Abstract: The Art of Design

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.