Bjarke Ingels
Bjarke Ingels
Bjarke Bundgaard Ingelsis a Danish architect. He is the founder and creative partner of Bjarke Ingels Groupsince 2005. He is known for buildings that defy traditional architectural conventions and dimensions, ranging from representations of mountains to snowflakes. His designs incorporate sustainable development ideas and sociological concepts, along with sloped lines that are shaped to their surroundings...
NationalityDanish
ProfessionArchitect
Date of Birth2 October 1974
CountryDenmark
All comic books take place in built environments, and I was very good at drawing people and animals, and stuff like that, but I hadn't spent much energy drawing buildings. So I thought, maybe I could, and then I became an architect.
St. Petersburg is a wonderful city. You have wonderful parks, birds singing in the trees, manatees in the water, pelicans. So it's like this little paradise on Earth.
In the traditional modernist planning that created the suburbs, you put residential buildings in suburban neighborhoods, office spaces into brain parks and retail in shopping malls. But you fail to exploit the possibility of symbiosis or synthesis that way.
Architects have to become designers of eco-systems. Not just designers of beautiful facades or beautiful sculptures, but systems of economy and ecology, where we channel the flow not only of people, but also the flow of resources through our cities and buildings.
New York is flat - it's ideal for bicycling.
For me, architecture is the means, not the end. It's a means of making different life forms possible.
You can say, like, planet Earth has an existing geology, and what we do as human beings and as architects is that we try to sort of alter and modify and expand the geology.
Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house.
In Copenhagen, there's a long-term commitment to creating a well-functioning pedestrian city where all forms of movement - pedestrian, bicycles, cars, public transportation - are accommodated with equal priority.
I think the avant-garde often hides itself in the highly incomprehensible because they are frustrated that the real world is so boring.
I think architecture is rarely the product of a single ideology. It's more like it can be shaped by a really big idea. It can accommodate a lot of life forms.
All evidence shows that we are actually getting smarter. Roughly we are getting 10 IQ points smarter every decade. The speed of innovation is also faster.
My drawing skills probably froze around when I was 18... Now I'm more interested in the story, how the drawings, the layout can help express the stories and communicate them.
I believe that architecture, as anything else in life, is evolutionary. Ideas evolve; they don't come from outer space and crash into the drawing board.