Interview with Bjarke Ingels

• You've been calling for a new approach, "hedonistic sustainability," which is "sustainability that improves the quality of life and human enjoyment." What are some examples of this?  Why is it important for sustainability to enhance pleasure?

We shouldn't forget what we are here to do in the first place as architects and landscape architects. It's to improve the quality of life for everyone and not at the expense of the quality of life for other people or other life forms, for that matter. The whole discussion about sustainability isn't popular because it's always presented as a downgrade. The position has been there's a limit to how good a time we can have. We have to downgrade our current lifestyle to achieve something that is sustainable. That makes it essentially undesirable. People can be to the left and maybe shop a little bit green, but they're not going to drop their car if they have to pick up their kids from football and go to the movies. It becomes an impossible mission.

However, there's nothing in our lifestyle that necessarily requires CO2 emissions. It's just an unforeseen side effect of all of the increases in quality of life that we have been able to deliver through modernization and industrialization. As we get smarter and more aware of these side effects, we can factor them in and start delivering urban mobility without emissions by switching to fuel cells or batteries. 

My two favorite examples from Copenhagen: 37 percent of the Copenhageners today commute by bicycle so they are never stuck in a traffic jam. You know how unenjoyable it is to sit stuck in traffic, especially if you do it every day. So 37 percent of the Copenhageners never experience that because they have the convenience of going from A to B on a bicycle. Also, our port has become so clean you can swim in it. You don't have to commute to the Hamptons to have clean water. You can actually jump in the port downtown. So these are basic examples where sustainability actually starts becoming an upgrade rather than a downgrade.

In your large-scale master plan and park projects, you often feature landscape loops. For example, in your Stockholmsporten project, "a continuous bike and pedestrian path reconnects different areas in an un-hierarchical and democratic way." In Clover Block, there's a perimeter loop surrounding a massive lawn.  In another project still in the idea phase, you propose a loop city in the Copenhagen suburbs. What's the attraction to these loop forms? How well do they work?

They have to do with connectivity. You can see it in the loop city idea. The old paradigm for Copenhagen a city was the five finger plan, where from the central orientation of downtown Copenhagen you have these corridors of urban tissue that extend, leaving gaps between the fingers of green and agriculture. But, of course, this is a hierarchical and central model where the further you get out in the finger, the further you are away from the concentration of connectivity and activity. Given a lot of the Copenhageners live out in the fingers, and a lot people actually work in this finger and live in this finger and play football in this finger, another kind of connectivity starts becoming interesting. Since Copenhagen is actually the other side of the Oresund by Malmö and Lund and Elsinore, you have a whole suburbia over there. Historically, because it's on the Swedish side (ten years ago, we didn't have the bridge between Copenhagen and Malmö), there's never been any kind of central planning authority considering these Swedish/Copenhagen suburbs as part of the metropolitan area of Copenhagen because they're in another country. They're eight hours away from Stockholm but only 30 minutes away from Copenhagen. 

So what we are proposing with the loop city is to create a bi-national continuous urban tissue where people are no longer condemned to live in the outskirts and commuting into downtown Copenhagen and back out again.

There will be a continuous ability to interact between these kind of urban areas that now house the majority of the population of the area. You have 500,000 people living in Copenhagen inner city and you have three and a half million people in the region.

Rockstar Danish architect Bjarke Ingels delivered the keynote presentation at Architectural Record's Innovation Conference. He explained his idea of "hedonistic sustainability," which holds that design does not need to make a "Protestant" sacrifice in order to be ecologically or socially attuned.