Abstract: The Art of Design (2017–…): Season 1, Episode 4 - Bjarke Ingels: Architecture - full transcript

Is this going to be a slapstick comedy? Is it an action film?
You know, let's have fun with it.
- Yeah. - We can do anything.
Oh yeah, nice.
So what do you think your movie should be?
All right, it should be like the documentary version of Inception.
The whole premise of Inception is that, in real life,
you can't really realize the dreams because you have so many constraints,
but whereas in the dream world, they could do all these kinds of things.
And when architecture is at its best, that's exactly what you're doing,
you're coming up with something that is pure fiction.
Then after all the hard work, all the permits,
all the budgeting and all the construction,
it now becomes concrete reality.
When Bjarke came around,
Danish architecture was somehow sleeping.
We had our heydays back in the '50s, the '60s, the '70s.
We became world-famous compared to how small we are, actually.
At the time Bjarke came around,
people didn't expect anything really to happen.
And I think you could argue that he really made everybody wake up.
What he was proposing had such a scale and such revolutionary qualities
that the Danes got scared.
Bjarke Ingels is having his moment.
At just 40 years old, he has established himself
as one of the world's most inventive and sought-after architects.
His designs can be provocative.
He's transforming the shape of New York as we know it.
There's no doubt that in architecture there's this catch-22.
Nobody will entrust you to build a building
until you've already built a building.
This is the Maritime Youth House in Copenhagen.
It's...
I guess it's our first building.
I celebrated my 30th birthday in that space.
It was just completed.
Our practice, Bjarke Ingels Group, or in short BIG,
started 15 or 16 years ago.
Our rise has sort of coincided with the rise of the environmental movement.
So we came up with this idea of Hedonistic Sustainability.
What if sustainability could be part of actually increasing your quality of life?
So I think in this case, it's a beautiful site, but the site was polluted,
because they had been painting the underside of boats here.
A lot of the money in the budget was reserved for digging up the topsoil...
and moving it somewhere else.
So we thought, what if we covered the entire ground with a wooden deck?
Then we can leave the soil as it is.
We put up this sheet.
If you want more program over here, we'll just lift the deck here.
If you want to park some boats here, we store the boats underneath the...
So I think it had this sense of possibility.
These rolling hills next to the sea,
it also somehow inspires movement and playfulness.
We won the competition for the Maritime Youth House.
We found a lot of ways to solve the problems
in a completely unproblematic way.
Even though it's a very small building, with a small budget,
I think it had an impact, and it won a handful of awards.
And I think it showed
that even something that is essentially like a hut for boy scouts,
which is typically more like a barrack building,
like sort of off the shelf, almost like a trailer,
that's what it normally is,
and with the same resources you could get something that was completely different.
I think that definitely opened people's way of thinking about architecture,
what a building could be and what it could do.
So what happened this week?
Me and my partner here, at the New York office, Thomas,
went to London to Kensington Gardens, next to the Serpentine Lake.
For the last 15 years,
the Serpentine Gallery... They have been making a pavilion,
the Serpentine Pavilion.
So, in the middle of Hyde Park over the summer,
from June to end of October.
The Serpentine Gallery is almost like an icon
for miniature architectural manifestos.
It's always commissioned to an architect that has never built in England before.
And today, two thirds of the people that design these pavilions...
are Pritzker Prize-winning architects. They're really at the top of their game.
For a comedian, it's like performing at Saturday Night Live or...
It's a stage where the history of the people that have performed there
makes it an honor in itself.
And we met with the co-directors of the Serpentine
and they started the meeting by telling us that the good news was
that we would be designing this year's Serpentine Pavilion.
I guess that was Tuesday and today is Friday.
Without having any sort of design in mind, imagine this sort of logic
where you have some kind of undulation,
so it almost like looks like a marble curtain,
and that's what gives it stability.
Almost like a James Turrell.
That you're inside this weird translucent, undulating slice of marble
and then you're looking up through...
I think with the dome...
I mean, it creates that one experience of being inside,
and it's probably a beautiful optic from the outside,
but that's only that one use.
You're doing an entire building within six months.
Normally a project that goes fast takes six years,
so we're going to try to see how many ideas we can crank out.
I mean, there was something interesting
about like making a wall that morphs to become a pavilion.
You know, it could be a way of making a wall
that creates a cave, and an auditorium, right?
Yeah.
It's more like a magical manipulation of a conventional element...
Mm-hmm.
That then becomes space.
Cool?
Let's do it!
I'm Elisabet Ingels.
And I'm Knud Bundgaard Jensen.
And this is Fidel. He's a Bichon Havanese.
And it's Bjarke who had given him the name.
- He's from Cuba. - Cuba.
We couldn't call him Cuba, because there's a Cuba down the street.
Another dog.
Yeah another dog, and so it's Fidel.
He was drawing very much. It was his great interest.
He was considering making comics until 18, 19 years.
What did you think
when he told you he was gonna study architecture?
- Actually... - It's a family project.
- Yes... - So explain.
We told Bjarke, "You can later try making comics,
you can later get a job at an advertising bureau,
but I think that you should study architecture."
I went to Architecture school in Barcelona.
I wanted to use some of the first years
where you get some basic education in drawing to become a better cartoonist.
You end up in the school, you want to figure this thing out.
So I went through this sort of intellectual, serial-monogamy,
falling in love with one architect. Then the next, and next...
And it completely warped my idea of what architecture could be.
And that was definitely the year where I became the person I am today.
Getting out of Copenhagen, living in another city, speaking another language.
And finally, dropping out of school,
starting my own company in Barcelona with some friends.
It was also clear that when I returned to Copenhagen a year later,
with sort of a Spanish suntan,
I was a completely different person
and could somehow do things and be credible making statements
that would have been unimaginable the year before.
The qualities of the spaces and the indoor climate
doesn't come from the machine room,
but from the qualities integrated into the architecture.
Rather than architecture without architects,
it's sort of engineering without engines,
or Functionalism 2.0.
We started our company without any clients.
But after a very long and winding road, we finally ended up building a building.
The VM House.
My name is Per Høpfner. I am a developer.
I meet Bjarke, first time in 2001.
He said, "We are a new company, architect company,
we are so fucking good, and we are very creative,
and we are so bright, and we can build very, very cheap."
"Okay, how cheap?" "Oh, you can't imagine."
Immediately, I like him.
And at that time, there was nothing here in this area.
And if you should attract people, it should be very cheap,
and there could be something special.
We designed these buildings for pioneers.
We got permission to make the apartments 30% deeper,
and we made sure that each apartment had a double-height space.
For every three floors, there was only one central corridor,
so that, instead of having a corridor at every level that you had to pay for,
we boiled it down to every third level, so we could get great efficiencies.
The beautiful thing is that at this point, we hadn't built as much as a dog house.
And the day we started to sell here,
we have sold 110 flats for one Sunday.
It created a lot of noise.
And I can tell you one thing.
A lot of his colleagues, they don't like him.
And they don't like him because they've been so successful abroad.
It's not usual for a Danish architect company to make money.
We were definitely seen as being alien in a sort of Danish context.
And it is a culture where difference, or disagreement is almost embarrassing.
How's it going?
- Hello, happy New Year! - Happy New Year!
You never left the office?
Yeah.
Because the time schedule is so compressed
for the Serpentine Pavilion,
we have to make decisions absurdly fast.
We have been keeping a series of ideas alive.
For a while we had three, then we boiled it down to two.
And I think we are looking at this idea of a wall
that is made out of fiberglass bricks or blocks.
And then you're almost pulling it apart, like a zipper,
so that it becomes undulating landscapes on the exterior,
like a valley and a hillside.
And then on the inside, it creates this crevasse, or canyon, or cave.
So try to place this...
- This one is lower. - That one should fit, yeah.
That's kind of nice.
There's no doubt that the wall looks very good, right?
Yeah.
And it feels very comfortable.
It's the kind of shit we do.
And I think it's also the one we have developed the furthest.
There's a couple different ways we can put it together.
I have a feeling that we could do this and it would be a great success.
Yeah.
There's almost nothing that wouldn't be cool about it.
Maybe we should just do it.
The way you realize your wildest dreams
is actually one step at a time.
The master plan of this whole neighborhood
was basically saying to build a stack of apartments
and then a big box of parking behind.
What if the parking fills the entire site?
And then instead of having a vertical stack of homes,
they become houses with gardens,
like a giant staircase covering a big sort of mountain of parking.
What we see here is all the sun-facing gardens,
where each home has a garden
that is roughly the same size as the apartment itself.
And then they sit on this cave full of cars.
The underside actually becomes
the front door of the homes of people arriving
so we made the underside very, very colorful.
Whenever we design homes,
What would I think would be amazing?
And I think in this case, it's almost like realizing a dream
that an apartment block doesn't have to look like a big, boxy slab.
It could be like this sort of man-made mountain.
You don't have to choose between building a parking structure
or an apartment building.
You don't have to choose between a house with a garden
or having a penthouse view.
You can actually have both.
And once you force these sort of seemingly mutually exclusive concepts together,
you actually get a new hybrid that somehow ends up looking different
because it performs differently.
I think The Mountain is a quite good example of pragmatic utopia
in the sense that it's done within one city block,
so it becomes a very pragmatic realization of something utopian
but, like, one block at a time.
When I think just that The Mountain is here,
it means that there is another way, there is another possibility.
And therefore it makes the utopia more possible.
And that's what we mean with Yes Is More.
At that point, I'd never really written it down,
so it existed in the form of lectures, verbal tradition.
Yes Is More is presented in the form of a comic book.
It's not like you have the text first, and then you get the pictures.
You have the things intertwined so it becomes more conversational.
So then of course, in retrospect,
it feels quite logical,
because I wanted to become a graphic novelist
and I kind of deviated from that trajectory at some point,
it's kind of a return to home.
The book very rapidly gave him the position as a rising star.
He was... Suddenly, he was there. And quite massive.
Which changed the culture of young architects.
Bjarke took up the idea of, I think, asking the Danes:
what is it actually that we want to do
from having had this spectacular tradition?
How can we be revolutionary,
but in such a manner that you would not forget your tradition?
So for instance, the building that we are standing in right now
is actually a building which is, in itself, a merger.
The 8 House.
500 homes, shops and offices and kindergartens.
Classic apartments and more town houses.
And we've actually created a giant mountain path
with an ADA-accessible slope.
So it sort of becomes like a three-dimensional community.
I like big ideas and the BIG Group when it makes a big building,
that's just for me.
We feel like we are living in a village.
We have the beautiful rooms in common where we make parties and eat together,
and a path that you can walk.
The children out here, they really enjoy it,
and I can see it from our balcony.
It's just beautiful to see.
In the big picture, architecture is the art and science
of creating the framework of our lives.
And the buildings that we built, they either open possibilities
or they hinder encounters or connections.
With the 8 House, it really has become a three-dimensional community
and you can see it in the people living here.
There are so many initiatives, a lot of the people know each other.
Gabrielle? How's it going?
Is that beautiful Hélène?
Good to see you!
Actually the funny thing is Gabrielle and I and her husband were doing...
I think you were both students at the time.
- Yeah. - Or...
- Interns, yes. - Interns.
So we were working on our first book and exhibition,
so we were doing sort of 24-hour work days...
- Yeah, Yes Is More! - For a month and a half.
So we ended up resulting in this amazing comic book and exhibition,
but also I think that was actually the time
when we suddenly noticed that they were hanging out more and more,
even after the deadline was over.
Exactly.
Yeah, so Hélène is a little bit part of BIG as well, yeah.
For sure.
And one of the smallest BIGsters. Okay.
Bjarke started off doing sort of affordable housing.
And he was so young, by the standards of a world-renowned architect,
that he had to go from being a scrappy, young architect
to a large-scale, almost corporate firm.
And he's had to ramp that up very, very quickly.
Some of the criticisms have been that our buildings are too cheap,
but that's because, honestly, they have been cheap buildings.
But somehow we manage to turn that into architecture
that actually points in new directions, opens up new possibilities,
but in a field where there is almost zero innovation.
The Maritime Museum, is our first museum.
That has found much more universal praise simply because it's a museum
and therefore it came with the budgets where you can do a little bit more.
He wants to do everything.
He wants to build 1,000-foot skyscrapers,
I think he wants to build, you know, museums,
I think he wants to build football stadiums.
The issue is he doesn't feel that he needs to make a choice.
Danes hate big scales.
But Bjarke brought in the big scale.
And they were very skeptic and, I would say, quite hateful.
There were one or two old professors at the School of Architecture
that were very skeptical and critical.
It is easy to understand if you consider how young he was.
He never follows the rules.
And a lot of my fellow developers said, "Per, how can you build with this guy?"
Whenever we talk about architecture,
and whenever people have opinions about architecture,
the most typical argument is:
something is bad because it doesn't fit in.
And maybe in Copenhagen, if you would look out,
you would think that it's red brick and red tiles.
Six stories, end of story, pitched roof.
But when you think about the things
that people really associate with Copenhagen,
that the Copenhageners think are unique to their city,
they always think about those historical spires.
If everybody followed the rules, Copenhagen wouldn't look like Copenhagen.
And I think it's going to be interesting to see, like how...
what's going to happen with Danish architecture,
but, of course, we also kind of migrated to America.
The city is an experiment and Manhattan is the perfect example of that.
It's about accommodating diversity.
And after five years at BIG, we were in a pretty good spot,
but New York felt like it could be a real adventure.
It was a great opportunity.
He needed more space
because he wanted to make big architecture.
Things that evolved in one context
suddenly find their true potential when they move into another context.
To begin with such a big canvas
like a city block on the waterfront of Manhattan,
this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, we cannot mess it up.
The Courtscraper is this hybrid
of an American skyscraper and a Copenhagen courtyard.
When you get into that league, everything changes.
New York is the city of the world, so it can't get more wild.
There was a certain energy and pioneering
and maybe I just felt like feeling that energy again.
The Royal Parks are our landlords and this is their beautiful park
and they stipulate that the architecture
cannot come within three meters of the tree.
Now that of course is not a problem in principle,
but it is a problem in practice.
So the question is, is this three meters?
This is like, one, two, three. In my mind, we can nudge it.
- I think we can nudge it a meter over. - You think a whole meter?
Yeah.
So you need another meter?
I think if we just...
And then we don't take it a meter away from the fence?
Take it a meter away from the fence and move it closer to the signature line.
But the other thing that I am seriously curious about
is actually when you're standing here
and you imagine that you would basically take the two yellow outlines
and literally flip them,
and I think we simply turn the other way.
- And then we move it... - So it comes out...
It grazes the path
and then the entire hill is gonna be in the sun, which is also nice.
- Perfect, lovely. - That could be nice, it's so exciting.
The Serpentine, right now, is massively under construction.
Fiberline, the company that makes the boxes,
is plowing ahead and is shipping the first shipment to go to London.
Obviously we don't have any wiggle room from the beginning.
So we're now finding ways to catch up.
The beauty of it is you can take a single material,
a single technique, a single idea,
and you can make very clear statements,
undiluted by those thousands of constraints and compromises
and negotiations, which take so long.
Over the last 15 years, we've completed 12 or 13 buildings.
But right now, we have 17 construction sites.
Right where this new green promenade touches downtown,
it's going to create a new urban oasis,
which is going to become our new neighborhood.
In our work, Yes Is More.
We try to come up with this inclusive approach to architecture,
of getting everybody's input to the extreme,
where suddenly it becomes the driving force.
We're not gonna stop
until we have incorporated every single concern, no matter how small.
This obsession about making everybody happy
becomes a recipe for making something that is really extraordinary,
because it has to perform in so many different ways.
These buildings become like interesting scales in your own life.
You have to ask yourself:
is this going to be worth the next seven years of my life?
And if you're not realizing a dream, then seven years is a really long time.
Some things are missing. That's one thing.
There are things that aren't placed right, either.
How wrongly are they placed?
It touches, so that there isn't room...
- Oh, funny. - Look.
Is he doing too many projects at once?
Is he spread too thin?
If you're the architect who says yes to everything, including every commission,
do you, at some point,
have to start making compromises in your vision?
Do you start repeating yourself?
Should we take a look at what some people think of Bjarke?
Let's hear it.
"BIG's projects all repeat similar traits:
stacked, banal glass volumes with roof gardens,
cheaply made for developer satisfaction."
Another comment is:
"BIG sucks. My nine-year-old does more interesting shit in Minecraft."
The issue is he can sort of freely take
from all sorts of aesthetic traditions
and create things that are aesthetic promiscuity.
In that he can, to put it crassly,
market in a way that's elegant, innovative and fun.
If you go beyond indifferent,
you will awaken a response in both extremes, right?
Especially in the age of the internet.
If you read the comments on blogs as if they are valid criticisms,
then you're going to have a rough time.
I really grew a thick skin.
When you're doing something like this,
even though it's carefully crafted,
and premeditated and discussed and designed and tested,
when you see it, it has to feel effortless.
- This is the bar. - That's the bar?
So these gratings are going in afterwards.
The bar up there, right?
It will be quite cool with the gratings.
All the things that end up
becoming the values that somehow define you
are all the things you take for granted, right?
I grew up in a tiny house with a giant garden.
It's not my self-image to be an environmentalist
and it's not my self-image to be a social activist.
But you can't see the forest for all the trees.
This is due west.
So the sun actually sets, and that means that the last 30 minutes before it's gone,
or let's say an hour,
you have two shadows on the walls in the back
because the sun is there above the trees, and it's also right there below the wheat.
And both suns throw shadows,
so you have this amazing moment where the sky has two suns.
Or at least the view has two suns, which is quite nice.
And then actually another funny thing, in the winter, the water freezes.
And suddenly the lake, which was normally the end of the garden,
became this public square
where every single kid, touching on the lake from all sides,
would come and ice skate.
So just like this interesting idea that maybe just the seasonality of things,
or that suddenly something that was a barrier became a meeting point.
What changes over time is that naïveté fades away,
but it's replaced by another kind of confidence
that will make you better at seizing the moment
and grasping what's important.
Okay, let's... let's sit down.
Doc, anything else?
My mom has made, like, 500 meatballs.
Do we have microphones on?
Yes, but I don't think they will use them.
Can't you ask him to shut up?
Oh, Fidel. Can you shut the fuck up, dear Fidel?
There's a sense it's hard to make it in your own village,
but if you go to the big city and make it there,
then, "Ah, it's one of us. He did it."
I think we also changed people's mindset of what's possible,
so I think Copenhageners got used to more crazy ideas,
so when we actually presented
the idea of putting a giant ski slope on the roof of a power plant,
I think it was in an environment
that we had already influenced a little bit over the last decade,
so that it was receptive to that kind of thinking.
We felt that we could propose something seemingly insane
and actually get away with it.
Copenhill.
A waste-to-energy power plant that has a giant public park on the roof
where you can ski.
It's the tallest and biggest building in Copenhagen.
It's, again, this idea of environmental thinking,
that if you have a power plant that is so clean
that you only have a little bit of CO2
and a little bit of steam coming out of the chimney, but no toxins,
you literally have clean mountain air.
And instead of having to be far away from it, you can enjoy it.
It's quite amazing that this will be the children's hill.
It begins all the way up there!
It's high up, even though it's the children's hill.
Yeah, that's right.
It's too cool!
Of course you can say
you put an Alpine ski slope on the roof of a building.
It's a building, it's not a mountain.
I think, to my relief, it feels much more like being on a mountainside
than being on a roof.
This is around 130 feet and the top is 300.
The elevator arrives there so that when you come out,
you have almost like a flat area here.
And then you sort of...
Then you just take off.
I think a project like this can be sort of a beacon in showing the world...
clean tech presents almost utopian possibilities.
And I think the Steam Ring is a powerful symbol of exactly that.
The chimney, instead of being a symbol of pollution,
it becomes a celebration.
We've worked with Realities United to design the chimney
so that it puffs rings of steam.
And it's also like somehow, like, when you start this kind of journey,
it's, like, you know what's important for you...
but you don't necessarily know where you're going.
But you know that, if you make the decision
based on these things that you know matter to you,
wherever you're gonna end up, it's where you need to go.
Of course, I couldn't have predicted this when we did this,
but they're definitely sort of a similar spirit.
Where's the Maritime Youth House from here?
It's basically like...
You can see it where the trees are, exactly.
And then you can see...
the Mountain and the VM are right there.
What about the chapel?
That's right there.
This is probably the most spectacular toilet experience
you can get in Copenhagen at this point.
You can take things that are considered infrastructure:
highways, bridges, power plants...
and crossbreed it,
so that it actually has positive social and environmental side effects,
like the power plant.
Those combinations are very powerful because it's taking a very strong force,
which is necessity, utility,
and giving it poetry and possibility.
There's something there that can be taken much further.
For Bjarke to have achieved this incredible prominence
at 41 years old
is nothing short of extraordinary.
Because in order to do that, an architect has to have built.
There is this kick of seeing a completely novel thing come to life.
Thank you.
It is such a tremendous honor to play in the middle of a royal park,
and especially since it's the Serpentine Pavilion...
Are you surprised by how far your son's gone?
And how quickly he's done it?
Yes. Frankly speaking, we had not expected that.
It's... special.
We live in a time where we need to pull all disciplines
to address the big questions of the 21st century.
And Bjarke never really shied away
from really addressing topics which are found beyond architecture.
I am longing to discover things that I hadn't even thought about.
There's this real genuine moment of immaculate inception,
where you're sort of...
"This is brilliant. I never thought about this before.
This would be amazing. It's beautiful."
And two seconds after,
you can't think of the world without thinking of this being a part of it.
From Tribeca, it will appear like a vertical village of singular buildings,
each tailored to their individual activities,
stacked on top of each other, forming parks and plazas in the sky.
I like this idea about architecture being a way
to manifest your dreams into the real world.
It's almost like a shaman with brick and mortar.
That is the true power that we as humans have.
We actually have such a massive impact on our environment.
So now that we have this power,
we can either use it to create a nightmare or we can use it to realize our dreams.
And, of course, the latter is much more interesting.
Do you dream of buildings?
I never dream about my work, actually, interestingly enough.
There goes the end of the documentary.
Cut!