In a video by Architect Bjarke Ingels, he denounces the thought that in order to achieve sustainability, there must be sacrifice. He believes that sustainability is essentially a design challenge, in which sustainable buildings and products should not only save the planet, but also increase quality of life.

As he said this I had some serious doubts. Naturally, sustainability should indeed be a design challenge in which people are continuously innovating new ways to do things that have less of an impact on the earth. However, it is hard to imagine a way to do this without sacrificing at least some hedonistic needs. Regardless, he brings up some interesting designs and examples of how be believes his structures to simultaneously increase quality of life and sustainability.

During his speech he mentions being commissioned to design a sort of ‘loop city’ by Copenhagen, and announces his proposal to integrate business, industrial and residential buildings and use the excess power from the industry to subsidize ‘human programs’ such as thermal baths. Furthermore, he outlines that his inspiration came from the fact that 54% of the waste produced in Copenhagen are actually used to create energy for heating and electricity. Thus a loop is created in that people trade their trash for energy.

Now to create this loop you would need a large power plant, and as an architect advocating for hedonistic sustainability, he also shared a few ideas of how to make the power plant look wonderful. The most interesting idea I found was the design to make the chimney emit smoke as giant smoke rings. Originally I thought this was a pretty useless feature of the building, but then he shared his idea that he believes knowledge to be a main driver of change. Thus his ideal is for 10 smoke rings to demonstrate one tonne of carbon emissions.

All in all, his designs are interesting, and creating energy from waste sounds great. But there still seems to be some big issues we need to tackle, such as producing less waste to begin with, going against the idea of sustainability without sacrifice.