[W]e seem to be... incapable of dealing with the climate crisis, and we were thinking why? Because humans have... shown to be... capable of taking... resource-demanding multi-generational efforts like building cathedrals. The great cathedral in Køln took 632 years to complete... We laugh at the Catalans because they're still building , but they've only been building for a 137 years, so they're not supposed to be done yet. ...[T]he Romans were capable of building the... Roman aqueduct system for more than 500 years bringing fresh water to all of their urban settlements. ...It's because there was a master plan ...[W]hen the first architect of the died, the next worked... on those same drawings, and the next... and you probably went through 20 different architects... or more. ...[O]ne of the problems of climate change and climate action is that it's the realm of... climate scientists that are mostly academics... [T]hey're very good at science and academic accuracy but not so much at entrepreneurship and action. ...[T]hen you have politicians... not so good at... a 50 or 100 year commitment because they have election cycles of 4 or 8 years... [E]ven a short architectural project takes longer than that. ...[W]e thought, what if we, because architects make master plans for buildings... city blocks... neighborhoods... for cities... regions... even for coutries. Why not make a master plan for the planet? ...[N]ormally we get hired to do things, but in this case there was no obvious client, except maybe Greta Thunberg. So we started it ourselves... [C]limate change has been going on catastrophically since the dawn of planet earth, from a... ball of lava to... heavy bombardment of meteors 4 billion years ago, to the snowball 2 1/2 billion years ago, the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago, much more like current... present day. When you look 500 million years back... there's always been... fluctuations in <chem>CO2</chem> related to fluctuations in temperature.... If you look at the last 500,000 years... the ice ages are always valleys in the <chem>CO2</chem> levels, separated by peaks that also correspond to rising temperatures, and vice versa... [I]f you look at the last 500 years you see relatively stable, and then... 150 years ago it really starts escalating. ...It's 407 particles per million, and we have to go back 20 to 30 million years before we find the same levels of <chem>CO2</chem>... Regardless of global warming, at 1,000 particles per million the... ventilation in any room kicks in, because it becomes unhealthy for humans to breathe... So we're... not just warming the planet, we're also making it less inhabitable...
Danish architect (b.1974)
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[E]scalating in scale and impact, one project is... for a new baseball stadium for the Oakland A's. ...[S]tadia ...these ...massive venues in a giant sea of parking that are only active a few days a year, baseball more than any other sport, roughly a hundred in a year... {W]e thought what if this new stadium could... be... the cultural foundation for the city? What if we could bring the ball park back into the park? ...[B]aseball started in parks and... at some point a guy got the idea to build a fence around the park and charge [for] tickets. So we thought, what if we could... bring the park back, so instead of this... enclosed stadium, what if the main concourse was... Main Street? ...[B]ecause baseball is an asymmetrical sport with the outfield, what if the entire stadium could open up to the city and the water and the views? ...[I]magine as the roof dips down it... becomes... Oakland equivalent of the , a public park that is part of the experience of the game, but 250 days of the year it's... a park for the citizens... [I]magine that 365 days a year this is part of the enjoyable space of this new neighborhood. ...[N]ormally the seats that are the furthest away from the game would be the lousiest. Her they have this amazing experience of... being a part of the park... so... that a hundred days a year they shut down access to the park, like if you have a concert in Central Park, and it becomes part of the spectator experience. All the restaurants and cafes open up to the park. ...[T]he other days they open up to the park so you can... have a coffee... So you have this... connection from the inside to the out. Above... the running track on game day is part of the circulation, and on a non-game day it's part of the experience of living in Oakland. The same for the pinic lawn... [T[he stadium doesn't become this... massive... empty white elephant, a kind of void in the city, it... becomes a... bringer of life and energy into a new neighborhood... [B]ecause of the... asymmetry in extreme you have this... incredible view out over the port towards San Francisco... For the facade we wanted to spend as little money for the enclosure as possible... [W]e need to provide some shelter from the wind, so we came up with this idea of this... louvered structure... facing the predominant direction of the wind... {W]here we have the concessions... the circulation, we need to provide wind protection so it... becomes this series of scarfs wrapped around the building... providing only the necessary protection... [E]ven if you were only trying to make this... skeletal non-building it ends up having... elegant expression. ...[W]hen you arrive, you... walk over the edge of the stadium and onto the arms of the field. To provide access and... minimize... parking, because it's part of an urban neighborhood, we can share the parking. But also we have the BART... only... a mile away, but you have to cross a 12 lane highway, and a freight train, so the simplest way of connecting is by putting a single mast... We can put a gondola that takes you straight from the BART, across both highway and train tracks, lands you on , and... you walk... across the perimeter park and into the game.
A decade after, we opened the Danish Pavilion in Shanghai. The subject for the World Expo was "Better Cities, Better Life," and we thought of the pavilion as a condensation of all the things that make Danish cities more sustainable and... more enjoyable. ...We recreated the harbour bath ...and we were looking for common denominators between Denmark and China ...[W]e found that in the Chinese public school curriculum they have three fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, one being... , the national symbol of Denmark, so we proposed to move the mermaid [statue] to China. I had to go to Parliament to argue the case, and... we got her.
One... way to explain... the power of architecture... is to explain the Danish word for design, which is "Formgivning," which... means "form giving," because to design something is to... give form to that which has not yet been given form... [i.e.,] to give form to the future. ...We're giving form to the world which we would like to find ourselves living in ...Design becomes much more important than style or aesthetics and fashion.
[U]nderneath the bridge we worked with a series of local artists. You have... a university in these two triangular buildings... wedged between the legs of the bridge... proposed to... turn one of his video art works into a giant urban art work with this gigantic chandelier that... twice a day it... drops and spins dramatically... above the main street... [O]nce open the entire underside is going to turn into... the "Sistine Chapel of Street Art"... trying to turn the otherwise negative impact of the bridge into a positive. So that what ends up looking like this... surreal silhouette is... like a... precise analysis in response to a very difficult... urban situation. It is... one of the most striking places in Vancouver. ...[T]his is an example of... social infrastructure, the idea that infrastructure can have positive social and environmental side effects.
[T]rying to... take the entire sensibility and... philosophy of René and noma and trying to create a portraiture or capture the essence... the architectural equivalent of what René has created, and a powerful manifestation of this... urban ecology... in the middle of , but the honey is made there, most of the ingredients...
[W]hat we're trying to do... is try to apply the kind of tangible, practical thinking. We almost took the... way we would normally approach an architectural project and a master plan. So this is the kind of index... for the master plan of the planet, and going through it with this kind of pragmatic utopian approach, hoping that we can develop insights, and ideally a master plan for the planet that could be... handed... to corporations and governments with a much more tangible and... promising concrete plan of action than the reports or sort of political agendas that... exist today.
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[A]t its best, architecture is like the art of portraiture. In the sense that... Is the Mona Lisa an expression of da Vinci as an artist or is it an expression of Mona Lisa, the woman that it portrays? And... the answer is both. ...[A] great portrait can capture not only the likeness, but also the character, the soul, the potential of the subject, and... what we try to do... is to create... an architectural portrait of how we see Prague. In that sense it... has that kind of inherent Pragueness, from the river to the roof, the kind of 21st century equivalent of the ... You can dream... In the architectural design process, a lot of people... worship the idea of the genius sketch on a napkin, and... that the whole project is conceived in a single eureka moment. ...A lot of the ideas that will be striking ...in 2032 have not been formulated yet. ...A lot of the ideas that haven't even been framed yet, that's what makes it very exciting ... to not just create the vision, but acutually go through with it ...[S]o many ideas... experiences... contradictions and surprises actually occur when the purity of the initial vision starts encountering the nitty gritty reality of real life. ...Some of the most striking experiences are yet to be invented in the next couple of months and years.