Bjarke Ingels Quotes

Pine can't be outside untreated so René and his chefs, we were so behind on opening day... the chefs with their torches treating the outside against the elements... [T]he torched wood makes it capable of being outdoors.

[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.

[T]he intermittence problem... 99% of the earth's populaton lives within this zone [10,000 km]. ...If each 24 hr zone could provide 1/6 of the power of the planet, the site that has light could... power the other side. ...With current high-voltage connections you lose 3% of the power per thousand km. This means that the maximum loss, you lose... 1/3 of the power if you're going all the way to the other side. ...You already have regional grids. ...[T]here's plans to connect ...northern Europe and north Africa and the Middle East. There's plans to connect the [US] east and the west coasts and Mexico. ...[Y]ou have all of these partial plans. ...[W]hat if you could ...create an entire worldwide grid. The sunny side could power the dark side, or the windy side could power the less windy side... This kind of grid could... unite us all energy-wise...

[W]e are getting increasingly dry zones and... it's expensive, energy-wise, to desalinate. ...[I]f we would have to desalinate the increase of water consumption to reach 10 billion people, it would be 20% of our current electricity supply.

[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...

[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.

An almost invisible building is... a bunker museum on the west coast of Denmark. It's... a giant nature reserve... The only exception is this old German bunker... from the Second World War, a , a gun was delivered from in Germany and was supposed to be installed on September 9, 1945... and next to it inside the dunes, we were asked to make a museum telling the story... {B]ecause it's an entirely listed landscape, our proposal became to make these... precise incisions and almost imagine the opposite of the bunker. If the bunker is a heavy artifact in the dunes, the museum this... light absence as you slice through the sand, the sand becomes concrete and you have this square, entirely transparent, bringing daylight deep into this... underground museum. You descend into this narrative of the Second World War, the occupation of Denmark, using only materials that are already found in the bunker, so the concrete, the raw iron, the raw wood solving all of the... technical installations for the museography in the tectonics of the concrete work so that all technique: all sprinkling, all lighting, all hanging is done within the tectonics of the formwork. Daylight being sucked in so that even though you are underground it feels... light and airy, almost the opposite of the bunker... [F]rom here an umbilical cord takes you deep into a bunker where you can... explore what's left as this... giant artifact from the Second World War. So you can say, almost like a disappearing act, and the discretion becomes... the most characteristic of what makes the building stand out and... also makes it disappear.

Also there's the idea of planting forests to sequester carbon, but we would have to plant the entire land mass of earth every third year... so it can only be part of a solution.

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.

This is , the capitol of Albania... [W]e were invited to imagine their National Theatre. ...It is pinched to perform a gateway between the Plaza... and... City Hall on the other side, and that... wrinkled opening creates a covered plaza that is the entrance into the theatre. ...[A] very simple ...public gesture that becomes an invitation... shading from the Mediterranean sun, made out of... red upcycled concrete. ...The national color of Albania is red. We found this beautiful red stone ...locally sourced. ...The main hall is faceted out of hot-rolled steel ...a mixture of perforated and reflective surfaces creates the perfectly calibrated acoustics, almost like an of black steel. ...The second auditorium can ...open its backstage out to the roof, and the ...roof becomes a ...starlit, open-air performance space. ...[W]e've tried to squeeze as much creative energy and performance possibility into the smallest possible volume. It's currently under construction. ...[I]t's going to be a building that looks different because it performs differently.

As human beings we have the power to imagine our world, to create... and cocreate... and to cohabit it.

Historically the field of architecture has been dominated by two opposing extremes. ...[A]n avant-garde of wild ideas, often so detached from reality that they fail to become... other than eccentric curiosities. On the other side... well-organized corporate consultants that build... boring boxes of high standard. Architecture seems entrenched between two... unfertile fronts: either naively utopian or petrifyingly pragmatic. ...BIG operates in the fertile overlap between ...opposites. A pragmatic utopian architecture... creation of socially, economically and environmentally perfect places as a practical objective.

Almost the opposite, if a bridge can turn into an art museum upside-down the opposite could also be true. A project we did in the same space of time... is a project for a small art museum and sculpture park in Norway... [W]e could... place the sculptures on either side of the river. There's an old historical mill, and we could place the museum anywhere we wanted... [O]ur proposal was to turn it into the bridge that turns the entire complex of parks on either side into one single loop. The museum has two galleries. One [is] daylit galleries with views over the water and one... more vertical... enclosed gallery. The transition from one to the other becomes this... distortion, a 90° rotation... [W]e had this idea that the museum could be seen as one of the biggest sculptures in the sculpture park. ...[O]nce we started getting more intimate with how to make it span its 250 ft... column-free span... The cross sections are incredibly rational, like a series of rotated rectangles... The raw structure had... this... aesthetic that wasn't... what we were looking for. It looked more... muscular than the... effortlessness that we had fantasized... So we tried to imagine how could we finish the building... [T]he idea became... taking a lot of... standard elements, standard aluminum profiles on the outside, standard wooden sticks on the inside, and... shift them... slightly so it's... traditional, conventional... structure. In the joinery of the wood we... resolve all of the... technical installations. ...[L]ike very classic ...Norwegian wood carpentry ...creating this ...precise, complex geometry... a hyperbolic paraboloid. As the floor turns into the wall it reveals a gap that... becomes the ventilation, the sprinklings, the light installations, the security. Everything that makes it a contemporary art museum is also integrated in this... rectilinear logic. So even though you see curves and arches everywhere, every... element... is completely straight. ...Somehow ...trying to hack the ...conventional, traditional building techniques ...to create something ...extraordinary, out of the ordinary... [T]he skylight zips and turns the more vertical part of the building into ...completely introverted ...[O]n the outside this... extruded aluminum facade that you put on... warehouses, so... the most conventional, traditional... barn... put together in a way that it describes this... acrobatic geometry. ...[T]he irony is that we spent the same amount of time on this building as we did on the power plant, and it ...shows how undiscriminating you are as an architect with... your time... trying to make a building, a small art gallery over a river, or trying to turn a power plant into a ski slope. ...[F]rom the other side it has this ...even more abstract ...sculptural quality that ...makes it like one of the sculptures in the sculpture park. ...Another example of... this idea of social infrastructure that one thing can also be the other, that something cultural can also be infrastructural and vice virsa.

Every hour we produce a pile of 38 meters. This is and this is the cone of plastic bottles, every day, and every month we can bury the tallest tower on planet earth in a cone of plastic bottles... [W]hen you look at the flow of plastic, the vast majority is discarded after a single use. A good part of it is still in use in different components. The stuff that gets recycled, quickly gets discarded again, and then a small fraction becomes put to... more constant use or incinerated for the energy value. If you look at the sources of energy, the vast majority of mismanaged plastic is in Asia Pacific. The global river plastic input to the oceans, massively Asia... and massively packaging. So these are the sort of mismanaged pollution hub spots, and these are the outlets into the global oceans creating this kind of distribution because of the currents of plastics, where the biggest... is the .

This is only a fragment of the plan for the planet that we've done as an in-house research project... to answer some of our own questions... [W]e don't have any jurisdiction over Earth, so no one asked us to do this. So what's the point? ...[D]oing the plan for the planet has given us an insight and a clarity... and we started aligning the projects... with the principles of the plan... [P]roject by project we're beginning to give form to a future that is more aligned with the principles...