The Man Who Just Can't Sit Still

He turned a roof into a ski slope and made a museum out of Legos. Bjarke Ingels is architecture’s Mr BIG.

- Mark Ellwood

WHEN I MEET Bjarke Ingels in his firm’s surprisingly nondescript red brick office building in Copenhagen, the architect radiates Tigger-like energy, even though he’s just stepped off a plane from Mexico. There isn’t a hint of jet lag while he sits to talk, or at least tries to. Constantly shifting in his chair, Ingels seems to be straining against the urge to get up. Yet that restlessness will be essential if he’s to complete the extraordinary slate of projects underway – so many, in fact, that his 14-year-old firm will double its overall output in the next 18 months.

The high-profile commissions for Bjarke Ingels Group (or BIG) include a new Champs-Elysées flagship for Galeries Lafayette, Audemars Piguet’s new watch museum in Switzerland, two campuses for Google in California (one with Thomas Heatherwick) and several skyline-defining apartment towers in Manhattan. But Bjarke (pronounced BYARK-uh) seems neither intimidated nor overscheduled by this onslaught; rather, he appears to relish it. Ruffling his artfully tousled, Calvin and Hobbes–like hair, he speaks in blurted phrases, leaving uneven pauses between them that suggest he’s updating or revising what he thinks as he speaks. “Each project we do has to identify how the world is changing or has changed.” Pause. “And then address the consequences, the conflicts, the problems, and the potentials.”

Indeed, with each new project, Ingels pushes himself to reinvent. Whether the sloping roofs of Google’s Sunnyvale campus, which will double as ramps for walking or rolling, or Hualien Residences in Taiwan, which echo the nearby mountains (down to the steep facades covered in vegetation), Ingels’s designs fearlessly break the rules, playing with geometry and materials to create a built world worthy of 21st-century innovation. If Ingels has a signature move, it’s subverting expectations.