Since dissolving the avant-garde Copenhagen architecture firm PLOT in 2006, former partners Julien De Smedt and Bjarke Ingels have launched individual practices with grandiose, statement-making visions. Considering how to add new housing in the middle of already-crowded Copenhagen, for example, Ingels’s firm Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG, decided that a local sports field could be surrounded by a giant wall containing 5,000 apartments—an unsolicited idea that the municipality now intends to realize. De Smedt, too, has thrilled potential clients. His studio, JDS, recently won a competition to redesign the Holmenkollen ski jump in Oslo.

Images courtesy JDS