Bjarke Ingels Quotes

We designed and built MÉCA, la Maison de l'économie créative de Aquitaine. It's a... regional art foundation, and a library and...performance center... on the waterfront of in ... next to the first bridge designed and built by . ...As you walk along the Garonne river the museum lifts you up, allow you to pass through and continue your journey... The theater and the library become the pillars that carry the art museum. ...It creates this urban room ...shaded from the Bordeaux sun... gently lifts the public up through the building and out. It creates... effortless seating in the shade of the building overlooking the river. ...[J]ust by opening the facade a tiny bit ...all the programs that need daylight are visible from the outside. ...All the finishes ...almost like Le Corbusien ...raw and simple material. ...[Y]ou enter ...a little storytelling pit ...It's really like a warehouse for the arts. ...As you ascend up, the theater with the skylit stage, so for rehearsals they have daylight, and finally the art space on the roof and the beautiful view of the city. ...[A]lmost like an extension of the industrial neighborhood behind, bringing the city and its life all the way down to waterfront.

He came to us because he wanted to move his restaurant... to... Christiania, this kind of hippie commune in Copenhagen. It's part of the old fortification... a historical landmark... The hippies invaded in 1969 and never left. You can buy mild drugs openly... The main part of the building is an old... mine storage. ...We thought the city was going to give us a medal for trying to make it nice, but the city had this attitude that as long as it was only deteriorating organically, everything was fine... [A]s soon as we started trying to repair it, everything was incredibly restricted.

[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.

75% of the greenhouse effect is attributed to <chem>CO2</chem>. This is the biggest problem, 14% to methane and the rest nitrous oxide and F-gases. ...F-gases are 3,000 times more impactful than <chem>CO2</chem>. There's just a lot less of it.

Sustainable ideas crystallize through an immensity of wasted efforts. ...Good ideas are sometimes resurrected from fossils of past evolutions.

[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...

Today we spend 153,000 terawatt-hours per year. ...1/3 ...from electricity, transportation and agriculture ...85% of our energy comes from non-renewable... but of the 15% of renewable 2/3 of it is... burning wood...

In Amsterdam we... opened the Slicehouse. ...We put a floating solar farm in the water... There's a public promenade where people can overlook... Amsterdam. It's... completely framed by . ...[W]e lift up the courtyard so you can sail into the city block. The local kids can swim. You can dock a boat. It becomes... a... fusion between the public realm, the port, and the private. The facade is made out of maritime aluminum... so the facade continues into the water. ...[T]o let in sunlight some of the apartments become houses with gardens, and you can walk... up to the public promenade... [T]he building... becomes an extension of the city landscape of Amsterdam. It's... piled on energy piles extracting heat and cold from the port... to heat and cool the building.

[W]e could only place buildings in the footprints of where there had been buildings in the past... a very limited repertoire.

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...

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.

If you look at the different renewables, they've all gone down [in cost], especially solar; massively over that last half decade, except hyro, which has gone up... Hydropower currently provides only 3% of our power. It's believed that there's a bigger potential, but... not enough to provide the entire earth, but 71 of the countries on earth could... be delivering European living standard with the amount of hydroelectricity they have available. ...The biggest [35 TW-h/yr] hydro-station in the world, Churchill Falls in Canada... You could provide the same amount of energy with solar, with a much smaller area [102 km² vs. 7,000 km²].

[S]olar power... since the 70s the price has gone drastically down <nowiki>[</nowiki>PV prices: $76 down to $0.30].

In a similar loop, methane only stays in the atmosphere for 9 years, but because every year we're releasing another 10 million tons, primarily because of rice fields and animals, it's also adding to the equation...

There's another aspect, which is the shine effect. So , the Anish Kapoor patented black, the least reflective material on earth, had a shine effect of zero, and perfect white, of one... [A]n ocean or a parking lot has almost no shine effect so it absorbs a lot of heat. So the more open ocean... the more parking lots, the more heat is absorbed, whereas fresh snow has a... good shine effect... [T]o give you an idea of how impactful this is, if earth was all ocean we would have an average temperature of 27°C. Today it's 15°C... If 1/3 of the planet was glacial, it would be frozen. So 1% of change in the shine effect of earth is the equivalent of doubling the amount of <chem>CO2</chem> in the atmosphere. So it's also an important factor that... now works against us.