Bjarke Ingels: the BIG-time architect with designs on the entire planet – The Guardian

Bjarke Ingels, Danish founder of the architectural practice BIG (short for Bjarke Ingels Group), bridles at the suggestion that he is megalomaniac. I made a mistake at the dawn of time when I named my office BIG, he tells me, speaking from the converted car ferry in the port of Copenhagen that is one of his homes. It felt sweet when we started off in Denmark. Now it means we always get re-interpreted as megalomaniacs.

Well yes, maybe, but his new book, Formgiving: An Architectural Future History, does place the work of his practice in the context of a timeline of the creation of absolutely everything that goes back via the evolution of life to the big bang. It also introduces the concept of Masterplanet, whereby the Earth and its climate would be put to rights by the sort of plans that architects sometimes prepare for neighbourhoods and large-scale development proposals. The magic of form the architectural technique whereby BIG can, for example, give a twisting shape to an art gallery outside Oslo or a tower in Vancouver is in this view continuous with problem-solving for a whole planet.

Its partly a guy thing. Ingels, 46, doesnt seem troubled by the striking gendering of Masterplanet. The practices website address is Big.dk, which, however droll it might have seemed 15 years ago, has surely outlived its welcome. But he has his answers to the accusations of megalomania: You can dismiss the desire to deal with a very important issue or you should believe that youre going to intervene for the better.

Its fair to say that Ingels is a can-do sort of person. BIG is now big, with more than 550 employees in its offices in Copenhagen, New York, London and Barcelona. He has made his name with monuments for the Instagram age CopenHill, the Copenhagen power plant that is also a ski slope; or West 57th, his courtscraper in Manhattan a giant off-kilter pyramid punctured by a garden courtyard. He has designed (with Thomas Heatherwick) headquarters for the mighty Google, now rising in London and in Silicon Valley.

In BIGs world you can have it all. Yes is more, to quote the title of one of his earlier books. Opposites can be reconciled into what Ingels calls oxymorons or bigamy. You can have a power plant and a ski slope. The courtscraper, says the official blurb, combines the density of the American skyscraper with the communal space of the European courtyard. He speaks of pragmatic utopianism and hedonistic sustainability, which means you can save the planet and still have a good time. The Dryline, his plan for combining flood defences for lower Manhattan with public parks, encapsulates the idea.

Ingels cites as inspiration The Rational Optimist (2010) by Matt Ridley, the British viscount, self-described climate lukewarmer and former chairman of Northern Rock bank. I recognise a lot of the vibe, says Ingels of Ridleys book. He makes the claim that optimism is not a question of naivety. Its empirical. You can see that things tend to evolve in a good way. And this is part of the thesis of Formgiving. There is an ever-increasing ability to collaborate, of doing better and better. Where others get nervous about such things as artificial intelligence and the replacement of crafts by robots, Ingels gets excited.

In the world of architecture, Ingels presents a challenge. Hes prolific, hes rich. He turns the cherished tropes and dreams of other architects into smash hits. He makes the visionary physical. For the Burning Man festival he designed a structure in the shape of a giant orb. His Oceanix project proposes a floating city. His Google Bay View building puts a multiplicity of human life under a great oversailing roof. All seem to owe something to visionary architects of the past respectively to the 18th-century French revolutionary tienne-Louis Boulle, to the 1960s Japanese metabolist group, to the 20th-century American Buckminster Fuller.

Most obviously he has learned from his former employer Rem Koolhaas, with whom he shares a love of crashing together seemingly incongruous uses and forms a WTF fondness for puncturing piety and pomposity, an attitude that says lets embrace the modern world for all it is, in all its extremes of beauty and ugliness. Like Koolhaas, Ingels has a prodigious publishing habit: Formgiving is the last of a trilogy.

Koolhaas, however, comes with a certain amount of existential angst, which Ingels discards, which doubtless makes him more attractive to clients. He more generally dispenses with the difficulties and complexities and sometimes the social issues over which other architects agonise. He rinses out the problematic. Instead, he offers his oxymoron, which makes complexity and contradiction into a charmingly consumable package. Which raises a question: are the angst and scruples of other architects actually important, or should we just accept Ingelss invitation to lie back and enjoy the ride?

This is partly about detail. His projects tend to come with loud clunks, where his ambitions of his ideas and shapes are imperfectly reconciled. In those of his works that I have seen, there is often a lack of joy in the way cladding panels and Planar glazing enable the transition from computer screen to physical reality. At the 8 House, an early housing project on the outskirts of Copenhagen, many of its residents have furnished their flats and terraces from Ikea: combined with BIGs construction they conjure a dizzying feeling of just-stuck-togetherness, of coalitions of convenience between processed sheet materials.

Its also about politics. In January, Ingels met Brazils forest-wrecking, racist and homophobic president Jair Bolsonaro, in order to discuss a plan (as the countrys tourism minister put it) to change the face of tourism in Brazil. For this, Ingels was accused by a leading architecture critic of lacking a moral compass, and the controversy may have contributed to office space company WeWorks decision soon afterwards to cease employing Ingels as their chief architect. Id like to raise this with him, but the publicists for his book rule it out: there is no direct link to Formgiving with regard to politics, they say beforehand; please strike the question from the interview. Ingels, however, has previously expressed himself on the subject: criticisms of his Bolsonaro visit, he said, were an oversimplification of a complex world.

He also pushes back at critiques of detail. He cites his recent museum for the Audemars Piguet watch company, a grass-roofed spiral in the Swiss Jura. Its hard to complain about detail with that, he says. The 8 House was a very inexpensive project. It was finished in the middle of the biggest financial crisis in my lifetime. Every cost that could be reduced was reduced.

Its probably clear that Im what Lord Ridley might call a BIG-lukewarmer. I believe that much gets lost in Ingelss blithe renunciation of the complex and the particular. But those of us who would curl our lips and wrinkle our noses should answer his challenge. A project such as CopenHill makes a powerful and direct appeal to almost all the non-professionals who see it, as the Dryline in New York probably will. What can more fastidious beings offer to match them?

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Bjarke Ingels: the BIG-time architect with designs on the entire planet - The Guardian