Is this going to be a slapstick comedy? Is it an action film? You know, like, let's have fun with it.
Yeah. What do we want to do? We can do anything. Oh yeah, nice.
So, so what do you think your... Yeah, it should be like the documentary version of Inception. The whole premise of Inception is that, you know, in real life you can't really realize your 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, and then after all the hard work and all the permits and 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. The time Bjarke came around, people didn't expect anything really to happen.
I think you could argue that he really make everybody wake up. What he was proposing had such a scale and such revolutionary qualities that the Danes got scared. Yorker Ingalls 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. 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. I guess it's our first building. I celebrated my 30th birthday in that space. It was just complete. Our practice, Björk Inglis Group, or in short BIG, started 15 or 16 years ago.
Our rise has 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 cover the entire ground with a wooden deck? Then we can leave the soil as Yes it is.
We put out this sheet. If you want more program over here, we'll just lift the deck here. If you want to like pack some more boats here, we store the boats underneath. So I think it had like 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 like an impact. 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 like 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, 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 I think maybe today like two-thirds of the people that design these pavilions. Pritzker Prize winning architects, they're really at the top of their game. For a comedian, it's like performing at Saturday Night Live.
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 were designing this year's Serpentine Pavilion. I guess that was Tuesday and today's Friday.
Without having any sort of design in mind, imagine this sort of Eladio Dieste logic, where you have some kind of an undulation, so it almost looks like a marble curtain, and that's what gives it stability. Almost like a James Turrell. that you're inside this like 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 you know probably a beautiful object from the outside but it like there'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 gonna try to see how many ideas can we crank out. There was something interesting about making a wall that morphs to become a pavilion.
Yeah. 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 that then becomes space. Cool? Double up smile.
I am Elizabeth Engels. And I am Knut Bondgård Jensen. And this is Fidel.
He is a Bichon Havanese. And it's Bjarke who had given him the name. He's from Cuba.
We couldn't call him Cuba because there is 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 to make comics until 18, 19 years.
So what did you think when he told you he was going to study architecture? Actually... It's a family project.
Yes. So explain. Yes. 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 school. You want to figure this thing out. So I went through this sort of intellectual serial monogamy falling in love with one architect and the next and 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 like 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 a sort of 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 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 Hoefner. I'm a developer. I met Bjarke for the first time in 2001. And we said, OK, 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. OK, 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 attract people, it should be cheap and there could be some space. 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 on every level that you had to pay for, we boiled it down to every third level, so we could get great efficiencies. And the beautiful thing is that at this point, we hadn't built as much as a doghouse. On the day we started to sell here, we had 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 me.
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!
Hey, happy New Year! You never left the office? Hey, hey, hey!
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 then we're looking at this idea of a wall that is made out of fiberglass bricks or blocks. And then you're almost like 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 crevice or canyon or cave.
So like try to place this. So that one should fit. There's no doubt that the wall looks very good, right?
Yeah. And it feels very comfortable. Yeah. It's the kind of shit we do.
I think it's also the one we have developed the furthest. There's a couple of different ways we can put it together. I have a feeling that we could do this and it would be a great success. Like there's almost like nothing that wouldn't be cool about it.
So maybe we should just do it. Okay? The way that you realize your wildest dreams is actually one step at a time. The master plan of this whole neighborhood was basically saying to build like a stack of apartments and then like a big box of parking behind. So we got this idea of saying, like, 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 for people arriving. So we made the underside very, very colorful.
Whenever we design homes, I'm also thinking about myself, 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 having a house with a garden or having a penthouse view.
You can actually have both. And once you force these seemingly mutually exclusive concepts together, you actually get a new hybrid that somehow ends up looking different because it performs differently. I mean 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.
But I think just that the mountain is here means that there is another way, there's 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, like in retrospect, it feels quite logical that because I wanted to become a graphic novelist and I kind of deviated from that trajectory at some point, it's kind of returned 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 the 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 a 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 8th house. 500 homes, shops and offices and kindergartens, classic apartments and more townhouses. And we've actually created a giant mountain path with an ADA accessible slope. So it 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 and we have the beautiful rooms in common where we make parties and eat together and paths that you can walk. The children out here, they really enjoy and I can see it from my balcony. It's just beautiful to see. The big picture architecture is the art and science of creating the framework of our lives.
And the buildings that we build, they either open possibilities or they hinder encounters or connections. With the 8th house, it really has become a three-dimensional community and you can see it on the people living here. There are so many initiatives, a lot of the people know each other.
Gabriel, how are you? C'est la belle 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. Interns, yes. Interns.
So we were working on our first book and exhibition. So we were doing like sort of 24-hour work days for like a month and a half. So we ended up returning and 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 a little bit here. Elena is a little bit part of big as well. For sure. One of the smallest bigsters. Okay.
PRK started off doing sort of affordable housing. And he was so young by the standards of a world-renowned architect. 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 criticism has been that our buildings are too cheap, but that's because, honestly, they've been cheap buildings. But somehow we managed 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.
What we're doing now, for instance, like 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 thousand-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 sceptic, 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 followed the rules. And a lot of my fellow developers said, how can you build with this guy? Now when you talk about architecture, And whenever people have opinions about architecture, the most typical argument is something is bad because it doesn't fit in.
When Copenhagen would look out, you would think that it's red brick and red tiles. Six stories, end of story, pissed roof. But... But then 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 would follow the rules, Copenhagen wouldn't look like Copenhagen.
And I think it's going to be interesting to see how... what's going to happen with Danish architecture. I mean, 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 of big, we were in a pretty good spot, but New York felt like that 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 like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity like we cannot mess it up. The court scraper.
This hybrid of an American skyscraper and a Copenhagen courtyard. You get into that league, everything changes. New York is the city of the world, so it can't get more wild. There is a certain energy in 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. 50, 70 meters?
I think we can nudge it a good meter over. You think a whole meter? Yeah.
So you need another meter? I think if we just like... And then we can take it a meter away from the fence.
We'll take it a meter away from the fence and it'll move closer to the symmetry line. But the other thing... that I am seriously curious about is actually when you're standing here and you imagine that you would just 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 graces the the path and then the entire hill is going to be in the sun which is also perfect that can be nice it's so exciting Serpentine right now is massively under construction.
Fiberline, the company that makes the boxes, is plowing ahead and is shipping the first shipment 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 can make very clear statements undiluted by like those thousands and 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 going to stop until we have incorporated every single concern, no matter how...
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. It's going in and out of the way, so there's no room for light between the walls. And the ceiling?
The ceiling. Should we take a look at what some people think of Bjarke? Oh, yes. Ooh, yeah, 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, uh, 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.
He can, to put it crassly, like 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...
comments on blogs as if there are valid criticisms, then you're gonna have a very 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. It's the children.
The children up there? It would be really cool with the children. 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 see the forest for all the trees.
This is due west, so the sun actually sets and that means that the last like 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 right there above the trees and then it's also right there below the weeds. And both suns throw shadows in, 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 about this place, so obviously 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 like the seasonality of things or like that suddenly something that actually was a barrier became a meeting point. What changes over time is the naivety 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.
My mom has made like 500 meatballs. Is he a good boy? Yes, but I don't think he likes to be petted. Can you not ask him to shut up? Hello little Fidel, can you close the door please?
There's a certain sense that it's a little bit hard to make it in your own village, but if you go to the big city and you make it there, then... 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 that 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 actually enjoy it It's unbelievable here. The children's park starts all the way up there. It's high up there, even though it's the children's park. Yeah, it's really...
It's fucking awesome. I think to my relief, it feels much more like being on a mountainside than being on a roof. This is around like 130 feet and the top is 300. The elevator arrives there, so then when you come out, you have sort of almost like a flat area here, and then you sort of then just take off. I think a project like this can be sort of a beacon in showing the world. Cleantech 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. It's also like somehow like when you start these kind of journeys, 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 going to 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.
What's the name of the Marathon Youth House from here? It's basically like a... You can see where the trees are, exactly. And then you can see the mountain.
The mountain and V.M. are like right there. What about the chapel?
It's right there. This is probably the most spectacular toilet experience you can get in Copenhagen at this point. The best toilet in the country. Exactly.
You can take things that are considered infrastructure, highways, bridges, power plants, and cross-breed 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.
This arm is folded, I think, oh, it's that. Just looking, twist around the face. That's lovely. Hold it.
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's this kick of seeing a completely novel thing come to life.
Thank you. It is a tremendous honor to play in the middle of a royal park, and especially since it's the Serpentine Convention that was the first... 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 the architecture never shied away from really addressing topics which are far 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 sort of the...
this is brilliant, you know, like I never thought about this before, like 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. In 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, is that 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.
Did you ever dream of this? I never dreamed about my work, actually. Interesting enough.
Well, there goes the end of the documentary. Cut!