[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.
Danish architect (b.1974)
[T]his... relationship between the pragmatic and the utopian, or... the utilitarian and the . One such example... This is where the Granville bridge touches downtown Vancouver. We got invited to look at turning it into a mostly residential and also educational development. So we just started mapping the constraints. There are setbacks from the streets... from the bridges. The city has a rule that you cannot build residences closer than 30 meters, or a hundred feet to the traffic on the bridge. There's a park where we're not supposed to cast any shadows, and finally we were left with this tiny triangular footprint, almost too small to build. So... we started thinking... If the purpose of the 100 ft setback is a minimum distance, once we get a hundred feet up in the air we can grow the building back, so... the triangular footprint... turns into a rectangle. ...[W]hen you drive over Granville bridge it's... as if someone is pulling a curtain aside, welcoming you to Vancouver.
[W]hat was mesmerizing... was this... marvel of modern engineering... was going to be the cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world. No toxins coming out of the chimney. So we thought maybe a mountain of trash could become an actual mountain. Our nearest ski slope... is 6 hours away in Isaberg... Sweden... We could put 2/3 of Isaberg's main slope on the roof of the power plant, and so we did. ...The kind of cliff face of the mountain is made out of these gigantic folded raw aluminum bricks that are... planters. ...Raw aluminum so they... reflect the surroundings, so... the building changes color over the course of the day. ...The entire power plant is ...daylit. 50% of the facade is transparent. ...This spring it's going to open the tallest in the world, 300 feet. ...[T]he roof is maybe the most exciting facade. ...[T]he skiing is ...free. It's a public park. If you want to use the lift system, you have to buy a lift pass. It's... designed to... help spread vegetation to the surrounding... post-industrial area. You have hiking paths, different... activity zones. You have... vegetation that changes over the... season. There's more than 400 different trees. ...It's purely indigenous species. If Denmark had mountains this is probably what they would look like. ...[T]he entire roof park has been made for a budget of... $13 million dollars... absurdly inexpensive so everything has... been done with... the least... maintenance and... acquisition cost. ...Maybe the most important material, because Denmark doesn't have enough snow so... we found this Italian company that makes this... mat that has the same friction as a groomed slope. The only problem was that it was... ugly. Also because of the and contraction it had to be split in... 7x7 foot squares. So we sat down... with the company and... managed to develop a... new product... by joining every two circles [holes in the material] in two... directions... This... simple geometric invention... now the standard product of the company, meant that we could have a continuous surface on the... roof... We color-coded it so that the brighter the slope... the less likely... to crash... [E]ventually the grass grows through... [T]he grass... holds the mat to the roof, so eventually it's going to be like skiing on an alpine meadow. ...What is amazing ...it ...shows this ...world-changing power of architecture ...[M]y son is ...never going to remember that there was a time when you couldn't ski on the power plant in Copenhagen ...[F]or him and his entire generation, that's going to be their normal ...the starting point from where they start having crazy ideas about their future. ...A landmark for this ...idea of hedonistic sustainability, that a sustainable city can also be, not just better for the environment, but better for the people living there.
[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...
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...
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.
Starting with the smallest project that we have created... but maybe also one of the most complex. This is ... he pioneered the... regionalistic cuisine with his restaurant Noma... in Copenhagen...Noma is short for Nordic food, "Nordic smell" in Danish. He... rediscovered the Nordic landscapes, the flora and fauna of Nordic nature... to see how those plants and... animals could... be seen as ... a cuisine that's been dominated by French and Asian cuisine. ...[W]here we ...aligned with him was ...this idea that healthy could also be incredibly delicious. We have this notion... hedonistic sustainability, that sustainable can... be more enjoyable. Sustainable cities, sustainable buildings can be more enjoyable, not just good for the environment, but also great for the people living there. He's... done that to food.
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.