Bjarke Ingels

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

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

“It's legendary how architectural lectures can be incredibly boring.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Architects have to become designers of eco-systems. Not just designers of beautiful facades or beautiful sculptures, but systems of economy and ecology, where we channel the flow not only of people, but also the flow of resources through our cities and buildings.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I love computer programmers. They have a very beautiful definition of complexity as 'the capacity to transmit the maximum information with the minimum data'.”

“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.”

“I almost never listen to the radio.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Our cities are not polluted or congested because they have to be. They are what they are because that's how we made them.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”