Architecture is never triggered by a single event... conceived by a si — Bjarke Ingels

"In Sevilla, the hottest city in Spain, we are building the for the . Its half a public square and half the... Commission. Its covered by this... canopy of photovoltaic panels that creates a shaded square, which means that we can make the facade in one of the sunniest places in the world entirely out of glass, because its... shaded... Its a naturally ventilated square... The building... produces twice as much energy as it consumes... [T]he photovoltaics are funded and maintained by the local energy company... It becomes... an energy machine or a decentralized power plant..."

"Sustainable ideas crystallize through an immensity of wasted efforts. ...Good ideas are sometimes resurrected from fossils of past evolutions."

"An almost invisible building is... a bunker museum on the west coast of Denmark. Its... a giant nature reserve... The only exception is this old German bunker... from the Second World War, a , a gun was delivered from in Germany and was supposed to be installed on September 9, 1945... and next to it inside the dunes, we were asked to make a museum telling the story... {B]ecause its an entirely listed landscape, our proposal became to make these... precise incisions and almost imagine the opposite of the bunker. If the bunker is a heavy artifact in the dunes, the museum this... light absence as you slice through the sand, the sand becomes concrete and you have this square, entirely transparent, bringing daylight deep into this... underground museum. You descend into this narrative of the Second World War, the occupation of Denmark, using only materials that are already found in the bunker, so the concrete, the raw iron, the raw wood solving all of the... technical installations for the museography in the tectonics of the concrete work so that all technique: all sprinkling, all lighting, all hanging is done within the tectonics of the formwork. Daylight being sucked in so that even though you are underground it feels... light and airy, almost the opposite of the bunker... [F]rom here an umbilical cord takes you deep into a bunker where you can... explore whats left as this... giant artifact from the Second World War. So you can say, almost like a disappearing act, and the discretion becomes... the most characteristic of what makes the building stand out and... also makes it disappear."

"Theres another aspect, which is the shine effect. So , the Anish Kapoor patented black, the least reflective material on earth, had a shine effect of zero, and perfect white, of one... [A]n ocean or a parking lot has almost no shine effect so it absorbs a lot of heat. So the more open ocean... the more parking lots, the more heat is absorbed, whereas fresh snow has a... good shine effect... [T]o give you an idea of how impactful this is, if earth was all ocean we would have an average temperature of 27°C. Today its 15°C... If 1/3 of the planet was glacial, it would be frozen. So 1% of change in the shine effect of earth is the equivalent of doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. So its also an important factor that... now works against us."

"Its not enough to provide 153,000 [TW-h] because were going to be 10 billion people and everybody will eventually have the of Singapore... currently the highest living standard. ...[W]e need to have 750,000 [TW-h]. ...[A]t current technology for solar, we could provide ...that with [7.5 million km2 compared to 510 million km2 earths total surface] or with... [20 million km2] of windmill parks or... [322,000 km2 expanded to 76 million km2] of real estate for nuclear... because of the plume exposure pathway emergency planning zone... hydroelectricity... [108 million km2] We dont have enough hydroelecticity, or biomass [224 million km2]."

"Historically the field of architecture has been dominated by two opposing extremes. ...[A]n avant-garde of wild ideas, often so detached from reality that they fail to become... other than eccentric curiosities. On the other side... well-organized corporate consultants that build... boring boxes of high standard. Architecture seems entrenched between two... unfertile fronts: either naively utopian or petrifyingly pragmatic. ...BIG operates in the fertile overlap between ...opposites. A pragmatic utopian architecture... creation of socially, economically and environmentally perfect places as a practical objective."