If documentary is to document our world as it already is fiction is to fantasize about how it could be in that sense architecture is the fiction of the real world so turning dreams into concrete reality with bricks and mortar architecture is the canvas for the stories of our lives The city is never complete it has a beginning but it has no end it’s a work in progress always waiting for new scenes to be added new characters to move in when i started studying architecture and told people what i did the most frequently asked question was always Can you tell me why all new buildings are so boring people had the idea that in the past buildings came with ornaments and decoration moats drawbridges spires and gargoyles today they had been reduced to containers of space boring and boxy somehow so many of our choices today tend to settle with reaffirming the Status quo by replicating what’s already there rather than inventing what could happen next i decided i wanted to change that in the movie inception the architects find that they can finally realize their wildest dreams because they’re in fact designing inside a dream the arctic hero cobb explains how he and His wife wanted to live in a house with a garden but preferred to live in a high rise in real life we would have to choose he says but in a dream we could get it as we wanted it we’ve made a building in copenhagen called the mountain combining a parking Structure and an apartment building by turning the parking into a man-made mountain of cars we can turn the stack of homes into a cascade of houses with gardens penthouse views and big lawns cobb’s dream home made in real life we call this idea bigamy that you can take multiple desirable Elements that might not fit together or even seem mutually exclusive like the garden home in the high-rise and merge them together into a new genre you don’t have to remain faithful to a single idea you can literally marry multiple ideas into promiscuous hybrids the beauty is that architecture not only Allows you to dream stuff up it also allows you to alter the facts you can turn pure fiction into hard fact we went on to imagine little tweaks of the status quo that now form everyday reality in copenhagen and beyond the eighth house is a neighborhood of townhouses Where you can walk and bicycle from the street to the penthouse turning a city block into a mediterranean mountain town of paths and squares the harbour bath brings the beach into the heart of the city realizing the parisian slogan of may 68 sule pavila plague the court scraper combines the urban Oasis of the courtyard with the extreme density of a skyscraper into a new warped hybrid of the two copenhill is a power plant that turns waste into electricity and that is so huge that it’s going to be the biggest and tallest structure in all of copenhagen how could we transform the stereotype of The power plant into a public amenity we thought denmark is cold we have snow but no mountains but we do have mountains of trash so we wrapped the plant in a continuous envelope of a giant ski slope this is only possible because the power plant is So clean the smoke coming out of the chimney is completely non-toxic only steam in co2 so the top of the hill will feel fresh like mountain air to completely alter people’s perception of a power plant from a dirty neighbor to a public park we designed the chimney to release its steam In puffs of smoke rings the ultimate transformation from a symbol of a problem pollution to something playful that puffs rings of steam this sounds like science fiction but this is the world changing potential of architecture what started off as wildly fictional ideas ski slopes and smoke rings is turning into everyday reality in Venice they sail in gondolas to the streets and in copenhagen they ski on their power plants that turn trash into electricity a weird dream has crystallized into concrete reality Today people flock towards immersive worlds in the virtual realm more than 100 million people populate minecraft where they can build their own worlds and inhabit them through play the real world predecessor for minecraft lego has become the greatest toy company in the world with a population of mini-figs of 3.7 billion the largest Ethnic group on the planet these fictional worlds empower people with the tools to transform their own environments this is what architecture ought to be if geography is the documentation of the world as it is architecture must become worldcraft the craft of making our world where our knowledge and technology Doesn’t limit us but rather enables us to turn surreal dreams into inhabitable space to turn fiction into fact You Video Information
This video, titled ‘Bjarke Ingels: Architecture should be more like Minecraft’, was uploaded by Dezeen on 2015-01-28 10:49:25. It has garnered 768344 views and 19927 likes. The duration of the video is 00:06:06 or 366 seconds.
In this movie Bjarke Ingels, founder of architecture firm BIG, explains his theory of “Worldcraft” – creating architecture that focuses on turning “surreal dreams into inhabitable space”.
