of infrastructure like a bridge can have a negative impact on a society this is where Granville bridge touches downtown Vancouver and it slices the city up in these useless triangles and we were asked to a sort of look if we could turn it into the seed for a nice neighborhood so we started like mapping the constraints the setbacks from the bridge then there's like a hundred foot setback because the city wants to secure that nobody looked straight into the traffic from the bridge then there's a park where we don't want to cast any shadows and finally we are left with a tiny footprint of light instead of six six and a half thousand square foot triangle almost too small to build on so then we got the idea that if a hundred foot setback has to do with the minimum distance once we get a hundred feet up in the air we can come back out sort of a almost as if so if someone is pulling a curtain aside sort of welcome to Vancouver or like a wheat growing through the cracks and the asphalt and blossoming when it gets light and air it's very similar to with a flat iron it's a child of this sort of diagonal a Broadway intersecting the orthogonal grid of of Manhattan then because of the rising real-estate prices and steel structure and the advent of the elevator suddenly it became the landmark of a whole neighborhood which is taking that idea maybe one step further also underneath the bridge we're trying to turn the underside of the bridge into a positive and anyone who's been to Vancouver knows that having an urban umbrella could actually be quite nice and then we're working with some local artists including Rodney gray him to turn the underside of the Granville bridge into what you could call the Sistine Chapel of street art like an art gallery turned upside down but essentially trying to reinvent the negative impact of the of the infrastructure into something good for the community another example is that once a piece of infrastructure gets decommissioned like our office it can be reinvented a project we're doing and we built in Copenhagen next to Hamlet's Castle Combe Bowl is the Danish Maritime Museum the museum used to be inside the castle but when they gained a UNESCO World Heritage they had to put it somewhere else and it was suggested to put it inside the the drydock where they used to build ships but we had a dilemma because UNESCO said that we couldn't stick as much as a foot out of the ground to not block the view of the castle the museum wanted an architectural masterpiece to attract visitors so we got the idea to turn the dock inside out in a way use the museum to preserve the dock all we needed to do was design a series of bridges we could actually build the bridges on a shipyard in China the way you build ships and lift them into place one of the bridges slopes with an accessible slope because we couldn't even put an elevator building because it would block the view of the castle so you can sort of walk on this lazy ramp into the exhibition you have like intimate spaces vast spaces and you have this sort of encounter between the lightness of the glass and the steel and the heaviness and the heritage of the of the concrete dock the auditorium where the seats continue under the stage becoming an alternate or touring for children you have a the cafe where you look through the different layers of glass of the bridges and not only the auditorium has become a cultural venue but actually the dock itself has amazing acoustics because of the hard walls and the open ceiling so like this piece of old infrastructure has become a cultural venue next to Hamlet's castle also you have this sort of horizon where below you have this contemporary Museum and above the history of the castle this is this sort of inverse Titanic moment so not only can a you know a piece of decommissioned infrastructure get reinvented to become a cultural building but maybe a cultural building can also be a piece of infrastructure we're doing a museum in a sculpture park in Norway and we could place the museum anywhere we wanted and we suggested why don't we make the museum the bridge that takes you over the river and turns the whole promenade through the park into a single loop so you you walk on the paths you walk into the to the museum you have the Scylla sculpture gallery where the the skylights turn out 90 degrees and become a view of the old mill and then you continue so anyway you can see it as both a museum building and a bridge and actually a sculpture it's almost like the biggest sculpture in the sculpture park you might not suspect that it's a building from serving ankles so then we leave Scandinavia and six years ago I moved to to New York because we got invited to look at a site on the Upper West Side in Hell's Kitchen and we got the idea to try to combine the density of a Manhattan skyscraper with the typical communal space of a Copenhagen courtyard or since you try to see what what a quart scraper look like so we did put this like typical Copenhagen Cordia on the waterfront we lifted it up to 500 feet in the northeast corner creating this sort of striking new silhouette on the waterfront opening up to the south and the west for views and sunshine so the courtyard actually has the same proportions as Central Park only it is 13,000 times smaller sort of a bonsai Central Park then it has the height of a handrail on one side and a height of a high-rise in the other this was our first sort of rendering of the project this is what it looks like today the first 50 residents have already moved in and essentially it's just like sort of trying to combine the sort of communal space of the courtyard with the density of a skyscraper that creates this like rather striking new silhouette on the waterfront this is the view from the airplane landing in Newark a view that makes the architect very happy when he returns to but then having arrived in New York too after two years after we came here as sandy arrived and sort of shut down most of lower Manhattan according to a New York cartoonist it gave rise to a new neighborhood in Manhattan and and the basics of science is simple because of rising temperatures wind speeds are accelerating which means that the eastern seaboard of the United States are being hit more frequently by heavy and heavier storms and because the funnel shape of the New York Bight storm surge is being pushed into the mouth of the Hudson River putting 50% of the city at risk and we were invited by heart of the Housing and Urban Development Department of America to look at making the 12 miles of contiguous waterfront protection of lower Manhattan in a way that it wouldn't become a wall segregating the life of the city from the water around it and we looked at the High Line and the High Line is actually today the second most frequented Park in New York only superseded by a by Central Park which is infinitely bigger and it is essentially a piece of decommissioned train tracks that have now become you know with sort of social and environmental programs so thought what if we could design the resiliency infrastructure of Manhattan so that actually comes with premeditated positive social and environmental side effects and when you look at the development of New York as a city it has very much been shaped by the clash of these two Titans on one hand you have Robert Moses the power broker this public servant who is behind a lot of the major sort of Public Works of New York including highways housing projects and parks but often with a devastating impact on the local community he tried to run the trans Manhattan highway through Greenwich Village and he encountered resistance from Jane Jacobs who was living in the village and she rallied the local community and in a sort of David Goliath moment she defeated the plants and saved the village so we were thinking that perhaps the dryline as we've called this project could be conceived as the love child of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs because to to resist an incoming flood you need 12 miles of sort of contiguous and sort of top-down hard engineering but to make it socially successful it needs to happen in a closed dialogue with the local community so we actually devised an idea where on one hand we could take the hard engineering necessary to save us against the next sandy but then to design it in close dialogue with different representatives from the local communities inhabiting the neighbourhoods along the big you or the the dry line and I'd like to show you a short three-minute film where you can see people from the community that we worked with hear their experiences from sandy hear their concerns and dreams for their future waterfront and and what it's going to look like in a few years 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 the wind and the tide lining up perfectly to give us 14-foot sides instead of 8 foot the most shocking part of hurricane sandy was the fact that it exceeded expectations I think the sheer magnitude of it caught a lot of people off-guard when hurricane sandy came we were not prepared at all I mean not even the slightest yeah it was like an alien invasion of water and not the good kind of work so yeah I mean it came right in front where there was literally boats on 14th Street floating in front of our in front of our window we had a sub basement level office a block from there and it was totally covered in water for two days so we lost everything everything we're really concerned about another storm and the flooding that's possible and we think that the next time it's gonna come even further inland I'd like to see some type of flood protection in this area that's going to happen more vulnerable obviously being at close to the water something that just brings white-girl more walks different walks of life another escape is the busyness and the hustle-bustle there's this great space that could really become community space cultural space and active uses everyone enjoys space and in New York and other congested cities it's hard to come by anything that makes the city's greener is such a wonderful thing for not only the environment that people that live in the city too to be able to be around that space the plans the berming the sense of how it can be come into the natural landscape itself how we want to program that is is really the next challenge we are the link we're the tip and this is the big you it's important that the entire waterfront of lower Manhattan 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 for cities all over the world so so the the dry line is actually going going through and we're breaking ground on stage one in in 2017 maybe just to give you a like one last example that's being built right now in my old hometown Copenhagen as a real example of social infrastructure it's a building that I think could be the landmark of Copenhagen in a few years but it's not a royal palace or cultural palace it is a power plant that turns household waste into electricity and district heating when you look at domestic trash one ton of trash equals one and two thirds of an oil barrel of energy value but they work on an economy of scale they're like very big and ugly buildings they cast shadows on the neighbors they block the views this is going to be the tallest and biggest building in Copenhagen right next to the marina and right where the locals go waterskiing so we're thinking how can we make this an asset to the community and speaking of skiing Danes love to ski we have snow but we have absolutely no mountains but apparently we have mountains of trash so we have to go six hours by car to the south of Sweden to find Alpine Skiing because of the size of our powerplant we can do 2/3 of this on the roof of the power plant so we designed the roof complete with a sub ski slopes ski lifts hiking paths pine trees you name it miraculously we won the competition on this idea so suddenly we had to deliver it's it's going to be twice the length of an Olympic halfpipe and you might remember that in Sochi Denmark 1:0 medals we hope to sort of improve on that statistic come out now we can actually sort of practice at home also it'll be a you know a public park free-for-all you can do picnics you can enjoy the view of the otherwise horizontal city of Copenhagen you're going to have the tallest climbing wall in the world 300 feet of vertical danger and basically you can say it's almost realizing an idea of creating cities and buildings like like man-made ecosystems because not only do we harvest available resources daylight air flows water waterfall but also together with the city of Copenhagen it forms a metabolism that converts waste into resource it's currently under construction it's going to be a pretty epic contribution to my old hometown this is like the view from the slope the reason we could win the competition is that the coolest thing about this power plant is that it's the cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world the smoke that comes out of the chimney is completely non-toxic it contains only a little bit of steam and a little bit of co2 but the coolest thing is going to be completely invisible you would almost have to like put put pamphlets out to make people understand that this is a new completely new kind of technology but by put turning the the roof into this public park it becomes blatantly obvious for everybody that you actually have literally clean mountain air on the roof of the power plant you don't have to be far away from it it's actually totally safe and clean to take this like one step further we designed the chimney of the power plant in such a way that it accumulates steam and then at regular intervals it pops a gigantic smoke ring or a ring of steam so rather than being you know the typical tale of smoke being a symbol of pollution or problem this becomes a celebration that every time we've saved the emission of one ton of co2 we celebrated by puffing a smoke ring I mean again you know you come up with these ideas and and then you wane and you have to deliver and and actually like there are no sort of a giant smoke ring emitting manufacturers in the Yellow Pages so we had to do if I constantly go this is here 100 favor God hi buddy deeds so yeah you know that you can say that they're on one hand it seems silly to spend so much energy on on puffing smoke wings out of a factory chimney but but I think the smoke ring is a nice simple of this idea that edits you know and it's at its core architecture is you can call it the ardent science of turning fiction into fact that you sit in the in the studio and you sort of brainstorm crazy ideas and then you are you then spent the next decade orphans of trying to sort of apply for permits or sort of you know run through the numbers get sort of raised funds you know solve all the technical issues and then instead of after five or ten years suddenly it goes from being pure fiction into concrete reality and it actually becomes what the world is it has this sort of world-changing ability and I like this idea in 2017 when the power plant is open and someone visits Europe and they come back and then also they'll tell Europe is an interesting place you know if you go to Venice in Italy the streets are paved with water and they sailed in in gondolas through the streets and in Denmark they ski on their power plants that turn waste into electricity and heating and where the chimneys puff giant smoke rings and that's just how it is in Denmark so so I think it's sort of it's also like a good reminder that whenever we are sort of invited to intervene and I think this transcends architecture whenever we are invited to an meet intervene in the world and in the case of axes or to build a building or design a public space not only do we have the possibility but we actually have the responsibility to make the world we live in a little bit more like our dreams

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 65,888

Rating: 4.9551568 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Design, Architecture

Id: 8PItGf69eaw

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 18 2016