Bjarke Ingels Quotes

Bjarke Ingels

Profession : Architect

Birth : October 2, 1974

New York is flat - it's ideal for bicycling.

Bjarke Ingels

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.

Bjarke Ingels

When I started studying architecture, people would say, you know, 'Can you tell me why are all modern buildings so boring?' Because, like, people had this idea that in the good old days, architecture had, like, ornament and little towers and spires and gargoyles, and today, it just becomes very practical.

Bjarke Ingels

You can say, like, planet Earth has an existing geology, and what we do as human beings and as architects is that we try to sort of alter and modify and expand the geology.

Bjarke Ingels

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.

Bjarke Ingels

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.

Bjarke Ingels

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.

Bjarke Ingels

I almost never listen to the radio.

Bjarke Ingels

We can engineer a building and design a building with least reliance on active machinery to make it inhabitable.

Bjarke Ingels

I think the avant-garde often hides itself in the highly incomprehensible because they are frustrated that the real world is so boring.

Bjarke Ingels

St. Petersburg is a wonderful city. You have wonderful parks, birds singing in the trees, manatees in the water, pelicans. So it's like this little paradise on Earth.

Bjarke Ingels

I think architecture is rarely the product of a single ideology. It's more like it can be shaped by a really big idea. It can accommodate a lot of life forms.

Bjarke Ingels

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.

Bjarke Ingels

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.

Bjarke Ingels

If you are not able to transmit what you're trying to achieve to your collaborators, you will only have minions - or morons.

Bjarke Ingels

If I was misogynist, would I hire a woman as my CEO? Probably not. I grew up in Denmark, for crying out loud. Denmark is probably one of the places where equality is actually fully achieved. Our political system is practically a matriarchy.

Bjarke Ingels

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.

Bjarke Ingels

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.

Bjarke Ingels

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.

Bjarke Ingels

My drawing skills probably froze around when I was 18... Now I'm more interested in the story, how the drawings, the layout can help express the stories and communicate them.

Bjarke Ingels