Bjarke Ingels Will Make You Believe in the Power of Architecture
Released on 11/03/2014
(applause)
I just wanna say that I'm actually incredibly excited
to be here with Wired at the Skywalker Ranch.
It's like two lifelong obsessions coming together.
This is my office in Copenhagen.
We're inside a Carlsberg factory where they used to make
the least interesting part of the beer: the bottlecap.
We're also in New York, these are my American colleagues.
We're architects but we also do haircuts.
(audience laughs)
Basically the way we work is that we always
try to mine as much information out of a certain 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.
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 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 clearance and
in the middle you need 25 feet of clearance.
And actually we got the permission 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 graceful curvature of the glulam beams
is actually shaped by the mathematics of the sport.
Everything you see here is not designed,
it's simply tracing the natural geometry
of a thrown handball.
And as a result it leaves an imprint up in the courtyard.
It becomes this informal furniture that has actually
invited people to start hanging out.
So this kind of cascade of effects,
this basic tracing of the mathematics of handball
suddenly creates this new space in the courtyard.
Another example is Hamlet's Castle Kronborg,
north of Copenhagen.
It recently become 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 dry dock
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 takes you down into the museum.
We could actually build all of the bridges
in a Chinese ship yard, and then sail them in
and click them into place.
So in a way the architecture is completely manifesting
all the aspects of ship building from the steel
of the bridges to the concrete of the dock.
You have this descent through different spaces
of intimate scale and vast scale.
You get this clash of the old and new,
the lightness of the steel and the glass
clashing with the heaviness of the concrete.
And in a way this is the grown-ups' auditorium
that extends under the stage
and becomes an auditorium for the kids.
Dock extends into the restaurant
and you have this whole coexistence
of the Shakespearian heritage on one hand
and this ultra contemporary universe below the horizon.
This inverse Titanic moment looking into...
(audience laughs)
And essentially once we've defined what
the key criteria is, like proximity to the UNESCO Heritage
we don't necessarily have the answer,
it's just the question we've formulated.
So we have to do tons of models.
We always have to make tons of models to test it,
and sometimes we make huge models
and sometimes we make the models out of LEGO.
If you just go around our office everything is
LEGO everywhere, even our signage is made out of LEGO.
So when we got approached by LEGO,
actually LEGO made one of our buildings in the LEGO store,
we're not gonna file a suit it's actually
the highest compliment you can get as an architect,
but when they approached us to look at making a LEGO house
which would be looking at all aspects of culture
through the eyes of LEGO, we were incredibly excited.
We went completely to town and we really had to get this job
It's gonna be where LEGO is from in Billund in Denmark.
And essentially what really excites me about LEGO
is LEGO empowers children and everyone 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
is to empower people to influence their physical environment
so they can actually live the life they wanna live.
The LEGO house is under construction. This is me.
This is the foundations these concrete LEGO bricks.
This is me standing with all of the richest people
in Denmark, the LEGO family.
(audience laughs)
If you can't wait it's gonna open in two years,
but if you can't wait you can actually build it yourself.
But a way to get people involved is the idea
to crowdsource the design, in a way.
We did an urban space in Copenhagen
and 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 60 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 bench
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 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
architectural water features.
So you have a Jamaican sound system, the neighbors hate it.
A Thai boxing arena. You have Iraqi swings.
Litter boxes from Great Britain.
Bollards from Ghana. Bicycle racks from Finland.
The sign on the Red Square is actually a sign
from the Red Square.
You have an amazing Khazak bus stop.
Way cooler than a typical Danish one.
We found palm trees in China that actually grow
in a Danish climate.
This octopus really reveals the diversity
of the neighborhood and the impact of play.
When you look at the benches,
this S-curve loveseat 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.
(audience laughs)
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.
It really reminds us how amazing it becomes
when you outsource the creativity to the community
to actually have a massive impact on their own environment.
So we took this idea with us when, you probably remember,
a bit more than two years ago Sandy hit New York
and caused a lot of devastation.
It wiped out all of Lower Manhattan,
creating a new neighborhood in Manhattan: SouPow.
That's South of Power.
Sandy happened because the Atlantic hurricane belt
is expanding because of rising temperatures
and because of the geometry of the New York bite
you have this 90 degree funnel shape.
All of this 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
are also the ones where we need
to take greater responsibility in protecting them.
So the question is how can you protect Lower Manhattan
without creating a sea wall 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 what if instead of waiting
for infrastructure to get decommissioned
before you add the program,
what if you could think of the resilience infrastructure
from Manhattan as the dry line
to imagine that it comes from day one with a lot
of extra positive social and environmental side-effects.
So when you look the flood map you have these
natural pinch points where the flooding doesn't get
very far into the island because of the topography.
So we used these as a way to create compartments
just like you have compartments in a ship.
Each compartment can be solved on its own.
And then you look at the urban development of New York,
it's characterized by this David and Goliath encounter
between Robert Moses, AKA the Power Broker, and Jane Jacobs.
Robert Moses did a lot of the necessary
infrastructure investments in 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 rarely very instantly successful.
They often cut the people off from different neighborhoods
got cut off from each other, 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 grassroots opposition
and eventually she defeated the plan
and Greenwich Village is still there.
But we thought in this case it could be interesting
to think of this resilience infrastructure
as the love child of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.
Because to provide 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 surge you need a certain geometry
but this geometry 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 city from flooding.
It could be various art works, or furniture, or landscaping.
You could imagine the median of the West Side highway
could become this art piece that also
protects the city from flooding.
And as a way to do this we went a step further.
We went to the Lower East Side.
The Lower East Side was massively hit by Sandy.
These are the areas that got flooded
and when you look at the 100 year flood
and the 500 year flood actually 2/3 of this neighborhood
is flood-threatened.
It's a primarily residential neighborhood
and this is 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 ethnically diverse neighborhood.
It's the most socially challenged neighborhood.
Rather under serviced by public transportation,
but in return it has a highway cutting it
off from the waterfront.
And even though it appears green,
it actually has a lot less park than any other
neighborhood 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 tortured by this
relationship to the infrastructure.
So we created this process where we reached
out 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 smorgasbord of different solutions,
and together we formulated a series of strategies.
One idea was in the East River Park simply to create
raise the ground of the park to protect the park
from the noise of the highway
and also protect the city from flooding.
It could be a Phase One of a Phase Two to eventually
submerge the park and integrate a new subway line
underneath it. Submerge the highway.
Moving the bicycle lanes into the park side.
The existing bridges are these caged highway bridges
become like high lines extending
we integrate ADA accessibility into the natural topography.
You arrive in this sloping park
that takes you out into the water.
We also creating a 10th street harbor bath
'cause the Hudson is actually,
or the East Street River is so clean you can swim in it.
Underneath the FDR we got this idea to turn
the underside of the FDR into an asset.
You have a lot of spaces in New York that are
actually beautiful when you look up.
So we got this idea of creating these art pieces
hanging underneath the bridge.
So normally you just look up and you have local artists
and it illuminates and makes the underside more friendly.
And then, you know, some of them can flip down
and create temporary enclosures for a Christmas market
or they can become what saves the city.
Some places all you needs is actually four feet of height
to resist the 50-year flood plane.
So they can be undulating benches,
serving different activities,
and then they also become what saves the city.
And they can serve as sockets for bigger flood barriers
when you have a hundred year or
five hundred year flood coming.
Further down we proposing to create these little pavilions
that animate the space underneath the canopy of the highway
so that galleries and markets that make
the underside more friendly and lively,
but also protects the city from flooding.
They're placed so that we 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 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 Battery Park to create a series
of little events in the park
that creates a natural topography.
We're sort of integrating a new harbor school
and what we imagine to be a museum of cities underwater
Where the big auditorium could actually be
this inverse aquarium giving you a view
into the different flood lines of different storms.
So essentially the thinking is to take all
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 reanimated Manhattan so that when
the next Sandy comes it's gonna remain a lively city.
This project has just been granted $335 million
from the government so we're gonna start Phase One,
but I often get the objection that
this is a little bit too much like science fiction.
Just to give you an example of what we call
Social Infrastructure that is 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 2/3 of an oil barrel
in terms of energy, so it's a really valuable resource.
But they operate on an economy of scale
so they're ugly boxes that cast shadows
on the neighbors and block the views.
This is gonna be the biggest
and tallest building in Copenhagen.
It's gonna be right next to the marina,
and it's gonna be right where the local boys go waterskiing
so we thought, 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 Isabel.
But because of the sheer magnitude of this power plant
we can put 2/3 of Isabel on top of the power plant.
We know how big the machines are
so we designed this sloping roof that has
an elevator takes you to the top
of a green, a blue, and a black ski slope.
We plant trees on top of the columns
so the view becomes like an man-made mountain.
Insanely, we won the competition based on this idea,
so suddenly we had to figure it out.
Just to give you a sense of scale
you can see this is an Olympic half pipe,
so some of you might have noticed that
Denmark got zero medals 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 including the tallest climbing wall in the world,
at 300 feet for those who have the balls.
And basically the reason we could win the competition
based on this idea is 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 an urban metabolism.
But the reason we could win it is because
this is gonna 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 C-O-two and some steam.
So that's why you 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 reconfigure
the perception of a power plant we've worked
with Realities United and Copenhagen Suborbitals
to design the chimney in a special way
so that it accumulates steam and when at regular intervals
it puffs a gigantic smoke ring.
(audience laughs)
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 recently did a test
at the end of August trying to figure out how to do this
and this is how it went:
(piano music)
[Voice On Video] Yes, fuckin' A!
(audience laughs)
(cheering in foreign language)
So I think the
(applause)
I think the smoke ring is a good symbol of what
architecture is really all about.
Because it is somehow this idea,
it has this element of world changing,
that you take something that is a wild idea,
like pure fiction, and then you suddenly
turn it into hard fact.
And I really like this idea that when we came with this idea
everybody thought that's insane.
But then in 2017 that's just how it is.
You know, people who say in Venice people sail
in gondolas through streets of water
and in New York people inhabit the resilience infrastructure
like pavilions or parks, and in Denmark people ski
on their power plants and they puff giant rings of steam.
So in a way architecture at its best is really
the power to turn, to make the world a little bit
more like our dreams. Thanks.
(applause)
(electronic music)
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