ICON: Bjarke Ingels

Bjarke Ingels (born October 2, 1974 in Copenhagen) is a Danish architect. He heads the architectural practice Bjarke Ingels Group which he founded in 2006. In 2009 he co-founded the design consultancy. In his designs, Bjarke Ingels often tries to achieve a balance between playful and practical approaches to architecture.

Explaining his design ideas, Bjarke Ingels states:

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Historically the field of architecture has been dominated by two opposing extremes. On one side an avant-garde full of crazy ideas. Originating from philosophy, mysticism or a fascination of the formal potential of computer visualizations they are often so detached from reality that they fail to become something other than eccentric curiosities. On the other side there are well organized corporate consultants that build predictable and boring boxes of high standard. Architecture seems to be entrenched in two equally unfertile fronts: either naively utopian or petrifyingly pragmatic. We believe that there is a third way wedged in the nomansland between the diametrical opposites. Or in the small but very fertile overlap between the two. A pragmatic utopian architecture that takes on the creation of socially, economically and environmentally perfect places as a practical objective. Bjarke Ingels studied architecture at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen and the Technica Superior de Arquitectura in Barcelona, receiving his diploma in 1998. As a third year student he set up his first practice and won his first competition. From 1998-2001 he worked for Office of Metropolitan Architecture and Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam. VM housing in Ørestad, Denmark In 2001, Bjarke Ingels returned to Copenhagen to set up the architectural practice PLOT together with Belgian OMA colleague Julien de Smedt. The company rapidly achieved success, receiving significant national and international attention for their inventive designs. They were awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2004 for a proposal for a new music house for Stavanger, Norway. Their first major achievement was the award-winning VM Houses in Ørestad, Copenhagen, in 2005. Despite its success, PLOT was disbanded in January 2006 and Bjarke Ingels created Bjarke Ingels Group, BIG, while his former partner founded JDS / JULIEN DE SMEDT ARCHITECTS. With BIG, Bjarke Ingels has continued the ideology from PLOT and has several major projects under construction or development both in Denmark and abroad. These include BIH House in Ørestad and the new Danish national Maritime museum in Elsinore, hotel projects in Norway, a highrise designed in the shape of the Chinese character for 'people' for Shanghai, a masterplan for the redevelopment of a former naval base and oil industry wasteland into a zero-emission resort and entertainment city off the coast of Baku, Azerbaijan,[3] shaped as the seven mountains of the country, and a museum overlooking Mexico City. Under the BIG Banner Bjarke recently published "Yes is more - an archcomic on architectural evolution". On 24 July 2009, he spoke at the prestigious TED event in Oxford, UK. He presented the case study “Hedonistic sustainability” in the workshop Manage complexity - With integral solutions to an economy of means at the 3rd International Holcim Forum 2010 in Mexico City and shall be a member of the Holcim Awards regional jury for Europe in 2011.