What vitamins does he take? That might be your first question if you encounter Bjarke Ingels, founder of the four-year-old Copenhagen-based firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). To say that Ingels, who just turned 35, is irrepressibly energetic and optimistic seems like a pathetic understatement. But it might partially explain why BIG is completing its third housing complex executed over the past five years in the town of Ørestad, a newly developing section of Copenhagen. In 2005, Ingels and Julien De Smedt, then partners in PLOT, a firm they started in 2001, completed the VM Houses, a complex of 221 flats in two structures shaped like a V and an M when seen from the air. The two architects parted ways, and Ingels’s new firm, BIG, finished a project called The Mountain in 2008, where 80 terraced apartments spill down the top of a parking garage next to the VM Houses. Down the road, 8 House, a mixed-use complex in the shape of an angular double-loop, is nearing completion.
This all sounds a bit ahead of the game; most architects, Danish included, don’t get large-scale projects until around age 50. But as BIG’s work shows, the bold, unbridled inventiveness in mixing programmatic typologies and forms already sets this architecture office apart from its competitors.
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