04/01/2024
The Masterplan vision for Gelephu Mindfulness City has been unveiled.
The masterplan has been designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)’s Landscape and Urban Design team. It includes a new international airport, railway connections, a hydroelectric dam, public spaces, and a language for local building typologies, based on the nine domains of GNH: Psychological Wellbeing, Health, Education, Living Standards, Time-Use, Ecological Diversity and Resilience, Good Governance, Cultural Diversity and Resilience, and Community Vitality.
According to the founder of BIG, Bjarke Ingels, the Gelephu Masterplan gives form to His Majesty’s vision to create a city that becomes a cradle for growth and innovation while remaining founded on Bhutanese nature and culture. “We imagine the Mindfulness City as a place that could be nowhere else. Where nature is enhanced, agriculture is integrated, and tradition is living and breathing, not only preserved but also evolved. Shaped by waterways, Gelephu becomes a land of bridges, connecting nature and people, past and future, local and global. Like the traditional Dzongs, these inhabitable bridges turn into cultural landmarks, doubling as transportation infrastructure combined with civic facilities. Among these, the Sankosh Temple-Dam embeds the city’s fundamental values into a cascading landscape of steps and landings, that like a 21st century Tigers Nest will be a manmade monument to the divine possibility of a sustainable human presence on earth. Turning engineering into art and turning the forces of nature into power,” he said.
The neighborhoods within the city, which are divided by rivers, are tied together by three main mobility connections. Occasionally, these double as transportation infrastructure combined with civic and cultural facilities, creating a series of ‘inhabitable bridges’ which are tailored to each of the nine Gross National Happiness domains.
Bjarke Ingels is a renowned Danish architect and founder of (BIG) who has won numerous architectural prizes, and gained international attention for designing some of the most innovative and unique structures around the world, including the Mountain Dwelling in Copenhagen, the Danish World Expo 2010 pavilion in Shanghai, hotels in Norway, a museum overlooking Mexico City, and converting an oil industry wasteland into a zero-emission resort on Zira Island off the coast of Baku, Azerbaijan, an integrated flood protection system, the DryLine, which was a winner of the Rebuild By Design competition by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, among many other notable works.
He was named the 2011 Innovator of the year by the Wall Street Journal, and one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2016.
According to Ingels, architecture is the art of translating all the immaterial structures of society – social, cultural, economical and political – into physical structures. He has said that architecture should arise from the world benefiting from the growing concern for our future triggered by discussion of climate change.
Video by BIG, voice over by Bjarke Ingels
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