[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 … - Bjarke Ingels

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.

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.

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...