“This is a work well matched to its architects’ strengths. Nicety is
not really the thing in this [old industrial area]; a compelling idea
is. Plus a dollop of chutzpah.”
CopenHill embodied Ingels’ concept of “hedonistic sustainabil-
ity,” laid out in a 2011 TED talk, which holds that reducing our envi-
ronmental impact should also increase our quality of life, and that
it’s designers’ jobs to make that calculation work. The approach
has certainly appealed to clients. BIG has won a number of high-
profile commissions centered on sustainability. In Manhattan,
the firm is playing a key role in the construction of the Dryline,
a park cum flood defense that will hug the island’s shoreline. In the
foothills of Japan’s Mount Fuji, BIG is designing an entire town in
partnership with Toyota, envisaged as a utopia for clean transport
technology. Construction begins in 2021. On the late- summer day
TIME spoke to Ingels, the state government in Penang, Malaysia,
announced BIG as the winner of a competition to design a master
plan to transform Penang Island’s south shore into a series of resil-
ient artificial islands.
As the projects grew larger, Ingels says, so did his belief in the
importance of scale when planning for a sustainable built environ-
ment. “When you’re building a house, there’s a few things you can
do—add some solar panels on the roof and so on—but most of it is
not very effective.” If you’re planning a city block or a neighborhood,
though, you can start working with some “synergies,” he says: cap-
turing rainwater over a large area; designing to take advantage of
the differences in energy use between residential buildings, which
typically spend energy on heating, and commercial buildings, which
spend energy on cooling in the middle of the day. “There are all kinds
of things you can start doing. And every time you go up in scale, you
can actually do more.” The logical conclusion, he decided, was to at-
tempt to tackle the entire world.
Masterplanet divides the world’s environmental problems
into 10 sections. Five cover greenhouse-gas-emitting sectors—
transport, energy, food, industry and waste management—and
five cover other areas humans need to address to live sustainably
on earth— biodiversity, water, pollution, health, and architecture
and urbanism. The plan will initially take the form of conven-
tional master- plan documents used by architects, “including bud-
gets, area tables, system layouts and phasing strategies,” according
to BIG. It will include ongoing projects, like the work of a plastic-
recycling plant in the U.S., as well as more out-there ideas like cre-
ating floating cities to house communities affected by rising sea
levels, or unifying global electrical grids to help solve the problems
of “intermittency”—unreliable and inconsistent energy production
by renewable sources, an obstacle to their wider adoption. BIG is
consulting industry experts in energy, waste management, trans-
port and other fields, before a first draft is made public in 2021.
By linking projects up in a single overarching plan, BIG says,
it will “prove that a sustainable human presence on planet earth is
attainable with existing technologies.” Masterplanet will account for
10 billion people—a figure we are due to hit not long after 2050—
with the highest available living standards. Ingels says he wants both
to galvanize businesses and governments to do more, and to change
the way the public sees climate action. “I think a lot of people don’t
really understand whether or not the different initiatives by differ-
ent countries or different companies are adding up to something,
whether or not it’s even possible to
eliminate greenhouse- gas emissions
or sequester carbon because of the
complexity. So it ends up being a lot
of... opinions. And also a feeling of
hopelessness,” he says. “That’s not the
greatest call for action.”
Ingels says architects—whose
daily work is turning requirements
and feedback from an array of par-
ties into built reality—have some-
thing unique to bring to the fight.
Politicians are bogged down by short
electoral cycles that don’t reward
long-term planning. Activists are
great at getting attention for issues
but rarely have the power to enact
their plans. Climate scientists are
great at understanding problems.
“But they are not entrepreneurs.
Their specialty is not starting things
up and making them happen.”
The practical barriers to the so-
lutions proposed by Ingels are, of
course, massive. For example, cre-
ating a unified global electrical grid
could solve many problems, and
make it more efficient and easier to
power our world solely from renew-
able sources. But electricity- market
experts say it’s almost too com-
plicated to fathom doing so. Even
a proposal to unite the main grids
within the U.S. in 2018 was stifled by
political pressure, according to re-
porting by the Atlantic.
But Edwin Heathcote, an architect
and the architecture critic at the Finan-
cial Times, says Masterplanet fits into
a history of “architects who set out a
big idea as a provocation, more than
a proposal.” He cites R. Buckminster
Fuller, who appeared on TIME’s cover
in 1964 with his plan to use giant geo-
desic domes, including one over Man-
hattan, as a way to building efficiently
at a very large scale. The idea never
came to pass. But it became “one of
the most referred-to images in archi-
tecture” and fed into the Eden Project,
a biological reserve in Cornwall, Eng-
land. With architectural visions like
this, Heathcote says, “the idea begins
to pique people’s interests. It’s so kind
of seemingly impossible that people
begin to think, Well, actually, maybe
there’s something in this. I think the
‘THE IDEA
OF ARCHITECTURE
AS PROVOCATION
IS SOMETHING
THAT BUILDS
ON BJARKE’S
SKILL FOR
PRESENTATION.’
—Edwin Heathcote,
architecture
critic at the
Financial Times
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