This article was taken from the July 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
By 9am, on a recent Monday morning in Copenhagen, the sun has been up for four hours, but cars still require headlights to cut through the gloom. Commuters make their way to work on buses the colour of custard powder, and by bicycle, the preferred mode of transport in this small, orderly city surrounded by water. Out of nowhere, a sudden burst of air horn from a lorry echoes up and down Hammerichsgade, unsettling passers-by.
The object of the driver's annoyance is a white Mercedes van that has pulled into a taxi rank at an angle and partially blocked off a lane. The driver of the van -- the architect Bjarke Ingels, who has returned late the night before from a trip to Paris -- eventually straightens his vehicle and parks it parallel to a bike lane. "It's a little bit against the rules," Ingels smiles, pulling away from the kerb.
Disruption is something that Ingels is good at. His practice, the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), is responsible for some of the most innovative and distinctive architecture -- housing projects, mixed-use developments, civic buildings, a psychiatric hospital and a waste-to-energy plant -- of recent times. He is also, to some degree, an iconoclast, having published a graphic novel, Yes is More, that explains and demythologises the architectural process. "By making [architecture] nonsensical and mysterious you can create the illusion that it's complicated and difficult to understand and therefore there's some kind of mystery around," he says. "Apparently architects can understand some things that nobody else can."
Notable commissions in Copenhagen have led to contracts from abroad and Ingels now finds himself in wide demand in North America and Europe. He currently lives three weeks out of four in Manhattan, where he is working with the developer Douglas Durst -- the real-estate titan behind the recently completed Bank of America Tower, now the second tallest building in New York after the Empire State Building -- to build a 600-unit apartment block on a once-dismal location at the corner of 57th Street and the West Side Highway.
There, Ingels has designed a building that seeks to redefine residential architecture in New York City: from one perspective it will appear to be a twisted pyramid; from another an elegant tower.
The structure has a large slash through its middle, creating a large European-style courtyard, unusual in a city where every square metre of real estate is priced in thousands. It's quite unlike anything the city -- dominated as it is by modernist slabs -- has seen before. At 37, Ingels is overseeing a build with a budget likely to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars and, as with other projects that BIG has in various stages of development, is trying to push architecture in new directions to tackle social and environmental challenges. "When you start doing something it is pure imagination," Ingels says as he walks back to his parked van. "It is pure fiction. And you can say, 'Hey it is never going to happen.' But once you have done it, it is beyond discussion. 'This is how the world could be'
[becomes] 'This is how the world can be.' In fact, this is now how the world is...It is world-changing in the most literal way."
As he drives through the streets of Copenhagen, Ingels talks about his weekend trip to Paris. He is mildly tanned and has a day's stubble; not the studied kind, but the type you get when you've had an early start after getting off a flight late the night before. He shows off an iPhone photo of the Eiffel Tower seen through cherry blossom and describes the Palais de Tokyo modern-art gallery as "fucking amazing". He reveals that he was in France to discuss a new project at the University of Paris, a "cute little incubator building wedged in between the aesthetic stuff" to stimulate entrepreneurship through "knowledge-based businesses that are fed straight from the university".
Dressed in black, except for a cardigan with a fluorescent zip that forms a dramatic V-shape against his chest, Ingels drives south out of the city. He passes Jean Nouvel's Copenhagen Concert Hall -- a cube with navy mesh wrapped around it -- which also houses the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. "The blue IKEA box is the second most expensive concert hall in the world," he says matter-of-factly. "They had to lay off 300 people on Danish radio because the budget tripled." Ingels's characterisation is fitting -- add a quartet of yellow letters, and the structure resembles somewhere passers-by might pick up a Billy bookcase and 15 Swedish meatballs. Ingels drives a few minutes further into an area called Ørestad, a new town on the island of Amager. Cows graze in the hazy distance as urban gives way to rural. The vision for the development is one of public and commercial architecture: 20,000 residents, 20,000 students and 80,000 people working in the area, which is connected to the rest of the city by the newly completed metro line.
Ingels found the initial plans for Ørestad dull, describing the proposed buildings as "square blocks". So he and his collaborators decided to rethink the project, which Ingels describes using the lexicon of biology: "I decided to design an Ørestad biopsy -- like a tissue sample of the project that would contain the same programmatic mix as the city itself."
The result of this is a building, The Mountain -- Ingels describes it as a "vertical suburbia" -- situated to the side of the main road that bisects Ørestad. The brief didn't sound too promising: the developer, Per Høpfner, wanted a 10,000m2 condominium next to a 20,000m2 parking garage. Ingels's idea was to unite both structures in one: the parking garage, seen in cross-section, would be a wedged-shaped structure; and the apartments -- each with a garden -- were built on top of this, layered in steps, meaning that every apartment would have a view and easy access to the garage. "Ingels's projects fulfill a number of different needs in parallel," says Holger Hampf, executive creative director of Frog Design. "Many buildings excel on one
[level] and do poorly on another. Ingels keeps aspects in balance and asks how a building can be successful at many different levels."
Inside, the parking structure has high, tiered ceilings, painted in large blocks of colour ("Like a binary Sistine Chapel," Ingels says) -- tangerine, apple green, sunflower yellow -- it features murals by French street artist Victor Ash of various animals (a wolf, a ram and an elk) each standing on piles of junkyard cars. The façade of the parking garage is fabricated from perforated aluminium to assist ventilation. These holes depict a photograph of the Himalayas, which Ingels claims is the world's largest black-and-white image. "In all banalities there is the potential for incredible innovation," Ingels says in the expressive, upbeat style that has made him popular as a conference speaker. "There is both poetry and complexity in the everyday -- and really good art, the sort that expands your perception of the world or society...By looking a little bit more carefully you can actually transform a normal stack of apartments and a parking building into a mountain of homes and a cathedral of car culture, making you aware of aspects of potentials of daily life that you might otherwise miss."
Ingels illustrates his belief in lavishing care and attention on often overlooked areas by talking about his experience of visiting clients in Manhattan: big, dramatic lobbies are often fronts for buildings that pay little attention to design beyond what's on public display. "I enter this nice lobby with a lot of marble, then I have to go through this door [into a service room] with a linoleum floor... and then I come back into the fancy lobby. It's bizarre that all these practical activities that are part of your everyday life are somehow exempt from that level of attention and care. I'm not saying that everything has to be marble, I am just saying that [we need to] embrace all aspects of life, not just a front office." He parks his van inside The Mountain and walks through the cool, grey morning towards a development known as the VM Houses -- named after their shapes when seen from above. This was the first residential project in Ørestad, and is home to Ingels, who lives on the top floor. The project was completed before The Mountain, when Ingels was partners with a Belgian architect named Julien De Smedt. The two met while working for Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam around the turn of the century. PLOT, the practice they cofounded in 2001, quickly achieved success, winning a Golden Lion at the 2004 Venice Biennale for a proposed music house in Norway. But the two split in January 2006 and De Smedt now runs a competing practice in Copenhagen that has completed notable projects, including redesigning the Kalvebod Brygge harbour-front in Copenhagen, and the Holmenkollbakken ski-jumping hill in Oslo, Norway ( see Wired 09.09). "Julien and I simply decided to pursue our ideas in separate ways," Ingels says. "We had started almost by chance -- and taken it quite far together -- and we both felt like trying something new." De Smedt declined to comment when wired approached. Much of Ingels's time is spent figuring out how to push the limits of building codes -- for instance, Copenhagen has strict limits on construction height, which is decided according to the height of adjacent structures. In the case of the VM houses, the masterplan for Ørestad -- developed, as are many architectural projects, through an international competition -- foresaw square perimeter blocks. PLOT decided to get as much out of the space as possible: instead of creating a square box with a central courtyard, the plans called for zig-zag shapes (the V and the M) that would maximise views and preclude the need for the blocks to face each other squarely. "Ingels is what we would call in the critical world a strong formalist, meaning that his buildings have strong, unusual shapes," says Reed Kroloff, director of the Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum in Michigan, and former editor of Architecture. "They're in a sculptural tradition that goes back to Le Corbusier. But he's also interested in the city-making aspect of it. He seems to always be going back to, 'How can I enrich this project by looking at different kinds of inputs?' He complicates the project with great delight."
As he enters an apartment kept for BIG's interns, Ingels worries aloud about the condition of the floor -- it's dirty. PLOT was aware that many of the residents of the building would be pioneers; arriving in what was effectively a new-build wasteland can be an isolating experience. Consequently the firm designed balconies that were shaped like the prow of a ship -- remaining at the rear of the balcony would afford privacy, while moving forward would offer interaction. Ingels describes it as a "vertical backyard community". Seagulls drift by the windows. "Architects can't really provide people with a happy life or a very good job, or a beautiful wife," Ingels says. "But we can provide them with a framework that will maximise the abundance and access to certain qualities. Daylight is an obvious one. In Scandinavia, sunshine -- to the extent that you can irrigate it -- you really want to get as much of it as possible."
Constructed from wood, glass and aluminium, the apartments are sober. However, down in the exterior lobby, there's a colourful mosaic of a human face. "We thought [the building] was probably interesting enough, and [planned] to go easy on the façades,"
Ingels says. "But still we thought it is going to be a little depressing to come home to a silver-grey blank wall, and we wanted to do an artwork. I spent a scholarship travelling to Brazil and there you have this combination of cool Brazilian modernism, and then this excessive use, in a good way, of ceramic tiles, especially in the entrance halls of these modernist boxes."
Ingels proposed to the developer that they put a piece of artwork outside the entrance. The developer said that he was not a gallerist -- go with aluminium. One night, Ingels was having dinner at the restaurant at the top of Arne Jacobsen's Hotel Royal in central Copenhagen when he noticed a brightly coloured painting on the wall. He discovered it was a portrait of Alberto K, the hotel director at the time of its construction between 1956 and 1960, and had been painted and hung by Jacobsen himself. A light went on in Ingels's head: they would create a mosaic of the developers' faces. "I told our client," he says. "Since we are not painters we came up with the idea of using bathroom tiles. Because of the scale of the building it would look nice, like a lowres bitmap. Suddenly there was money in the budget."
Ingels's final touch was to place the brass plate PLOT received as an award for the building in the developer's mouth, like a gold tooth. "A nice afterthought," Ingels says, as he heads back to the parking garage to collect his van.
The BIG offices are in Nørrebro, a rare area of ethnic diversity in a largely homogenous city. The streets were the scenes of unrest in spring 2006 when Muslims objected to caricatures of Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper. It's a typical architect's office: a large, former industrial loft space with high ceilings, expanses of windows, exposed ventilation and glass meeting rooms. There's a large, white-tiled cafeteria and a gleaming new stainless-steel coffee machine which is seemingly constantly in use by the busy twenty- and thirty-somethings who staff the office.
A large part of the space is devoted to workbenches where interns put together architectural models using foamboard and glue.
Pass through a side door and there's a workshop area with laser cutters and both 2D and 3D printers. Much of BIG's day-to-day work involves rapid prototyping -- creating models of how an idea might work in the real world. There are models throughout the office and large boards covered in reference material. BIG staffers estimate that they make between 5,000 and 7,000 prototypes a year.
Ingels explains that the pitch phase of a project -- an intense two months in which ideas evolve before being presented to a client -- involves dozens of possible solutions. There are close to 100 schemes under consideration for the University of Paris pitch, all of them pinned to a board for comment. "It is not because we are indecisive," Ingels says. "It's because, rather than sitting around and waiting in a silent room for divine intervention, we start crossbreeding: we take two designs and we try to see how they could merge. West 57th Street is a merger between a tower and a courtyard. If you merge [them] you get a sort of twisted courtyard. So it's like this binary cross-breeding of two typologies, two species with desirable attributes."
Ingels greets colleagues with handshakes and hugs. His day is back-to-back meetings. In that time he drinks coffee but appears to consume nothing else.
Ingels meets with the group working on a project for Tallinn City Hall in Estonia. BIG has designed a sloping, mirrored window that dominates the front of the building. It's symbolic as well as practical: the council members inside are able to look out at the people they're working for, while local residents are able to see what their representatives are up to. Ingels describes it as a "democratic periscope". What sounded good at the competition stage must be given a real-world application. In this instance, the mirrored window brings with it a significant in-built problem: glare.
The gathering takes place in the middle of the office. Ingels uses his hands expressively, his fingers sketching phantom versions of what he's imagining. Contrary to his stage persona at the TED conference and beyond -- Tiggerish energy and a way with a punchline -- Ingels listens, considering each of the options being enthusiastically pitched to him. "A major part of it is you put your money where your mouth is and really make this shit happen," Ingels says. "People always somehow misunderstand the light-heartedness of our discourse, the fact that we just play around. If you want to break the mould, if you want to do something surprising or different, [you need to do] three times the work to make it convincing. If you just follow the standard, you don't need to make it up because it's already done.
You have to take the playfulness really seriously to get it to work."
BIG recently won a competition for a "superjunction" in Stockholm where two major motorways meet. Part of the proposal is a floating, reflective PVC sphere, 100 metres in diameter, that will give drivers entering or leaving the city an Escher-like 180° view of the area. The Stockholm Sphere will be tethered to three cables and a structural support arm, and kept aloft by being filled with hot air generated by energy from photovoltaic cells that cover 30 per cent of its surface. It will also provide energy to 235 local houses. "There are some exceptional long-standing practices in Copenhagen," Cranbrook Academy's Kroloff says. "Architecture is a middle-aged and old person's profession. To be an architect in your mid-thirties with that level of commission is very distinctive."
BIG is also in the process of regenerating a 1.6km-long ethnically diverse area of Copenhagen that is largely made up of housing projects, by creating a park and recreational area through public participation. The scheme -- which Ingels visits the first night he is back in town, yanking at fences to try to gain access to the construction site -- features crowdsourced items from all over the world. Fifty familiar everyday urban objects have been sourced from abroad, including a Moroccan fountain, a slide from Ukraine, a sign from Moscow, bike stands from the Netherlands, sand from the Sahara and a line-dancing pavilion from Texas. "It's an outrageous orgy of cool shit," Ingels says, surveying the scene. "An inhabited art exhibition."
The first significant building Ingels can recall seeing is a fortress. Not a specific fortress, but castles he would visit as a boy on holiday. "Families with boys end up visiting a lot of fortresses," he says. He also cites the lair of the villain Syndrome in The Incredibles as a type of architecture that he finds memorable for its beauty and utility. He also remembers the secret library in The Name of the Rose. "You see it for only like two seconds or something in the movie, but that is really just...wow," he says. "Cinema is an incredible reference bank of stuff that is not necessarily yet created, but is a way of transmitting ideas rapidly. We have a lot of language for geometry, but maybe less for atmosphere. It's a bit like wine-tasting or with food -- you are a bit surprised at how clumsy the vocabulary is to describe these senses. Cinema becomes a way of adding to an otherwise inadequate vocabulary for discussing architecture."
Ingels grew up in Skodsborg, a small beach town on the Baltic, 20km north of Copenhagen. He describes the family home as "a 60s cigar box -- classic Danish modern, big windows, south-facing, a view over a lake."
Sitting on a leather sofa in one of the apartments in the VM Houses, his leg extended, Ingels says that at school he demonstrated a talent for drawing and entered a national competition to create a modern version of one of Denmark's most-loved cartoon characters.
Rasmus Clump, published since 1951, features a cartoon bear with a weakness for pancakes, who sails the world with his friends. Ingels insists that his submission -- ten pages of it -- was "mind-numbingly boring". He didn't win anything, but something happened that was to change the way he thought about the creative process: he got feedback. "The guy who was the guru of comic books wrote me a letter, because they could see I was a kid," he says. Ingels was told that his characters were not developed enough, that his sketches had no personality and that his grasp of storyline was poor. "Since then I have been very into the content of things, not just the form," he says. "What is it the artwork expressing? What is it communicating? What are they trying to get to? It was like a reminder of the importance of having an underlying plot, if you like, or having an underlying big idea. Otherwise it is just a lot of lines. They might look good, but they don't do anything, they don't perform anything, they don't transmit anything."
Comic books and graphic novels remained Ingels's primary interest. His interest in pop culture led him to enrol at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. "I was certain that I was going to become a graphic novelist," he explains. After two years at the academy, Ingles's drawing techniques were leaning more toward the architectural.
Wanting to learn more, he headed to the university's department of architecture -- whose alumni include the father of modernist Danish design, Arne Jacobsen; Finn Juhl, the furniture and product designer who was a key member of the Danish modernist movement; and Henning Larsen, whose Copenhagen Opera House stands on the nearby island of Dokøen. Ingels hoped to get "two years of free drawing lessons". However, over that period the plan to become a graphic novelist evaporated as Ingels discovered his true calling. He enrolled at the Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura in Barcelona, graduating in 1998 before going on to work for Koolhaas.
Returning to work in Denmark offered a comfortable life, in a culture of consensus -- where all opinions tend to be given the same weight -- that Ingels sees as part of BIG's methodology. "I like this idea of an architectural game of Twister," he says, "where, in the end, the brief is so impossible that you end up forcing the architecture out of the norm and into some really back-bending composition and scary proximities. Being over-accommodating and overly pleasing can become the driver of a more radical agenda."
Ingels walks into a meeting room at the Amagerforbraending waste company on the edge of south Copenhagen and breaks into a broad smile. It's a moment several executives from the company, including managing director Ulla Röttger, have been waiting for: sitting on the boardroom table is a cake baked to resemble a new DKK3.5 billion (£413 million) waste-to-energy plant that BIG beat 36 other firms from Denmark and beyond to design. The plant, which will replace 40-year-old furnaces nearby on Kraftsværksvej Street, will be the country's single biggest environmental initiative and will burn the city's solid waste to gener- ate green energy. Instead of something placed out of sight on the city's margins, BIG conceived it as a destination: a 90-metre-tall, 31,000m2 ski slope with views all the way to Sweden. The structure, due to be completed in 2016, will be surrounded by a park with facilities for running and biking. This explains the cake -- which looks like the slopes of Klosters, not Battersea Power Station. The BIG team gather around it, taking photos with their iPhones. "We are creating a landscape that doesn't exist in Denmark,"
Ingels says. "We have the climate, but not the topography.
Ingels talks a great deal about the notion of "hedonistic sustainability"; that the environmental challenges faced by urban planners and architects can offer the opportunity to improve quality of life. The lift up to the slope will offer riders a view of operations inside the plant, and the smokestack has been modified to serve as an educational tool: it will release visible rings of smoke 30 metres in diameter every time a tonne of CO2 is released. At night, heat-tracking technology will allow the smoke ring to be illuminated in different colours.
The BIG team are here to sign the contracts, passed around in binders for signatures while everyone eats cake with tea or apple juice. A cameraman and photographer are on hand to record the event. "It's nice to get a signature on something," Ingels says as he walks back to his van. He drives to his office for a 7pm meeting and talks about his recent trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he was invited to speak. There are other projects on his mind: Greenland's National Gallery, the Danish National Maritime Museum, the Faroe Islands Education Centre, an extension to the Musée National Des Beaux-Arts du Québec and the National Library of Kazakhstan. But the project that perhaps best demonstrates Ingels's drift from architect to urban planner is a project called LOOP. Showcased at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, it proposes the creation of a dense metropolitan region extending between southern Sweden and Denmark, with the Kattegat bay in the centre. A loop of sustainable public transport, energy-exchange and electric-car infrastructure would run around the bay edge, connecting the two nations. "It's a bit of a buzzword, but I think he looks at architecture in a very holistic way," says Holger Hampf of Frog Design. "He doesn't look at the car alone or the building alone, but more how it comes together and flows together. The city of the future or urbanism is pos- sible only when considering the whole environment.
Ingels is zooming all the way out, so he can look at the whole picture instead of just the building." "Pragmatic utopianism lies within our influence," Ingels says. "Every time you have a chance to do something, try to wedge in as many qualities as possible. What is really going to change the world is not a thousand conferences on climate change, it is specific examples that do specific things that can be observed, enjoyed and copied."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
