Bjarke Ingels Quotes

René... was not only going to be regionalistic. It was also going to be seasonal, so... New Year to April, everything from the sea, because everything else is dead... so... seaweed and seafood and anything that can be fermented or pickled. May to September, vegetable season... the October to January, game and forest, so... venison, berries and roots. ...His idea is ...rediscovering traditional Nordic elements. ...[T]he context ...this ...self-built hippie commune in the old Navy yards. This is... what... traditional Nordic villages look like... Even though Scandinavians like to dress in black they like to paint their houses in bright colors... [W]here the southern Europeans push them together to create urbanity, in the Arctics, in the Nordics, they're... spread apart... [O]ur... inspiration came from this... typical Nordic farm... an accumulation of individual houses, each... built for its own purpose... for the main family, for the children as the family and the generations grow... for the potatoes, for the animals, for the workshop...

In Sevilla, the hottest city in Spain, we are building the for the . It's half a public square and half the... Commission. It's covered by this... canopy of photovoltaic panels that creates a shaded square, which means that we can make the facade in one of the sunniest places in the world entirely out of glass, because it's... shaded... It's a naturally ventilated square... The building... produces twice as much energy as it consumes... [T]he photovoltaics are funded and maintained by the local energy company... It becomes... an energy machine or a decentralized power plant...

[W]e started looking at how efficient are the different sources... also... at whose the biggest culprit. Today this is China... But... historically, the last 200 years the US and the EU have... contributed...

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

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.

[A] last smaller building before we escalate is a cultural institution which just opened in ... bringing three different cultural institutions together in a new building: a library, a media tech, a performance space, and a contemporary art center. The art gallery's on the top to... access skylights, and connected by a shared lobby on the waterfront of the ... and... the library and the theater creating the two pillars. The art museum [is] the bridge to enclose a big public [outdoor] room. The... building finished in prefabricated concrete. You can... see that the French invented steel because they are so incredibly good at it. Also the sand in the south of France is so insanely beautiful. That's why in is maybe the only truly beautiful of the unités that Le Corbusier did, because of the quality of the sand. ...[T]he three institutions enclosing this giant outdoor urban room, where the... institutions, but also the city itself can invade. On the inside it's... 150,000 sq ft building with a $40 million dollar budget... so we had this... positive side-effect that all the finishes inside are... insanely raw. It's... concrete in different shades. ...The most important part of the building is what's not there. ...Even the furniture is cast out of concrete, some of it tiled. ...The ballerinas can look out at the square and vice versa. ...The theater ...this mosaic of tarred wood, hot-rolled steel and black concrete to create the perfect... acoustic mix, and finally this... art barn at the top and a sculptural park... [I]n this very... simple building... the main gesture... providing this... new shaded and covered outdoor space for the cultural life of the city.

What if we could focus on examples where sustainability... increases the quality of life? Where a sustainable life isn't pain—but pleasure!

[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...

We are preparing to start phase one of our most significant project... the first carbon neutral island in Central Asia. ...BIG has become a sort of urban laboratory where we develop prototypes, breed species and evolve ideas that will... add to the topography of Zira... [and] the ecosystem of Azerbaijan.

[I]n many ways... this idea of social infrastructure and the utilitarian and the social, and bringing it together into a... new hybrid... [F]or the poster... [T]en years ago I was so keen on getting some buildings built, that I didn't care about master plans because they took forever and they resulted in nothing, at least in the horizon that I could overview. Now that I an older and more patient, and I realize that two decades go quickly, I have more appetite for master plans... [T]here's a lot of things that can only be dealt with... on a... wholistic level at a certain scale... [W]e had an unfortunate encounter with ... and he had this idea of turning the site of two former factories at the base of into an experimental city, where we would look at studying the potential impact on cities, from advances in personal mobility, mobility as a service, autonomy, robotics, smart homes, ...creativity through AI, multi-generational, assisted living, hydrogen powered infrastructure, academic research and incubation... [W]e... started... to look at the typical city of today. ...[T]oday the street has... everything: bikes, cars, pedestrians. We thought, maybe... to tailor different... experiences: one street-only autonomous vehicles and pedestrians, one for mixed personal mobility... more like a promenade, and finally a park, only for pedestrians... [E]every third street varies, and leaves in both directions. You can... walk through the entire city moving only through a park, or only along a promenade. ...[T]he roofs are powering the city with building-integrated photovoltaics... [A]ll these different intersections between the three different kinds of streets allows Toyota and collaborating companies to test the Toyota connected city traffic management system. There's a matternet for the delivery of goods.

Architecture is most appealing with simple lines and clear ideas. A city... becomes alive when it is rich with experiences and surprises. So the paradoxical challenge is to... create simplicity and variety, difference and coherence... a city in the building.

So of all the different sources wind and solar seems to be the best...

In the last 100 years we six times doubled our consumption [0.7 trillion m³ in 1900, to 4 trillion m³ in 2018] of water. ...Most of it goes to agriculture, and of the agriculture, most goes into meat.

Wind power: only 0.6% [of world energy production] and you have a very large untapped potential... Mostly the closer you get to the poles, the more wind power potential, especially offshore.