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.”

“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.”

“Design our world so that we have positive social and environmental side effects.”

“The fact that something is actually understandable and relatable doesn't mean that it's unsophisticated or banal. It just means that it's crystal-clear. And if you can't explain it, that doesn't necessarily mean it's so brilliant that ordinary mortals can't fathom it. It might just mean that it makes no sense.”

“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.”

“I think the biggest backhanded criticism-compliment I get is that I'm 'good at communicating.' Which implies that you're bad at doing.”

“The one thing all humans share is that we all inhabit the same limited amount of real estate, which is Planet Earth.”

“For me, architecture is the means, not the end. It's a means of making different life forms possible.”

“Instead of trying to change people, we could change the world.”

“Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house.”

“In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives.”

“All evidence shows that we are actually getting smarter. Roughly we are getting 10 IQ points smarter every decade. The speed of innovation is also faster.”

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

“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.”

“Silicon Valley has been this global engine of innovation and economic growth over the last few decades, but a tidal wave of innovation that has been focused very much in the digital realm.”

“Today, we have sophisticated building technology: we can calculate and simulate the environments and performance of the building, the thermal exposure of envelop, or the air flow through an urban space or structure.”

“In the traditional modernist planning that created the suburbs, you put residential buildings in suburban neighborhoods, office spaces into brain parks and retail in shopping malls. But you fail to exploit the possibility of symbiosis or synthesis that way.”

“A kid in Minecraft can build a world and inhabit it through play. We have the possibility to build the world that we want to inhabit.”

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

“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.”