A decade after, we opened the Danish Pavilion in Shanghai. The subject for the World Expo was "Better Cities, Better Life," and we thought of the pav… - Bjarke Ingels

[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...

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.

[T]he idea of the Vltava Philharmonic is to... celebrate the journey of the Vltava river, the Vltava symphony, the journey from the stream, the source in the mountains... through the ... through dams, through cities, and eventually to [Prague]... Imagine an architecture that... is... a journey from the river to the roof... as public... engaging and inviting... To bring the... the life of the city center down to the river. Create a landmark... for the neighborhood, for the city. To resolve this... of trams... trains... highways... metro stops... pedestrians and cars, in a three dimensional city, to create a literal and accessible connection to the river, to provide... an active social environment for the fine performing arts... also for the popular culture... to create this... perfectly tuned instrument for the performance and delivery of symphonic music. ...[F]rom this incredibly rational, orthoganal diagram, use the public realm, the canopies, the es and the s to create a public destination, and similarly in plan, to blur the distinction between inside and outside by pulling out the canopies to connect with the environment to create a zone that is neither indoor nor outdoor, that is protected from the rain and shaded from the sun... [T]his kind of very basic principle created this building that... starts at the edge of the water and winds itself up to the main level of the city and the bridge, and from here creates a series of destinations and lookouts... to the top of the city. ...[A] music student can walk all the way up to class on the outside of the building. ...[T]he highway... has... been overflown, so instead of having cars dominating the waterfront... it becomes public life. ...[Y]ou don't really know where the building ends or the city begins, and you have... generous spaces where public life is invited to enter and linger. ...From the city side you can see into... green rooms, rehearsal rooms and... a culture hub with musical studios. ...[A]t night the... transparency... illuminates the wooden... [ceilings] made out of locally sourced timber. Towards the water... pulling out the balconies and... terraces you get these... lookouts... almost at the... water's edge. [A]... pavement made out of locally sourced stone and the... integration of greenery... blurs the distinction between what is park, what is plaza, what is building... [S]tepping of stones create a series of... hangout spaces or... informal performance spaces. ...[W]hat could... sometimes be construed as a... , highbrow cultural institution becomes a very... welcoming and accessible landscape of... familiar local materials, and an abundance of places with views... shade... sun and shelter. ...[O]n the plaza level between the city and the traffic of the main street... a very permeable zone that also becomes an informal hangout space, so before performances or after, a place to linger... [W]hen the [day]light drops and the... [interior lighting] energy arises the building... comes alive when it starts... inviting guests for the performances. ...[E]ven though all of the... sloping roofs are... gentle in their ascent, at certain angles it... becomes this... incredibly dramatic overlapping of forms. ...Arriving across the bridge you... have the choice to connect... to the plaza... passing through the trees of the plaza that provide shade... having a major arrival plaza in front of the . The foyer wraps the city and the riverfront... [A] building without a... back side.