Global Design New York University: SPOTLIGHT: Bjarke Ingels of BIG, "HEDONISTIC SUSTAINABILITY."

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

SPOTLIGHT: Bjarke Ingels of BIG, "HEDONISTIC SUSTAINABILITY."

Bjarke Ingels is the founding partner of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). This urban architecture firm is based in Copenhagen and New York. They specialize in creating a new architectural form, a kind of pragmatic utopia—where ecological mediums are harmoniously integrated with urban systems. In the end, these ideas generate projects that may be defined as biotopes.

Bjarke Ingels, in his thoughts and constructions, hopes to clarify the concept of sustainability—he sees the "neo-protestant" notion of, "it has to hurt to be good" as highly fallacious. He wants to redefine and embrace "hedonistic sustainability." Ingels knows a sustainable lifestyle can be without sacrifices; thus, he strives to make designs that are "attractive, desirable and pleasurable," but at the same time sustainable. This methodology will result in a shift in consciousness of what it means to act sustainability.

BIG is one of the brilliant design firms featured in our forthcoming BOOK!

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http://www.ted.com/talks/bjarke_ingels_hedonistic_sustainability.html

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MISSION

Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is "as close to the beyond as to things near" when we evoke "our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere."