Words matter. These are the best Bjarke Ingels Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When I moved to America, everybody was asking, ‘Why the hell are you going to America? It’s over; you should be going east.’ But it turned out our timing was miraculous.
The ‘International Style of Modernism’ came with the advent of building services. In the end, the architecture became like a container space, essentially like a boring box with a basement full of machinery to make it inhabitable. As a result, buildings literally started to look identical all over the planet.
For me, architecture is the means, not the end. It’s a means of making different life forms possible.
I think the avant-garde often hides itself in the highly incomprehensible because they are frustrated that the real world is so boring.
I think if I would have started BIG in America, I would probably never have called it BIG. There was nothing but a little bit of local small country humor in the idea.
The fact that something is actually understandable and relatable doesn’t mean that it’s unsophisticated or banal. It just means that it’s crystal-clear. And if you can’t explain it, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s so brilliant that ordinary mortals can’t fathom it. It might just mean that it makes no sense.
Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house.
If you are not able to transmit what you’re trying to achieve to your collaborators, you will only have minions – or morons.
In the traditional modernist planning that created the suburbs, you put residential buildings in suburban neighborhoods, office spaces into brain parks and retail in shopping malls. But you fail to exploit the possibility of symbiosis or synthesis that way.
People outside the profession of architecture perhaps often lack the understanding of how their physical environment comes into being. What are the processes, the concerns and considerations? What are the parameters that shape the world around them?
I love computer programmers. They have a very beautiful definition of complexity as ‘the capacity to transmit the maximum information with the minimum data’.
Something like ‘Abstract’ can really give people access to the behind-the-scenes of how our physical surroundings take shape.
I really focus on the ball, I really focus on the work, and I really focus on creating all the growth opportunities for anyone in the organisation that’s willing to do it.
In Copenhagen, there’s a long-term commitment to creating a well-functioning pedestrian city where all forms of movement – pedestrian, bicycles, cars, public transportation – are accommodated with equal priority.
Instead of trying to change people, we could change the world.
Design our world so that we have positive social and environmental side effects.
A kid in Minecraft can build a world and inhabit it through play. We have the possibility to build the world that we want to inhabit.
I believe that architecture, as anything else in life, is evolutionary. Ideas evolve; they don’t come from outer space and crash into the drawing board.
Maybe our work appeals to some people more than others. But the opportunities that I present to my colleagues are completely uninfluenced by gender, race, sexual orientation, or religion.
In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives.
I think the biggest backhanded criticism-compliment I get is that I’m ‘good at communicating.’ Which implies that you’re bad at doing.
All evidence shows that we are actually getting smarter. Roughly we are getting 10 IQ points smarter every decade. The speed of innovation is also faster.
We can engineer a building and design a building with least reliance on active machinery to make it inhabitable.
All comic books take place in built environments, and I was very good at drawing people and animals, and stuff like that, but I hadn’t spent much energy drawing buildings. So I thought, maybe I could, and then I became an architect.
New York is flat – it’s ideal for bicycling.
I wanted to be a cartoonist, but there was no cartoon academy. So I enrolled in the Royal Danish Art Academy School of Architecture. But then I really got smitten by architecture.
One of the dilemmas of architecture in general is that there is a Catch-22 – you can’t actually get to be commissioned to do certain types of building until you’ve already built that type of building. So it seems to be incredibly hard to get going.
The one thing all humans share is that we all inhabit the same limited amount of real estate, which is Planet Earth.
I don’t have to come up with the best idea. It is my job to make sure that it is always the best idea that wins.
Sustainability can’t be like some sort of a moral sacrifice or political dilemma or a philanthropical cause. It has to be a design challenge.
