Bjarke Ingels Wisdom: Your Home Should Be a Portrait of You

0:05Bjarke, welcome back to Giant Ideas. Last time we talked a lot about your vision for architecture, hedonic sustainability, all sorts of interesting stuff. This episode is all about the man behind the idea. So we ask all our guests, if you had to define your life in three photographs, what would those three snapshots be and why? interesting i have a handful of photographs as of myself as a kid uh drawing uh because i i very early fell in love with with joy and and you know in my in my daycare there was uh this young pedagogue assistant i think he was 17 and he didn't really have any training and he was one of the few a few uh men in the in the daycare and and the way the way he would entertain the kids would be he would just sit and draw while telling stories about what he was drawing.

1:01And he was so captivating that just with a pen and a piece of paper and a truckload of imagination and a little bit of voiceover, it was the most incredible thing to do an entire afternoon and and I started like drawing with him and and eventually I realized that I had a gift for drawing that was different than any of my my my peers my friends even the older kids and and that gave me sort of an anchor that no matter what I felt I never really had to live up to anything because no matter what, my superpower was my ability to draw. So it was fine if I was good in school or in sports or whatever, but it didn't really matter because my superpower was my ability to draw.

2:01And I think that kind of anchor definitely meant also when I graduated from high school and I had no idea what to do, I somehow knew that no matter what it had to do, it needed to have something to do with drawing. then maybe a second postcard could be maybe from the the top of Sagrada Familia that interestingly is just finishing right now but like I end up in the first month of architecture school I go on this study trip to Barcelona this is in 1993 Barcelona just hosted the Olympics in 92 and it's one of the most successful Olympics and one of the most successful transformations of a city for an Olympic.

2:40But then, of course, there was also Gaudi. Sure. And I had started architecture school because there was no cartoon academy in Denmark. So architecture school was part of the art academy. So it smelled a little bit like drawing. But I didn't know that architecture could be interesting. I was probably also subscribing to the idea that modern buildings were boring. Yes. And then I discovered Gaudi. and suddenly, you know, my mind is blown that I realized that architecture can actually be incredible. It can almost be like physical, three-dimensional storytelling forms. And also like of all of this, like incredibly organic architecture, it's also super scientific.

3:25Everything is made from pure geometry. Some of them complex, you know, ruled surfaces, catenary curves, et cetera. But what really seems like freehand and artistry upon close inspection is rooted in deeply rational, rigorous, scientific, structural, geometric logic. Love that. What would your third photograph be, Bjarke? It would probably be somehow arriving, maybe arriving to the TWA terminal in New York. When I went to New York for the first time, I was 24, maybe. And the TWA terminal by Eros Ardenen was still in use. But somehow, like arriving to New York, this mythological city, the, you know, I'm looking out at the skyline, this kind of man-made mountain range of the raw accumulation of architecture that is maybe special or generic in itself, but together it becomes this manifestation of the collective power and ingenuity of mankind.

4:38And that definitely also moving here definitely became another step.

4:44Bjarke Ingels:So before you moved, you're originally from Denmark, the Danes typically issue doing anything at a massive scale. And there's a bit of a tall poppy syndrome in the country. On the other hand, to do some of the stuff you do in architecture, you need such massive self-belief. So how have you navigated that? And how has your work been received in the Nordic community? I mean, we definitely have a tall poppy syndrome issue. I would say in the beginning, because Denmark is one of the most egalitarian countries in the world. And to the point where disagreement is almost embarrassing. That's why we have so many political parties, because as soon as there's a little bit of disagreement, they split up into new bodies.

5:27But I think one method we invented was, and we tried to formulate it as yes is more, that you can actually create radical architecture not by resisting all of the different voices and contradicting demands, but by actually saying yes to them. and and and one example of it is if you know the game of twister yeah kind of family game where and you start and you put your foot there and you put your other foot there and it's kind of easy and boring but then when you as the game progresses and you get more and more unreasonable demands uh you find yourself in backbending configurations with your face rubbing up against body parts or family members and becomes more fun and and i think in some way in architecture you have to remember the standard solution is very good at at what it's doing so it's hard to beat the standard solution if you only have to solve for the for the standard problem so by actually piling on more demands by saying yes to what the neighbors want and what the client wants and what what the city wants and what uh you know what whatever what the birds want or the sunlight or the shelter from the wind, by adding more demand, suddenly the standard solution doesn't cut it any longer.

6:58And you force the architecture into something more backbending, interesting, maybe sculptural, different. And in some way, by getting the client to agree that this is not enough, we have to solve for this and this and this, they somehow become committed to an answer that is more interesting because it's an answer to a more complex problem or question. I think unlike a lot of the guests that we have on, Bjarke, your ideas are physically manifested in the world for decades and decades. And I'm really interested in asking you about the confidence that that requires. You know, as a 30-something year old, when you broke through as a very young man, your ideas are suddenly being imprinted from Manhattan to Bataan.

7:53And they're going to last, in some cases, for over a century. does it require enormous confidence that you have a point of view that should be there for people to see and live in and work in every day and do you have to kind of top that confidence up that creative confidence up occasionally you need a certain conviction that uh that what you're doing is for the better, right? And I think one way to build that confidence is to be very vocal about the critique of the status quo, to be very specific about all the things that you would like to do better. So in that sense, like to really have a well-identified criticism or well-identified problem that you're trying to solve for, right?

8:50So that's one way to build up your confidentiality. We might not come up with the perfect or final answer, but we can at least do it better than this. So therefore, it deserves the try. And then I would say then, yeah, sort of, so in that sense, there is a that's maybe the pragmatism in the pragmatic utopian right but then i think a lot of it is also like i i i always like to remind the team that of course we have to make sure that the client is happy and the users are happy and the city architect and the neighbors but we also have to make sure that we are happy so uh there has to be something in it for us which is not like you know monetary gains it's like architects are not very good at that but it's it's really there has to be some you can say in a way we are artists and our canvas is a very large and very expensive one but but as an architect you need someone with a budget sometimes of billions to to make something happen right so um so in that sense you have to make sure that everybody's happy but we also have to make ourselves happy and then finally i would say each project and we try to say this each project has to give a gift to the world that is in addition or beyond the brief uh so it's and and and it's not philanthropy it's just like it should somehow offer something that in the process of solving solving all the other things that we have to solve we also do this and you know a very straightforward example is for instance copenhill the waste storage power plant that was so clean that we could actually turn the roof into a park and a ski slope and a climbing wall making it blatantly obvious for everybody that this is a different kind of technology a different kind of power plant you know we did a museum that is a bridge we did a parking structure next to apartments where we put the apartments on top of the parking structure and the parking structure became almost like a man-made mountain that transformed all of the apartments into penthouses, houses with gardens, because they could sit on top of a bedrock of parked cars.

11:17So in every case, it's somewhere there is this ingredient. And once you identify it, once you have the eureka moment where you understand what the project is all about once you know what gift you can give then in in some way back to this idea of the confidence then you know that the world will be an incrementally better place because of that of that offering that that you that you bring to the table and what do you think it is

11:47Bjarke Ingels:about you bjarke that's enabled you to succeed as one of the world's top architects i think i am it's almost back to your uh form of function or art or or technology kind of question is that i i think i'm very left and right brain and and i found that at least some of the some of the leaders that i've had the the joy to to collaborate with like uh renee ritzepi is a good friend of mine um the chef of uh of noma and and he is incredibly intuitive, incredibly sensitive, but he also has the ability to put into words that which matters to him so that he can mobilize an army. And I'm definitely not a good cook.

12:40I'm pretty good at eating good food, but he can speak about food in such a way that I fully understand everything he's saying. And another friend of mine, Jason Ballard, He's the founder of Icon, a 3D printing company that we're working, we're collaborating to do this first building on the moon as part of the Olympus project. And he wanted to be a priest, but his father, like his priest at the seminary sort of took him aside and dissuaded him and said, you can probably do more of that which is your mission in another field. But again, he has this incredible technical ability, incredible sort of like, you know, mathematical engineering intelligence.

13:34But at the same time, this ability to elevate everything to a higher level. So also he can definitely give a speech that feels like a sermon and that gets everybody excited about whatever practical part they have to play in this puzzle of reimagining construction. So I think this, to be equally at home in both halves of the brain, the intuitive and the experimental combined with the analytical and also to be both visual and audio at the same time.

14:14Bjarke Ingels:Well, when with a bit of architectural digest for our listeners, what makes for a great home? I think a great home should be, I mean, from the architect's point of view, I would say architecture, and especially when we're designed, we haven't designed that many homes for people, but architecture is like portraiture. And you can say, because I often get the question, isn't it annoying to have a client because they have opinions? But actually the client is somehow the subject of the portrait. it so when you're designing a home for someone is is it about their demands as a as a resident or is it about your expression as an architect just like you could say like and without any other comparison but like is the mona lisa an expression of da vinci as a as an artist or mona lisa the woman uh that is being portrayed and the answer is of course both that by capturing the likeness not only the likeness, but actually the character, the soul, the aura of the woman that was Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci expresses himself as an artist.

15:25And in that sense, so the home should really be about the resident and what makes it, it should be a portrait. It should be almost like drawing the contours of the kind of invisible

15:43lifestyle of this particular family or resident. It should somehow make tangible and visible an aspect of their life that hasn't been prioritized or is somehow neglected in a kind of conventional confine. So in that sense, it should be a kind of canvas for people to populated with their life. I think that's the most joyful home renovation advice I've ever heard and a fantastic place to end our second part of Giant Ideas with you, Bjarke. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure.