A much-anticipated lecture delivered by Bjarke Ingels at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) is now available for online viewing.
In the wide-ranging, nearly two-hour presentation, Ingels, founding partner at Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), discusses a variety of the firm's most recent projects, including projects for NOMA restaurant in Copenhagen, a recent collaboration between BIG and Toyota, the controversial "Masterplanet" global master planning project, and even, Ingels's recent efforts to garner new work from Brazil's authoritarian regime.
Ingels's lecture is followed by a Q+A session with GSAPP Dean Amale Andraos and GSAPP students. The lecture, which took place January 27, 2020, was initially published to the GSAPP website but was subsequently taken down. It is now available once again on the school's website and on YouTube.
10 Comments
What was the fuss about?
"... Ingels's recent efforts to garner new work from Brazil's authoritarian regime"
Thanks!
monosierra:
As far as I can tell, Bjarke is trying to be Buckminster Fuller with his Masterplanet proposal, and nobody is buying it.
A more thorough answer is because Amale Andraos says that these days she can't think apolitically as an architect and once you start discussing master planning there are all sorts of negative “utopian” historical precedents that well-meaning architects are responsible for. She lists New Urbanism as one of the most recent movements that attempted to address walkability and other urban issues by almost completely relegating architectural style to a palette of more “traditional” archetypical forms.
...we all know the story of utopian architecture.... Corbusier’s Plan Voisin, Paolo Soleri, and the work of Archigram. All of these projects are lost to some delusional fantasy of architecture’s ability to reorganize the world.
She also wonders out loud (perhaps in a tongue-in-cheek-way) what Greta Thurnberg might have to say about Bjarke’s Masterplanet proposal. Look, I’m not a huge Bjarke fan, but that’s some weak sauce right there.
Bjarke actually responded overall pretty well in my opinion and was trying to say that the problem with master plans is exactly that often times they attempt to apply a sweeping aesthetic without attention to other systems and flows, and that he thinks of his Masterplanet proposal more of a project schedule than a dogmatic approach to design.
Do I buy any of it? Nah, I think Bjarke is trying to diversify his brand away from cutesy massing projects to keep up with OMA/AMO’s more mature version of form-finding because too many people think of him as a one liner. He's flexing for larger, perhaps more problematic projects with instantiated forms of power and that rubs the academy the wrong way. So what. BIG surprise.
just my crappy armchair analysis.
I’m sure someone has a completely different point of view than I do on this one.
Great summary - appreciate the insight. BIG is indeed looking for revirogate its brand as it seeks different business lines to sustain its vats overhead. It simply cannot risk being competitors with the likes of SOM, even as its headcount swells beyond the likes of OMA. They have to sell ideas.
liers!!!
Bjarke?
Seems BIG is still trying to apply top-down megaproposals when what is needed is some kind of return to human-scale, transparency, building by building approach. If you are only trying to score the next megaclient--whether dictator or corporation--you are missing the point. Probably why so many BIG megaprojects go nowhere.
Was just driving down the West Side Highway and saw a bunch of Bjarke twisty towers next to Gehry's delicate IAC building and was reminded of the difference between a humanist artist and a salesman.
BIG was the darling of bureaucratic urbanism that seems to be fading. I hope we are at the beginning of a more hard-edged, serious nut-and-bolts kind of urbanism.
I'm going to watch this, so I'll reserve judgement, but the idea of globalized planning control sounds scary.
To be fair to Bjarke (and I'm usually very critical of kiss-ass architects), with Masterplanet he is trying to show that it is theoretically possible for our planet to share resources much more efficiently, probably in the hope (perhaps a somewhat naive hope) that the very geo-political impasse that usually prevents such ambitions from happening might be overcome by growing popular demand. After all, he makes it quite apparent that he would like nothing more than for Greta Thunberg to jump on board the Masterplanet bandwagon (a bit of PR that would compensate his recent photo-gaffe in Brazil). He does say that this is only a blueprint, and that it would require many experts from many fields and from all over the world coming together and meeting in the "radical" middle. This comes across, thereby, as a masterplan for global cooperation more one for global domination. I have to tip my hat to him: he really is very clever!
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