When I need to get inspired one thing I do lately is go to google and type in  “Bjarke Ingels interview”.  Bjarke Ingels is a Danish architect, a founder of BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group – which has offices in Copenhagen, New York and a small office in Shanghai.

I have read numerous interviews with Bjarke, watched hours and hours of youtube lectures and interviews, read “Yes is More” and about to start “Hot to Cold” and  I am still obsessed. If our passions are the breadcrumbs that lead us on a path to our destiny, then there is some key message I need to unveil in this obsession with BIG.  Below are some pearls of wisdom I have been collecting along the path of BIG discovery which I feel deserve a larger audience than my Evernote app.

“For Ingels the details are not that important. What’s much more important is: what kind of social impact does it have? Are people playing—having a laugh, rather than being self-contained, serious, aesthetic people? So it is more childish in that respect, but in a good way.” © Martinussen

But Ingels seized the challenge posed by Per Høpfner: “Make it interesting, make it attractive, and make it dirt cheap.”

 “The Mountain” residential building

 

“…whereas with Koolhaas, though he had a style, each project was informed by a certain take on a certain condition, so that it always started with a story about the city, a story about art and technology, a story about the institution of the library. Suddenly, I could see that architecture was really part of society and was even informed by what was occurring in society. And I was hooked.”  (c) Bjarke Ingels

“BIG is not a service-oriented company that does whatever people ask us to do. We often give the client something they hadn’t imagined, but is still what they want.”

“One thing that can attract you to a girl is if she’s very attracted to you. I think they felt that we really want to do this.” (c) Bjarke Ingels after pitching for  Kimball Arts Center project

“In general, I think, if you’re cool, then you don’t have to worry if what you do is cool.” (c) Bjarke Ingels

“Architecture is most appealing with simple lines and clear ideas. A city, on the other hand, becomes alive when it is rich with experiences and surprises” Bjarke Ingels (Yes is more!)

“A successful building is a living building” (from an interview on the steps of Sydney opera)

“Good design is careful, bad deign is careless”

“The more waste you create in the design process, the less waste you will end up building in the city” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_W48ZsIqSo

“Whenever we get invited to look into a situation or to make a building we try to analyze how is a status quo – have things changed since the last time somebody built a school or a workplace. We try to look for potential changes and at some point, once you a find a thing that has already changed but nobody has realized a potential of it or it could change but nobody  tried it before, then you get the altered factors like in science fiction that can then trigger a whole cascade of consequences and the design work becomes an architectural exploration of the potential of that idea”  Architecture as a Science Fiction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKaG-XuCo9A