Bjarke Ingels Biography

Bjarke Ingels Acclaimed Architect & Cultural Innovator Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) Copenhagen-based architect Bjarke Ingels approaches his projects with creativity and tenacity. Through a series of award-winning design projects and buildings, he has developed an international reputation for designing buildings that are both programmatically and technologically innovative, while balancing cost and resource consciousness. Bjarke envisions a world free from boring boxes and tired templates by disrupting the physical world with pragmatic, utopian spaces. Up next, Bjarke will be designing Google’s corporate headquarters, the Mountain View Googleplex.

Bjarke Ingels started BIG Bjarke Ingels Group in 2005 after co-founding PLOT Architects in 2001 and working at OMA in Rotterdam. Through a series of award-winning design projects and buildings, Bjarke has developed a reputation for designing buildings that are as programmatically and technically innovative as they are cost and resource conscious. Bjarke has received numerous awards and honors, including the Danish Crown Prince’s Culture Prize in 2011, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2004, and the ULI Award for Excellence in 2009.

In 2011, the Wall Street Journal awarded Bjarke the Architectural Innovator of the Year Award. In 2012, the American Institute of Architects granted the 8 House its Honor Award, calling it “a complex and exemplary project of a new typology.”

Alongside his architectural practice, Bjarke taught at Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, and Rice University and is an honorary professor at the Royal Academy of Arts, School of Architecture in Copenhagen. He is a frequent public speaker and has spoken in venues such as TED, WIRED, AMCHAM, 10 Downing Street, and the World Economic Forum.

His deeply-thought-out and often rather large works -- including several skyscrapers and mixed-use projects in a developing section of Copenhagen, plus a project for a new commercial harbor-island --  work to bring coherence to the urban fabric and to help their occupants and users lead better lives. Coming up, he's designing the Danish Pavilion for Expo 2010 in Shanghai. The pavilion is described as "a loop, a velodrome and an interactive fairytale,"and  -- not surprisingly for a Dane -- comes with 1,500 bikes that Expo visitors can borrow.

BIG is a Copenhagen, New York and London based group of architects, designers, builders, and thinkers operating within the fields of architecture, urbanism, interior design, landscape design, product design, research and development.

The office is currently involved in a large number of projects throughout Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East. BIG’s architecture emerges out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes. Not least due to the influence from multicultural exchange, global economical flows and communication technologies that all together require new ways of architectural and urban organization. We believe that in order to deal with today’s challenges, architecture can profitably move into a field that has been largely unexplored.

A pragmatic utopian architecture that steers clear of the petrifying pragmatism of boring boxes and the naïve utopian ideas of digital formalism. Like a form of programmatic alchemy we create architecture by mixing conventional ingredients such as living, leisure, working, parking and shopping. By hitting the fertile overlap between pragmatic and utopia, we architects once again find the freedom to change the surface of our planet, to better fit contemporary life forms.

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