Superhero – BIGman

23Sep09

3 warp-speed architecture tales
Full transcript of Bjarke Ingels @TED 2009

——————————

0:12

The public debate about architecture quite often just stays on contemplating the final result, sort of the architectural object – is the latest tower in London a gherkin, a sausage or a sex tool?

0:29

So recently we asked ourselves if we could invent a format that could actually tell the stories behind the projects, maybe combining images and drawings and words to actually tell stories about architecture. And we discovered that we didn’t have to invent it; it already existed – in the form of a comic book. So we actually copied the format of the comic book to tell the story behind-the-scenes, how our projects actually evolved through adaptation and improvisation, to the turmoil and the opportunities and the incidents of the real world.

We call this comic book “Yes Is More”, which is obviously an evolution of an idea of some of our heroes – in this case it’s Mies van der Rohe (“Less Is More”); he triggered the Modernist revolution. After him followed the postmodern counter-revolution – Robert Venturi saying “Less is a Bore”. After him Philip Johnson introduced (you could say) promiscuity or at least openness to new ideas with “I’m a Whore”. Recently,  Obama has introduced optimism at a time of global financial crisis.

What we’d like to say with “Yes Is More” is basically: trying to question this idea that the architectural avant-garde is almost always negatively defined as who or what we are against. The cliché of the radical architect is this angry young man rebelling against the establishment, or this idea of the misunderstood genius frustrated that the world doesn’t fit in with his or her ideas. Rather than revolution, we’re much more interested in evolution, this idea that things gradually evolve by adapting and improvising to the changes of the world.

In fact, I think that Darwin is one of the people who best explains our design process, this famous evolutionary tree could almost be a diagram of the way we work. As you can see, a project evolves through series of generations of design meetings; at each meeting there’s way too many ideas – only the best ones can survive. Through a process of architectural selection we might choose a really beautiful model, or we might have a very functional model be made so that they have mutant offspring, and through generations of design meetings we arrive at a design. A very literal way of showing it is a project we did for a library and hotel in Copenhagen.

2:47

The design process was real tough, almost like a struggle for survival, but gradually an idea evolved, this idea of a rational tower, that melds together with the surrounding city, expanding the public space onto what we refer to as a Scandinavian version of the Spanish Steps in Rome, but public on the outside as well as on the inside with the library.

3:10

But Darwin doesn’t only explain the evolution of a single idea. As you can see, sometimes a sub-species branches off, and quite often we sit in a design meeting and discover that there’s this great idea that doesn’t really work in this context, but for another client in another culture it could really be the right answer to a different question. As a result, we never throw anything out, we keep our office almost as an archive of architectural biodiversity. You never know when you might need it.

3:38

And what I’d like to do now, in an act of warp-speed storytelling, is tell you the story of how two projects evolved by adapting and improvising to the happenstance of the world.

3:51

The first story starts last year when we went to Shanghai to do the competition for the Danish National Pavilion for the World Expo in 2010. We saw this guy, Haibao; he’s the mascot of the Expo and he looks strangely familiar. In fact, he looked like a building we had designed for a hotel in the north of Sweden. When we submitted it for the Swedish competition, we thought it was a really cool scheme, but it didn’t exactly look like something from the north of Sweden. The Swedish jury didn’t think so either so we lost.

4:21

But then we had a meeting with a Chinese businessman, who saw our design and said, “Wow! That’s the Chinese character for the word ‘people’.” Apparently this is how you write “people”, as in the “People’s Republic of China”. We even double-checked. At the same time we even got invited to exhibit at the Shanghai creative industry week. So we thought this was too much of an opportunity.

4:44

We hired a feng shui master, we scaled the building up three times to Chinese proportions, and we went to China.

4:55

So the People’s Building, as we called it (these are our two interpreters reading the architecture), went on the cover of the Wen Hui Bao newspaper, which got Mr. Liang YuChen, the mayor of Shanghai, to visit the exhibition. We had the chance to explain the project, and he said: Shanghai is the city in the world which has most skyscrapers, but to him it was as if the connection to the roots had been cut over. And with the People’s Building he saw an architecture that could bridge the gap between the ancient wisdom of China and the progressive future of China.

5:27

We obviously profoundly agreed with him. Unfortunately Mr. Chen [sic] is now in prison for corruption.

5:45

But like I said, Hai Bao looks very familiar because he is actually the Chinese character for people, and they chose this mascot because the theme of the Expo is “Better City, Better Life” (i.e. sustainability). We thought that Sustainability has grown into being this neo-Protestant idea that it has to hurt in order to do good – you’re not supposed to take long warm showers, you’re not supposed to fly on holidays because it’s bad for the environment, and gradually you get this idea that sustainable life is less fun than normal life.

6:17

We thought that maybe it could be interesting to focus on examples where a sustainable city actually increases the quality of life. We also asked ourselves what could Denmark possibly show China that would be relevant. It’s one of the biggest countries of the world; [Denmark] one of the smallest. China’s symbolized by the dragon; in Denmark we have the national bird – the swan. China has many great poets, but we discovered that in the People’s Republic public school curriculum, they have three fairy tales by An Tu Shung, or Hans Christian Andersen, as we call him. That means that all 1.3 billion Chinese have grown up with The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Matchstick Girl, and The Little Mermaid. It’s almost like a fragment of Danish culture integrated into Chinese culture.

7:02

The biggest tourist attraction in China is The Great Wall. The Great Wall is the only thing that could be seen from the moon; this picture taken in Denmark is of the Little Mermaid, that actually can hardly be seen from the canal tours. And it shows the difference of the two cities – Copenhagen/Shanghai, modern/European – but then we looked at recent urban development.

7:23

We noticed: this is a Shanghai street 30 years ago – all bikes, no cars; this is how it looks today – all traffic jams, bicycles have become forbidden in many places. Meanwhile, in Copenhagen we’re actually expanding the bicycle lanes; a third of all the people commute by bike. We have a free system of bicycles called the City Bike that you can borrow if you visit the city.

7:43

So we thought: why don’t we reintroduce the bicycle in China? We donate a thousand bikes to Shanghai. So if you come to the Expo, go straight to the Danish Pavilion, get a Danish bike, and then continue on that to visit the other pavilions.

7:57

Shanghai and Copenhagen are both port cities, but in Copenhagen the water has actually gotten so clean that you can actually swim in it. One of the first projects we ever did was the Harbor Bath in Copenhagen, continuing the public realm into the water. We thought that these Expos quite often have a lot of state-financed propaganda, images, statements – but no real experience. Just like with the bike, we don’t talk about it but you can try it.

8:21

With the water, instead of talking about it we’re going to sail a million liters of harbor water from Copenhagen to Shanghai, so the Chinese who have the courage can actually dive in and feel how clean it is. This is where people object that it doesn’t sound very sustainable to sail water from Copenhagen to China. But in fact, the container ships go full of goods from China to Denmark, and then they sail empty back. So quite often you load water for balance, so we can actually we can hitch a ride for free.

8:51

In the middle of this harbor bath, we are going to put the actual Little Mermaid – so the real mermaid, the real water, and the real bikes – when she’s gone, we’re going to invite a Chinese artist to reinterpret her. The architecture of the pavilion is a loop of exhibition and bikes; when you go to the exhibition you’ll see the mermaid and the pool, you’ll walk around and start looking for a bicycle on the roof, jump on your ride and then continue out onto the rest of the Expo.

9:17

When we actually won the competition, we had to do an exhibition in China explaining the project, and to our surprise, we got one of our boards back with corrections from the Chinese State Censorship.

9:30

The first thing – the China map missed Taiwan. It’s a very serious political issue in China; we will add on. The second thing – we had compared the swan to the dragon. The Chinese State said, “suggest change to Panda”.

9:47

When it came out in Denmark that we’re actually going to move our national monument, the National People’s Party rebelled against it. They tried to pass a law against moving the mermaid, so for the first time I got invited to speak at the National Parliament. It was kind of interesting, because in the morning from 9 to 11 they were discussing the bailout package – how many billions to invest in saving the Danish economy – and then at 11 o’ clock they stopped talking about these little issues. And then from 11 to 1 they were debating whether or not to send the mermaid to China.

10:25

To conclude, if you want to see the mermaid from May to December next year, don’t come to Copenhagen because she’s going to be in Shanghai. If you do come to Copenhagen, you will probably see an installation by Ai WeiWei, the Chinese artist. But if the Chinese government intervenes, it might even be a panda.

10:46

The second story that I’d like to tell actually starts in my own house. This is my apartment. This is the view from my apartment, over this landscape of triangular balconies that our client called the “Leonardo Di Caprio balcony”. They formed a vertical backyard where on a nice summer day you’ll actually get introduced to all your neighbors in a vertical radius of 10 meters.

11:13

The house is a distortion of a square block, trying to zigzag it to make sure that all  the apartments look at the street views instead of into each other. Until recently this was the view of my apartment, onto this place where our client actually bought the neighbor site. He said he was going to do an apartment block next to a parking structure.

11:34

We thought that rather than doing a traditional stack of apartments looking straight into a big boring block of cars, why don’t we actually turn all of the apartments into penthouses, put them on a podium of cars, and because Copenhagen is completely flat, if you want to have a nice south-facing slope with a view, you basically have to do it yourself. Then we cut up the volume, so we wouldn’t block the view from MY apartment.

12:00

Essentially, the parking is occupying the deep space beneath the apartments, and up in the sun you have a single layer of apartments, that combine all the splendors of a suburban lifestyle, like a house with a garden with a metropolitan view, and a dense urban location. This is our first architectural model; this is an aerial photo taken last summer. And essentially the apartments cover the parking; the access through this diagonal elevator is actually a standard product from Switzerland. In Switzerland they have a natural need for diagonal elevators.

12:38

And for the facade of the parking – we wanted to make the parking naturally ventilated, so we needed to perforate it. We discovered that by controlling the size of the holes, we could actually turn the entire facade into a gigantic, naturally ventilated, rasterized image. Since we had always referred to the project as “The Mountain”, we commissioned this Japanese Himalaya photographer to give us this beautiful photo of Mount Everest, making the entire building a 3000 square meter artwork.

13:11

If you go back into the parking into the corridors, it’s almost like traveling into a parallel universe, from cars and colors into this south-facing urban oasis. The wood of your apartment continues outside becoming the facade. If you go even further it turns into this green garden, and all the rainwater that drops on The Mountain is actually accumulated. There’s an automated irrigation system that makes sure that this landscape of gardens in one or two years would transform into a Cambodian temple ruin completely covered in green.

13:45

The Mountain is our first built example of what we would like to refer to as “architectural alchemy” – this idea that you can actually create if not gold, then at least added value by mixing traditional ingredients like normal apartments and normal parking, and in this case actually offer people the chance that they don’t have to choose between a life with a garden or a life in the city. They can actually have both.

14:10

As an architect, it’s really hard to set the agenda. You can’t just say that now I’d like to do sustainable city in Central Asia because that’s not how you get the commissions. You always have to adapt and improvise to the opportunities and accidents that happen in the turmoil of the world.

14:28

One last example is that last summer we won the competition to design a Nordic national bank. This was the director of the bank when he was still smiling. We were really excited about this opportunity. Unfortunately it was the National Bank of Iceland.

14:52

At the same time, we had a visitor; a minister from Azerbaijan came to our office. We took him to see The Mountain, and he got very excited by this idea that you can actually make mountains out of architecture. Azerbaijan is known as the Alps of Central Asia, so he asked us if we can imagine an urban master plan on an island outside the capital that would recreate the silhouette of the seven most significant mountains of Azerbaijan.

15:19

We took the commission, and we made this small movie that I’d like to show. We quite often make little movies; we always argue a lot about the soundtrack, but in this case it was really easy to choose the song –

[Twin Peaks intro theme starts playing as film begins]

15:36

Baku is a crescent bay overlooking the island of Zira, the island that we’re planning, almost like a diagram of their flag. Our main idea was to sample the seven most significant mountains of the topography of Azerbaijan, and reinterpret them into urban and architectural structures, inhabitable by human life. Then we placed these mountains on the island, surrounding this central green valley, almost like a central park.

16:06

What makes it interesting is that the island right now is a piece of  desert; it has no vegetation, it has no water, it has no energy, it has no resources. So we designed the entire island as a single ecosystem, exploiting wind energy to drive the desalination plants, and to use the thermal properties of water to heat and cool the buildings, and all the excess fresh/waste water is filtered organically into the landscape, gradually transforming the desert island into a green lush landscape.

16:41

An urban development normally happens at the expense of nature; in this case, it’s actually creating nature. The buildings don’t only invoke the imagery of the mountains; they also operate like mountains. They create shelter from the wind, they accumulate solar energy, they accumulate water – and so actually transform the entire island into a single ecosystem.

17:10

We recently presented the masterplan; it has gotten approved. This summer we are starting construction documents of the first two mountains, in what’s going to be the first carbon-neutral island in Central Asia.

17:37

Just to round off, in a way you can see how The Mountain in Copenhagen evolved into the Seven Peaks of Azerbaijan, and with a little luck and some more evolution, maybe in ten years it can be the Five Mountains on Mars. Thank you.

The public debate about architecture quite often just stays on contemplating the final result, sort of the architectural object – is the latest tower in London a gherkin, a sausage or a sex tool?

So recently we asked ourselves if we could invent a format that could actually tell the stories behind the projects, maybe combining images and drawings and words to actually tell stories about architecture. And we discovered that we didn’t have to invent it; it already existed – in the form of a comic book. So we actually copied the format of the comic book to tell the story behind-the-scenes, how our projects actually evolved through adaptation and improvisation, to the turmoil and the opportunities and the incidents of the real world.

We call this comic book “Yes Is More”, which is obviously an evolution of an idea of some of our heroes – in this case it’s Mies van der Rohe (“Less Is More”); he triggered the Modernist revolution. After him followed the postmodern counter-revolution – Robert Venturi saying “Less is a Bore”. After him Philip Johnson introduced (you could say) promiscuity or at least openness to new ideas with “I’m a Whore”. Recently,  Obama has introduced optimism at a time of global financial crisis.

What we’d like to say with “Yes Is More” is basically: trying to question this idea that the architectural avant-garde is almost always negatively defined as who or what we are against. The cliché of the radical architect is this angry young man rebelling against the establishment, or this idea of the misunderstood genius frustrated that the world doesn’t fit in with his or her ideas. Rather than revolution, we’re much more interested in evolution, this idea that things gradually evolve by adapting and improvising to the changes of the world.

In fact, I think that Darwin is one of the people who best explains our design process, this famous evolutionary tree could almost be a diagram of the way we work. As you can see, a project evolves through series of generations of design meetings; at each meeting there’s way too many ideas – only the best ones can survive. Through a process of architectural selection we might choose a really beautiful model, or we might have a very functional model be made so that they have mutant offspring, and through generations of design meetings we arrive at a design. A very literal way of showing it is a project we did for a library and hotel in Copenhagen.

The design process was real tough, almost like a struggle for survival, but gradually an idea evolved, this idea of a rational tower, that melds together with the surrounding city, expanding the public space onto what we refer to as a Scandinavian version of the Spanish Steps in Rome, but public on the outside as well as on the inside with the library.

But Darwin doesn’t only explain the evolution of a single idea. As you can see, sometimes a sub-species branches off, and quite often we sit in a design meeting and discover that there’s this great idea that doesn’t really work in this context, but for another client in another culture it could really be the right answer to a different question. As a result, we never throw anything out, we keep our office almost as an archive of architectural biodiversity. You never know when you might need it.

And what I’d like to do now, in an act of warp-speed storytelling, is tell you the story of how two projects evolved by adapting and improvising to the happenstance of the world.

The first story starts last year when we went to Shanghai to do the competition for the Danish National Pavilion for the World Expo in 2010. We saw this guy, Haibao; he’s the mascot of the Expo and he looks strangely familiar. In fact, he looked like a building we had designed for a hotel in the north of Sweden. When we submitted it for the Swedish competition, we thought it was a really cool scheme, but it didn’t exactly look like something from the north of Sweden. The Swedish jury didn’t think so either so we lost.

But then we had a meeting with a Chinese businessman, who saw our design and said, “Wow! That’s the Chinese character for the word ‘people’.” Apparently this is how you write “people”, as in the “People’s Republic of China”. We even double-checked. At the same time we even got invited to exhibit at the Shanghai creative industry week. So we thought this was too much of an opportunity.

We hired a feng shui master, we scaled the building up three times to Chinese proportions, and we went to China.

So the People’s Building, as we called it (these are our two interpreters reading the architecture), went on the cover of the Wen Hui Bao newspaper, which got Mr. Liang YuChen, the mayor of Shanghai, to visit the exhibition. We had the chance to explain the project, and he said: Shanghai is the city in the world which has most skyscrapers, but to him it was as if the connection to the roots had been cut over. And with the People’s Building he saw an architecture that could bridge the gap between the ancient wisdom of China and the progressive future of China.

We obviously profoundly agreed with him. Unfortunately Mr. Chen [sic] is now in prison for corruption.

But like I said, Hai Bao looks very familiar because he is actually the Chinese character for people, and they chose this mascot because the theme of the Expo is “Better City, Better Life” (i.e. sustainability). We thought that Sustainability has grown into being this neo-Protestant idea that it has to hurt in order to do good – you’re not supposed to take long warm showers, you’re not supposed to fly on holidays because it’s bad for the environment, and gradually you get this idea that sustainable life is less fun than normal life.

We thought that maybe it could be interesting to focus on examples where a sustainable city actually increases the quality of life. We also asked ourselves what could Denmark possibly show China that would be relevant. It’s one of the biggest countries of the world; [Denmark] one of the smallest. China’s symbolized by the dragon; in Denmark we have the national bird – the swan. China has many great poets, but we discovered that in the People’s Republic public school curriculum, they have three fairy tales by An Tu Shung, or Hans Christian Andersen, as we call him. That means that all 1.3 billion Chinese have grown up with The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Matchstick Girl, and The Little Mermaid. It’s almost like a fragment of Danish culture integrated into Chinese culture.

The biggest tourist attraction in China is The Great Wall. The Great Wall is the only thing that could be seen from the moon; this picture taken in Denmark is of the Little Mermaid, that actually can hardly be seen from the canal tours. And it shows the difference of the two cities – Copenhagen/Shanghai, modern/European – but then we looked at recent urban development.

We noticed: this is a Shanghai street 30 years ago – all bikes, no cars; this is how it looks today – all traffic jams, bicycles have become forbidden in many places. Meanwhile, in Copenhagen we’re actually expanding the bicycle lanes; a third of all the people commute by bike. We have a free system of bicycles called the City Bike that you can borrow if you visit the city.

So we thought: why don’t we reintroduce the bicycle in China? We donate a thousand bikes to Shanghai. So if you come to the Expo, go straight to the Danish Pavilion, get a Danish bike, and then continue on that to visit the other pavilions.

Shanghai and Copenhagen are both port cities, but in Copenhagen the water has actually gotten so clean that you can actually swim in it. One of the first projects we ever did was the Harbor Bath in Copenhagen, continuing the public realm into the water. We thought that these Expos quite often have a lot of state-financed propaganda, images, statements – but no real experience. Just like with the bike, we don’t talk about it but you can try it.

With the water, instead of talking about it we’re going to sail a million liters of harbor water from Copenhagen to Shanghai, so the Chinese who have the courage can actually dive in and feel how clean it is. This is where people object that it doesn’t sound very sustainable to sail water from Copenhagen to China. But in fact, the container ships go full of goods from China to Denmark, and then they sail empty back. So quite often you load water for balance, so we can actually we can hitch a ride for free.

In the middle of this harbor bath, we are going to put the actual Little Mermaid – so the real mermaid, the real water, and the real bikes – when she’s gone, we’re going to invite a Chinese artist to reinterpret her. The architecture of the pavilion is a loop of exhibition and bikes; when you go to the exhibition you’ll see the mermaid and the pool, you’ll walk around and start looking for a bicycle on the roof, jump on your ride and then continue out onto the rest of the Expo.

When we actually won the competition, we had to do an exhibition in China explaining the project, and to our surprise, we got one of our boards back with corrections from the Chinese State Censorship.

The first thing – the China map missed Taiwan. It’s a very serious political issue in China; we will add on. The second thing – we had compared the swan to the dragon. The Chinese State said, “suggest change to Panda”.

When it came out in Denmark that we’re actually going to move our national monument, the National People’s Party rebelled against it. They tried to pass a law against moving the mermaid, so for the first time I got invited to speak at the National Parliament. It was kind of interesting, because in the morning from 9 to 11 they were discussing the bailout package – how many billions to invest in saving the Danish economy – and then at 11 o’ clock they stopped talking about these little issues. And then from 11 to 1 they were debating whether or not to send the mermaid to China.

To conclude, if you want to see the mermaid from May to December next year, don’t come to Copenhagen because she’s going to be in Shanghai. If you do come to Copenhagen, you will probably see an installation by Ai WeiWei, the Chinese artist. But if the Chinese government intervenes, it might even be a panda.

The second story that I’d like to tell actually starts in my own house. This is my apartment. This is the view from my apartment, over this landscape of triangular balconies that our client called the “Leonardo Di Caprio balcony”. They formed a vertical backyard where on a nice summer day you’ll actually get introduced to all your neighbors in a vertical radius of 10 meters.

The house is a distortion of a square block, trying to zigzag it to make sure that all  the apartments look at the street views instead of into each other. Until recently this was the view of my apartment, onto this place where our client actually bought the neighbor site. He said he was going to do an apartment block next to a parking structure.

We thought that rather than doing a traditional stack of apartments looking straight into a big boring block of cars, why don’t we actually turn all of the apartments into penthouses, put them on a podium of cars, and because Copenhagen is completely flat, if you want to have a nice south-facing slope with a view, you basically have to do it yourself. Then we cut up the volume, so we wouldn’t block the view from MY apartment.

Essentially, the parking is occupying the deep space beneath the apartments, and up in the sun you have a single layer of apartments, that combine all the splendors of a suburban lifestyle, like a house with a garden with a metropolitan view, and a dense urban location. This is our first architectural model; this is an aerial photo taken last summer. And essentially the apartments cover the parking; the access through this diagonal elevator is actually a standard product from Switzerland. In Switzerland they have a natural need for diagonal elevators.

And for the facade of the parking – we wanted to make the parking naturally ventilated, so we needed to perforate it. We discovered that by controlling the size of the holes, we could actually turn the entire facade into a gigantic, naturally ventilated, rasterized image. Since we had always referred to the project as “The Mountain”, we commissioned this Japanese Himalaya photographer to give us this beautiful photo of Mount Everest, making the entire building a 3000 square meter artwork.

If you go back into the parking into the corridors, it’s almost like traveling into a parallel universe, from cars and colors into this south-facing urban oasis. The wood of your apartment continues outside becoming the facade. If you go even further it turns into this green garden, and all the rainwater that drops on The Mountain is actually accumulated. There’s an automated irrigation system that makes sure that this landscape of gardens in one or two years would transform into a Cambodian temple ruin completely covered in green.

The Mountain is our first built example of what we would like to refer to as “architectural alchemy” – this idea that you can actually create if not gold, then at least added value by mixing traditional ingredients like normal apartments and normal parking, and in this case actually offer people the chance that they don’t have to choose between a life with a garden or a life in the city. They can actually have both.

As an architect, it’s really hard to set the agenda. You can’t just say that now I’d like to do sustainable city in Central Asia because that’s not how you get the commissions. You always have to adapt and improvise to the opportunities and accidents that happen in the turmoil of the world.

One last example is that last summer we won the competition to design a Nordic national bank. This was the director of the bank when he was still smiling. We were really excited about this opportunity. Unfortunately it was the National Bank of Iceland.

At the same time, we had a visitor; a minister from Azerbaijan came to our office. We took him to see The Mountain, and he got very excited by this idea that you can actually make mountains out of architecture. Azerbaijan is known as the Alps of Central Asia, so he asked us if we can imagine an urban master plan on an island outside the capital that would recreate the silhouette of the seven most significant mountains of Azerbaijan.

We took the commission, and we made this small movie that I’d like to show. We quite often make little movies; we always argue a lot about the soundtrack, but in this case it was really easy to choose the song –

[Twin Peaks intro theme starts playing as film begins]

Baku is a crescent bay overlooking the island of Zira, the island that we’re planning, almost like a diagram of their flag. Our main idea was to sample the seven most significant mountains of the topography of Azerbaijan, and reinterpret them into urban and architectural structures, inhabitable by human life. Then we placed these mountains on the island, surrounding this central green valley, almost like a central park.

What makes it interesting is that the island right now is a piece of  desert; it has no vegetation, it has no water, it has no energy, it has no resources. So we designed the entire island as a single ecosystem, exploiting wind energy to drive the desalination plants, and to use the thermal properties of water to heat and cool the buildings, and all the excess fresh/waste water is filtered organically into the landscape, gradually transforming the desert island into a green lush landscape.

An urban development normally happens at the expense of nature; in this case, it’s actually creating nature. The buildings don’t only invoke the imagery of the mountains; they also operate like mountains. They create shelter from the wind, they accumulate solar energy, they accumulate water – and so actually transform the entire island into a single ecosystem.

We recently presented the masterplan; it has gotten approved. This summer we are starting construction documents of the first two mountains, in what’s going to be the first carbon-neutral island in Central Asia.

Just to round off, in a way you can see how The Mountain in Copenhagen evolved into the Seven Peaks of Azerbaijan, and with a little luck and some more evolution, maybe in ten years it can be the Five Mountains on Mars. Thank you.

——————————

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Tags: architecture, BIG, hero, ingels, stories, superhero, TED, urban