TEDxEast - Bjarke Ingles - Hedonistic Sustainability

Bjarke Ingels wows the audience with his wit and unlikely architectural solutions around the globe. Prepare to be dazzled.

I can say we have to become

more than just designers

of the two dimensional facades

or three dimensional architectural objects.

We have to become

designers of ecosystems, systems of both

ecology and economy that channel

not only the flow of people

throughout cities and buildings,

but also the flow of resources

like heat, energy, waste and water

into this sort of perpetual motion engines,

which is sort of stop seeing our presence,

the human presence, on the planet earth

as a sort of detrimental to our eco-system,

but actually tries to sort of integrate and incorporate

our consumption patterns and our leftovers

into our natural environment.

The reason for this sort of expanded role of the architect

is because of the atmosphere you capture in this image.

It was taken at the COP 15,

the United Nations Conference on Climate Change,

in Copenhagen, a year and a half ago,

and as you can see, you know, Sarkozy and Brown

and Merkel and even Obama, it wasn't exactly a party.

(Laughter)

It was like a -- it was a complete failure.

Essentially none of the goals

that had been established for the meeting were met,

and the generals of discussion about sustainability

was sort of drowning in this general misconception

that sustainability is a question of how much

of our existing quality of life are we prepared to sacrifice

in order to afford becoming sustainable.

Almost like this sort of protestant idea

that it has to hurt to do good.

But sustainability can't be like

some kind of moral sacrifice

or political dilemma or even like a philanthropical cause,

it has to be a design challenge.

So, when we were sort of recently asked to do

the Danish pavillion for the Shanghai World Expo

that was focusing on sustainable cities

we tried to ask ourselves if there was another sustainability

than this sort of sad depressing one.

We tried to ask ourselves if we could find examples

where sustainable cities and buildings

actually increased life quality.

So we decided to make the pavillion

as a sort of a condensation of how

Danish cities through their sustainable design

actually increase life quality.

We can see the pavillion as a sort of loop of a Danish street

complete with the blue bicycle lanes of Copenhagen,

because in Copenhagen 37%

of the Copenhageners commute by bike,

so people visiting could actually feel how cool it is

to ride a bike through the city instead of sitting

in a traffic jam or looking endlessly for a parking spot.

Also in Copenhagen, our harbour water

has become so clean that you can swim in it,

so that you don't have to, like, take the bus for hours

to go to the Hamptons,

you can actually jump in the port.

So at the heart of the pavillion

we allow the visitors to experience on their own body

how clean, if not how cold, the Danish harbour water is.

And in the middle of this sort of harbour bath

we decided to place the little mermaid of Denmark,

not a copy of the mermaid, we actually moved her to China.

We had to wrestle her out of the hand of the Danish

equivalent of the tea party, who was trying to

pass a law specifically against moving the mermaid,

we had to get her through Chinese customs.

(Laughter)

And there she is!

In her absence we invited the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei

to sort of install an installation.

He installed a Chinese surveillance camera.

It's the same Chinese surveillance camera

the Chinese State has installed in front of his house.

This one, however, was part of an installation

he called "The mermaid exchange".

It was transmitting a live image

to a giant flat screen

so that the Copenhagen tourists that went in vain

would sort of see that she was alright.

But sort of more importantly,

for the six months of the duration of the Expo

it became like this sort of, the only sort of

TV feed from China to the rest of the world,

trasmitting a sort of uncensored live footage,

almost turning Copenhagen

into this sort of global speakers' corner for China.

Sadly, Ai Weiwei has now been sort of silenced,

like this critical voice of China

has actually been captured by the government,

and has been missing for the last six weeks.

But sort of back in the pavillion, we can say like,

to just sum it up, what we wanted to

try to do, was to show how, essentially,

sustainable life can be more fun than normal life.

And as a sort of litmus test,

this is the first image we've pubblished

of the Danish pavillion.

You notice the red rectangle.

This is the first image or one of the first images

pubblished of Iron man 2,

showing Tony Stark's Mad Science Expo,

and if you sort of compare the two rectangles.

This is Hollywood and this Shanghai,

so first of all like this is, this is big business

it's America, the land of litigation, we should

we should sue them and get rich.

But then we thought

that sort of Coco Chanel said that copying

is the highest form of compliment, and you know,

if Hollywood starts using our sustainable architecture

to portrait science fiction, it could be a sign

that we are moving towards hedonistic sustainability.

So another idea we've been working on

to try to build this idea of how

artificial design can actually be most of,

be environmentally aware but also increase life quality.

We started a project we called "The Mountain", in Copenhagen

It's essentially a combination

of a big parking building and an apartment building,

but the parking creates a man-made mountain

that lifts all the apartments up in the sun and the view,

creating this sort of houses with gardens,

but in the middle of the Danish city.

We called this idea architectural alchemy,

because it's this idea that by mixing

traditional ingredients, like parkings and apartments,

you can actually create if not gold,

then at least added value.

We took this idea one step further

in a project in Copenhagen,

where sort of by mixing shops and offices,

town houses and apartments, putting them in a

stak where they occupy their favourite position

distorting the block to sort of maximise

views for the apartments and access to sunlight,

we created this building we call "The 8 House",

named after its shape.

And this sort of approach

doesn't only allow us to optimize the individual position

of the different parts of the program,

like leaving shops and offices on the street,

lifting the town houses with gardens

up into the sunshine, but it also sort of allows

public life, which is traditionally

restricted to occurring on street level,

to actually invade the three dimensional space

of the urban block, so that the 8 House in Copenhagen

is not, you know, a two dimensional facade design

or even a three dimensional

architectural object, it's a sort of three dimensional

urban condition that allows, public life

the possibility for spontaneous social encounters,

to actually invade the normally private space

of the urban block and reach

the penthouse of the city.

So this building is at the edge

of Copenhagen, basically at the city limits,

so you have this clash of life forms.

The last idea in the 8 House, it is essentially

like a private developer project,

built for private apartments and town houses,

but somehow it has this sort of generosity

towards the city that it invites public life into it.

This sort of idea of public participation,

we took one step further in a project

we did for the new city hall in Tallin.

We thought that instead of having

this sort of traditional dicotomy of the

politicians inside and the public outside,

we would harbour the city hall above the ground

allowing the public to invade the ground floor

in what we called the public service market place,

where they can interact with the public servants

and even sort of see the politicians at work.

We called it the public village,

because it is essentially like an accumulation of all

of the different departments that have their own building.

They sort of merge to form a

a sort of a single consolidated village.

In one place we invited the people of Tallin

to access the roof and enjoy the panorama

of the surrounding city.

And finally in the masterplan they wanted

a tower, because like in Europe

it's hard to imagine a city hall without a tower.

So we thought, what are we going to do with the tower?

We thought, why don't we place

the city council inside the tower?

So we created this incredibly generous space for political reflection.

The ceiling is made as a giant mirror,

so that when politicians have to make difficult decisions,

all they have to do is to look up,

and they get this sort of periscopic overview

of the city that they are actually messing with.

(Applause)

But as a sort of a side effect,

when the angry citizens gather to demonstrate,

they get this perfect insight,

they can see, you know,

if politicians are missing, if they are sleeping,

if they are playing Angry Birds.

So we called it

the democratic periscope

that combines political overview with public insight.

And to our extreme luck the City council

liked the idea and we are now building

this sort of architectural relaxation

of radical political transparency.

So these three ideas we tried to bring together in

what is, until now, our biggest

project, it combines

this idea of hedonistic sustainability

with this sort of architectural alchemy and this

notion of public participation.

It's located within a masterplan

we were commissioned by the 10 municipalities

of Metropolitan Copenhagen, to do a plan

according to, like along the new train line

that would connect all the municipalities.

What we proposed in return to saying

why just focus on Copenhagen, or even Denmark,

right on the other side of the Oresund waters

we have Sweden, southern Sweden.

It is sort of the most densely populated

and most economically active region

in Scandinavia, and by adding a simple 3 mile bridge

we could actually connect it all

into a sort of a single bi-national

metropolitan region where no area

is further away than fourty minutes

by public transportation.

And it wouldn't just be like an infrastructure

for public transportation, it would also be

an infrastructure for waste management,

for water management, for energy,

combining a smart grid that combines

hydro electricity from Sweden

with wind power from Denmark.

It connects all of the most prosperous businesses

in the entire region and by merging it

and making it sort of a bi-national masterplan.

We also introduced

pink in the flag for the first time. (Laughter)

It has exactly the same size

as the San Francisco Bay area.

So it is actually quite likely

sort of a regional planning size,

just because of the national boundaries,

this sort of holistic perspective has never been applied.

And our idea was to instead of focusing

on the individual infrastructure,

to actually merge it all, so that the train line is also

the first faced densification of the downtown areas.

The train really stops

at the heart of the different neighbourhoods.

And finally, since we are combining

industry, commerce and residential

we are proposing that perhaps

the excess energy from the power production

of the industry could become

like a human programme, like thermal baths.

So this could sound like sort of science fiction

or the Jetsons, but to take it to

something really tangible, this is going to be the first

building that we're completing within the Loop city.

It's a waste-to-energy plant.

In Copenhagen we only landfill 4% of our waste --

as an example in Chicago it is 85% --

42% gets recycled,

and 54% is essentially used as fuel to create heat and electricity.

97% of the homes in Copenhagen have district heating,

so they don't spend any energy on heating

in a very cold country, they get it all as excess heat

from the power production.

And essentially they form this loop

that people give their trash to the incineration plant

and they get it back as power.

So as a thumb rule, three kilos of

household trash turn into four hours of electricity

and five hours of heating. And just to give you an idea of

this resource, one tonne of waste is almost

two barrels of oil. But essentially

this is a power plant like any other,

it's a big, ugly, boxy factory

that casts shadow on the neighbours

and blocks the view, so the city wanted,

since it is located in downtown Copenhagen,

to somehow try to make it beautiful.

It should be a gift to the city,

said the CEO of the plant.

So this is not only going to be the biggest building

in Copenhagen, it is also going to be the tallest,

it is going to be more than 350 feet tall.

It's located right in the middle of the historical city,

you can see just the opera, the royal theatre,

downtown, and that's where it is going.

It is right next to the Copenhagen marina.

And right in front of it there is something called

the Copenhagen cable track,

which is a track that pools wakeboarders,

and water skiers around in this sort of

perpetual loop of water fun.

And speaking of skiing, Copenhagen has loved skiing,

but unfortunately Copenhagen is flat as a pancake,

we have the snow but we don't have the hills

so we heavily go for hours on buses

to the south of Sweden, so we thought,

you know, if Copenhagen doesn't have mountains,

at least we have mountains of trash, so why don't we

transplant one of the Swedish ski slopes

and put it on the roof of the factory?

So essentially we know the size of the machines,

so we created this sort of minimum envelope.

They wanted to make a visitor centre,

which essentially is a place

where school teachers drag the children

to force them to listen to how trash turns into energy.

Instead we proposed to install

an elevator that takes you to the roof,

where you can choose between

a green, a blue and black ski slope.

And because it is man-made, we can make sure

that it ends up at the foot of the elevator,

to create this sort of perpetual loop of skiing.

Miraculously we actually won the competition

based on this idea.

(Applause)

The roof material is a form of artificial carpet

that all the rainwater that drops on the mountain

is collected and can be blown out

in these humidifiers, that in the summer

can actually create so little friction that,

with normal skiing equipment you can actually ski,

creating this sort of nice brasilian

hybrid of bikini skiing.

But in the winter we do have

three to four months of frost and snow.

So from 2015

you are going to have to look out

for the Danish competitors in Alpine skiing!

You know, originally the competition was

to make the factory look good,

so we also had to do a facade.

We proposed to make it out of these giant planters

made out of recycled plastics. The excess water

runs through the facade watering the plants,

so in the summer we create this sort of

natural shade that turns the working space

of the factory into this sort of nice, naturally illuminated

and naturally ventilated work space.

At night you see the machines working inside the factory.

So you can say, the initial vision,

you know of trying to design our cities and buildings

as ecosystems, is quite close to materializing

in this project, because not only locally

there is this reuse of the water, the daylight,

the natural ventilation,

but also in a more regional perspective,

together with Copenhagen and the rest of the loop city

the plant actually forms an ecosystem.

As a last thing, they were imagining,

they wanted some kind of

building integrated art project,

and traditionally what you do,

you hire some light artist to blow coloured lights

at the building at night. We thought,

why don't we play with the resources we have?

This is going to be the cleanest waste-to-energy plant

in the world, the smoke coming out

of the chimney is completely non toxic,

but it still does contain some CO2.

A lot less than the current plant, but it does contain

some of it. So we thought,

why don't we design the mouth of the chimney

in such a way that it fills gradually with CO2

and when it contains 100 kilos, it compresses

and puffs a giant smoke ring?

So that we can play with it at night!

But of course, on one end we like it, cause it's

almost like the ultimate artistic expression

of hedonistic sustainability,

you take the symbol of the problem,

the pollution, the chimney,

and turn it into something playful.

But one of the main drivers of behavioural change

is knowledge, but if people don't know they can't act.

And when my nephews ask me, you know,

what's a ton of CO2, I have to say, I don't have a clue!

In 2015 I can tell them to count 10 smoke rings

and when they have counted 10 of them,

we have just emitted one ton of CO2.

So, we can say the waste-to-energy plant

in Copenhagen is not only sort of

economically and ecologically sustainable,

by turning waste into energy, it's also

socially sustainable because it turns a power plant

into a park, and it turns a flat land

into a man-made mountain for skiing.

So, as a last thing, you might object that

this is something that can only happen

in sunny, semi-socialist, sentimental Scandinavia.

But just to wrap it up,

recently we got approached by Durst Fetner Residential,

of Manhattan, to look at this side

on the west side water front.

It's quite far away from the nearby parks,

it's right next to the Helena, a building

owned by our client, named after his daughter.

And normally residential in the area

looks like this, sort of sturdy boxes, we thought:

why don't we, you know, having spent 10 years of

my career as an architect trying to escape

the tiranny of the Copenhagen courtyard

as a typology, we thought that maybe, in Manhattan

this idea of creating an urban oasis

at the heart of the block could be interesting,

If you like, the Copenhagen courtyard

is at the architectural scale

what Central Park is at an urban scale,

a human habitat surrounded by

a dense wall of people.

So we asked ourselves,

what happens when you combine a skyscraper

with a courtyard? Essentially, what would a

courtscraper look like?

So we first we placed the courtyard next to the Helena,

we tried to preserve all of its views

to be a good neighbour, but also because it is

our client's building.

And then in the north east corner, to create

density and views, we lifted it up to 450 feet,

creating this sort of walked perimeter block

that has views and sunshine from the west side.

And what happens is that you can say, traditionally

perimeter blocks or courtyards

are secrets kept for the tenants.

In this case, it really becomes

the main facade of the building towards the highway,

almost showing how the rejuvination of the waterfront

moves into the city fabric itself.

And the warped geometry also brings daylight

to the streetscape, and finally

all of the apartments are rotated towards the view,

creating this sort of pattern of balconies,

but also allowing the residents

to recognise their own apartment,

almost as a building within the building.

And of course, people living next to the roof

have this nice view of the Hudson.

So, because of the incredible asimmetry,

the courtyard really goes from 42 inches

to 400 feet and back down again.

So this has been sort of passed forward,

this has been well received,

and according to plan, and sometimes,

even in architecture, things happen according to plan.

We should be breaking ground

the 1st of September this year.

(Applause)

So you are gonna see some of the

sort of architectural evolution

we have been conducting in Scandinavia

is now starting to cross-breed

with the New York typologies.

To finish off, this is what it could look like

driving down the west side highway in four years.

(Aplause)