Bjarke Bundgaard Ingels (Danish pronunciation: [ˈpjɑːkə ˈpɔnkɒ ˈe̝ŋˀl̩s]; born 2 October 1974) is a Danish architect, founder and creative partner of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).
In Denmark, Ingels became well known after designing two housing complexes in Ørestad: VM Houses and Mountain Dwellings. In 2006 he founded Bjarke Ingels Group, which grew to a staff of 400 by 2015, with noted projects including the 8 House housing complex, VIA 57 West in Manhattan, the Google North Bayshore headquarters (co-designed with Thomas Heatherwick), the Superkilen park, and the Amager Resource Center (ARC) waste-to-energy plant – the latter which incorporates both a ski slope and climbing wall on the building exterior.
Since 2009, Ingels has won numerous architectural competitions. He moved to New York City in 2012, where in addition to the VIA 57 West, BIG won a design contest after Hurricane Sandy for improving Manhattan's flood resistance.
In 2011, The Wall Street Journal named Ingels Innovator of the Year for architecture, and in 2016 Time named him one of the 100 Most Influential People.
Ingels was born in Copenhagen in 1974. His father is an engineer and his mother is a dentist. Hoping to become a cartoonist, he began studying architecture in 1993 at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, thinking it would help him improve his drawing skills. After several years, he began an earnest interest in architecture. He continued his studies at the Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura in Barcelona, and returned to Copenhagen to receive his diploma in 1999. As a third-year student in Barcelona, he set up his first practice and won his first competition.
Alongside his architectural practice, Ingels has been a visiting professor at the Rice University School of Architecture, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and most recently, the Yale School of Architecture.
From 1998 to 2001, Ingels worked for Rem Koolhaas at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam. In 2001, he returned to Copenhagen to set up the architectural practice PLOT together with Belgian OMA colleague Julien de Smedt. The company received 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.
PLOT completed a 2,500 m2 (27,000 sq ft) series of five open-air swimming pools, Islands Brygge Harbour Bath, on the Copenhagen Harbour front with special facilities for children in 2003. They also completed Maritime Youth House, a sailing club and a youth house at Sundby Harbour, Copenhagen.
The first major achievement for PLOT was the award-winning VM Houses in Ørestad, Copenhagen, in 2005. Inspired by Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation concept, they designed two residential blocks, in the shape of the letters V and M (as seen from the sky); the M House with 95 units, was completed in 2004, and the V House, with 114 units, in 2005. The design places strong emphasis on daylight, privacy and views. Rather than looking over the neighboring building, all of the apartments have diagonal views of the surrounding fields. Corridors are short and bright, rather like open bullet holes through the building. There are some 80 different types of apartment in the complex, adaptable to individual needs. The building garnered Ingels and Smedt the Forum AID Award for the best building in Scandinavia in 2006. Ingels lived in the complex until 2008 when he moved into the adjacent Mountain Dwellings.
In 2005, Ingels also completed the Helsingør Psychiatric Hospital in Helsingør, a hospital which is shaped like a snowflake. Each room of the hospital was specially designed to have a view, with two groups of rooms facing the lake, and one group facing the surrounding hills.
After PLOT was disbanded at the end of 2005, in January 2006 Ingels made Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) its own company. It grew to 400 employees by 2016.
BIG began working on the 25-metre-high (82 ft) Mountain Dwellings on the VM houses site in the Ørestad district of Copenhagen, combining 10,000 m2 (110,000 sq ft) of housing with 20,000 m2 (220,000 sq ft) of parking space, with a mountain theme throughout the building. The apartments scale the diagonally sloping roof of the parking garage, from street level to 11th floor, creating an artificial, south facing 'mountainside' where each apartment has a terrace measuring around 93 m2 (1,000 sq ft). The parking garage contains spots for 480 cars. The space has up to 16-metre-high (52 ft) ceilings, and the underside of each level of apartments is covered in aluminium painted in a distinctive colour scheme of psychedelic hues which, as a tribute to Danish 1960s and '70s furniture designer Verner Panton, are all exact matches of the colours he used in his designs. The colours move, symbolically, from green for the earth over yellow, orange, dark orange, hot pink, purple to bright blue for the sky. The northern and western facades of the parking garage depict a 3,000 m2 (32,000 sq ft) photorealistic mural of Himalayan peaks. The parking garage is protected from wind and rain by huge shiny aluminium plates, perforated to let in light and allow for natural ventilation. By controlling the size of the holes, the sheeting was transformed into the giant rasterized image of Mount Everest. Completed in October 2008, it received the World Architecture Festival Housing Award (2008), Forum AID Award (2009) and the MIPIM Residential Development Award at Cannes (2009). Dwell magazine has stated that the Mountain Dwellings "stand as a beacon for architectural possibility and stylish multifamily living in a dense, design-savvy city."
Their third housing project, 8 House, commissioned by Store Frederikslund Holding, Høpfner A/S and Danish Oil Company A/S in 2006 and completed in October 2010, was the largest private development ever undertaken in Denmark and in Scandinavia, combining retail with commercial row houses and apartments. It is also Ingels' third housing development in Ørestad, following VM Houses and Mountain Dwellings. The sloping, bow-shaped 10-storey building consists of 61,000 m2 (660,000 sq ft) of three different types of residential housing and 10,000 m2 (110,000 sq ft) of retail premises and offices, providing views over the fields and marches of Kalvebod Faelled to the south. The 476-unit apartment building forms a figure 8 around two courtyards. Noted for its green roof which won it the 2010 Scandinavian Green Roof Award, Ingels explained, "The parts of the green roof that remain were seen by the client as integral to the building as they are visible from the ground. These not only provide the environmental benefits that we all know come from green roofs, but also add to the visual drama and appeal of the sloping roofs and rooftop terrace in between." The building also won the Best Residential Building at the 2011 World Architecture Festival, and the Huffington Post included 8 House as one of the "10 Best Architecture Moments of 2001–2010".
In 2007, Ingels exhibited at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City and was commissioned to design the Danish Maritime Museum in Helsingør. The current museum is located on the UNESCO World Heritage Site of nearby Kronborg Castle. The concept of the building is 'invisible' space, a subterranean museum which is still able to incorporate dramatic use of daylight. In launching the $40 million project, BIG had to reinforce an abandoned concrete dry dock on the site, 150 metres (490 ft) long, 25 metres (82 ft) wide and 9 metres (30 ft) deep, building the museum on the periphery of the reinforced dry dock walls which will form the facade of the new museum.
The dry dock will also host exhibitions and cultural events throughout the year. The museum's interior is designed to simulate the ambiance of a ship's deck, with a slightly downward slope. The 7,600 m2 (82,000 sq ft) exhibition gallery is to house an extensive collection of paintings, model ships, and historical equipment and memorabilia from the Danish Navy. Ingels is collaborating with consulting engineer Rambøll, Alectia for project management, and E. Pihl & Søn and Kossmann.dejong for construction and interior design. Some 11 different foundations are funding the project. Construction began on the museum in September 2010 and it is scheduled for completion by the summer of 2013. In September 2012, the Kronborg and Zig-Zag Bridge components to the building were shipped in from China.