“Hedonistic sustainability” is an appealing rebrand of sustainable design. It says that sustainability is not just unsightly banks of solar panels. It means that sustainable elements and essential infrastructure can solve practical problems while bringing visible and experiential pleasure.
The term was coined by architect Bjarke Ingels, Danish founder of
Bjarke Ingels Group
(BIG), a global firm with more than 700 employees and offices in Barcelona, Oslo, Copenhagen, London, New York, Shanghai, Zurich and Los Angeles, where BIG partner Leon Rost opened an outpost with 20 employees two years ago.
Rost’s
upcoming lecture Thursday
at Casa Del Prado in Balboa Park will cover the hedonistic potential for designs related to fire containment, flood control, and solar power, as well as college campuses, corporate buildings, urban neighborhoods and other places where vibrant, human-friendly design should be an essential ingredient.
In San Diego, BIG’s work includes a significant project at UC San Diego about which Rost would not divulge details, although he already has some strong ideas. In 2019, BIG proposed a 500-foot spiraling hourglass-shaped tower as part of the Seaport San Diego redevelopment, but it was absent from subsequent proposals by other architects.
Many of BIG’s designs are on or near the West Coast. They include a new Athletics ballpark (the team has moved from Oakland to Las Vegas), Google’s Bay View campus in Silicon Valley and a new sciences building at Claremont McKenna College,
Google’s 3-million-square-foot
Bay View campus
, opened in 2022, epitomizes hedonistic sustainability. Buildings have sculptural “dragonscale” roofs of 90,000 solar panels arrayed to define the curved lines of those gigantic dragonscales. The panels produce seven megawatts of power, enough to meet 40% of the campus’s energy needs.
“Obviously, the dragonscale panels were an important feature,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has said. “To me it’s kind of a statement, just showing that building solar roofs can be aesthetically incredible.”
In New York, in the aftermath of 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, BIG brought its hedonistic sensibilities to bear on the problem of flood control, after it won the Rebuild by Design competition for a system of barriers and flip-up floodgates to prevent future flooding of Manhattan.
Rebuild by Design “put designers in the driver’s seat to come up with ideas as to how to protect Manhattan from the next superstorm,” Rost said. “We saw it as an opportunity not just to build a wall around Manhattan, which would be a huge undertaking,” but also to transform the East River’s shoreline.
BIG’s Dryline (the moniker is a spinoff of Manhattan’s elevated High Line park, which transformed an abandoned railway into a popular public venue) incorporates greenspace, pedestrian and bicycle paths, and landscaped areas to create fabulous locations for Manhattanites and visitors.
Rost, 42, grew up in Japan and the San Francisco Bay Area, earned his architecture degree at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and began his career in Europe, Japan and New York, where he joined BIG in 2011. Given his California roots, he felt compelled to bring his and BIG’s international experience to bear on many challenges the state and its cities will face in the years ahead.
“I believe in the state,” he told me, “I’ve learned a lot from working abroad, and I feel I have something to offer, to be able to leverage the great design thinking that is emerging around the world and adapt it to California sensibilities.”
While Rost would not detail BIG’s UCSD project, he is thinking about how the campus can become a more inviting place to live, work and visit, as it grows increasingly tall, dense and city-like, and to connect the campus with the surrounding community.
“I think maybe what the campus needs is more of an urban heart,” he said. “It has grown tremendously and is one of the biggest in the world now, the size of downtown San Diego [the campus encompasses 2,178 acres, while San Diego’s center has 1,450], with open spaces as noteworthy as Balboa Park’s. It’s notoriously difficult to park and penetrate campus, and that’s where the opportunities are for the growth of campus.”
Essential to meeting parking and transportation challenges that make access difficult at UCSD and in other urban settings, Rost said, is embracing various forms of “micro” transportation such as e-bikes and scooters. There have been outcries regarding safety and sidewalk clutter, but, Rost said, “The scooters aren’t the problem, cities just haven’t adapted yet.”
Rost cites BIG’s
Robert Day Sciences Center
at Claremont McKenna College, opening in September, as the kind of urban heart needed at UCSD.
“It combines three different sciences into one building, and we designed it to create an indoor plaza at the intersection of two pedestrian corridors, a node at the heart of the building that will be a public space, not just for students but for people in the community, with dining options and an informal amphitheatre.”
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In Los Angeles, following the devastating Palisades and Altadena fires early this year, BIG is leading the Breakline initiative to prevent future flaming disasters, with new infrastructure that includes attractive public amenities.
“Part of it is an idea to create a physical firebreak along the edges of cities,” Rost said, “at wildlife interface zones that could become incredible linear parks connecting boundary neighborhoods with mountain biking, farming, hiking, things that people love to do, but in a less flammable landscape.”
Still in a formative stage of discussion among design experts, public officials, and community stakeholders, the Breakline might seem like an idealistic fever dream that will have a tough time gaining support and funding. But Rost is optimistic that a compelling vision with hedonistic appeal can succeed.
In California, Rost said, “the championing of sustainability is something I haven’t seen anywhere else.” San Diego, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and other West Coast locales present opportunities for architects to demonstrate that new infrastructure doesn’t have to be a “sacrifice” or “sandbag.” Roar believes that, if done right, it can play a big part in making cities more livable, full of inviting places.
Dirk Sutro has written extensively about architecture and design in Southern California and is the author of architectural guidebooks to San Diego and UC San Diego. His column appears monthly in Times of San Diego, and he also writes about houses for San Diego Magazine.
