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Ambitious New York architects in their thirties or forties, waiting to become famous, comfort themselves with the thought that fame comes later to architects than to people who launch Web sites, design dresses, or make horror movies. Construction is slow and costly, and you can't do it on your own. You can't, at twenty, borrow money on a credit card, work through your weekends, and end up with an airport terminal.
So the career of Bjarke Ingels—who recently moved from Denmark to New York, in part, so that he could oversee construction of a giant white wedge of an apartment building that will fill most of an empty block on West Fifty-seventh Street—is vexing to some of his contemporaries; they notice a "disconnect between age and success," as one of them put it. At thirty-seven, Ingels is in the first rank of international architects, or nearly so: he has a body of admired work in Denmark, including a remarkable four-hundred-and-seventy-six-unit apartment building, forming a figure eight around two courtyards, in which you can bike, on an outdoor path, to the tenth floor. He has won prizes, spoken at 10 Downing Street, taught at Harvard and Yale. Student architects become fluttery when asking him to sign copies of his book, a combined monograph and manifesto, written in comic-book form, entitled "Yes Is More."
And in offices in Copenhagen and New York scores of blue and white foam models show buildings that melt into the ground, or twist on the way up, or take the form of fractured cubes. Many of these are being built, or are likely to be built. Although Ingels has the swagger of a night-club d.j., he is acquiring the reach of a major international corporate practice; he is designing two of the world's tallest buildings, which is not the usual work of a high-art architect. Some critics acknowledge the wry intelligence with which Ingels presents his designs but wonder if the work sometimes lacks nuance, or polish, or is too pliant to the needs of powerful clients. (With the phrase "Yes Is More," Ingels has almost made such pliancy sound radical, or at least fun.) His active projects include a riverfront arts center in southwestern France, a city hall in Tallinn, Estonia, and a mixed-use development of ten million square feet in Tianjin, China. Ingels's New York office space has expanded twice since I first met him, in December. His firm is the Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG; it pleases him that his Danish Web address is big.dk.
On a recent afternoon, he was driving a mid-nineties black Porsche up the West Side Highway, on his way to visit the site of his future contribution to Manhattan's skyline and then take the car to the shop. Ingels, who was wearing a black jacket over a T-shirt that said "Free Ai Weiwei," is quick-witted and personable, and rarely speaks without smiling. He looks like a former boy-band star who is not getting quite enough sleep in the next stage of his career. At a public event in SoHo last year, to discuss an analysis of BIG—most of it critical—that had filled an entire issue of CLOG, an architectural magazine, one question from the audience was about whether he was single.
We passed the elevated gray slabs of the Standard Hotel, designed by Ennead Architects. "It doesn't even feel like pastiche," Ingels said, appreciatively. "It feels as if somehow it was built in the fifties." He found Frank Gehry's I.A.C. Building, up the road, harder to praise. "They cold-bent the glass," he said. "The shapes are as much as you can do without actually tailoring the glass. That part of it is kind of interesting." The next building to the north, a condominium by Jean Nouvel, caused Ingels to recall a version of rock, paper, scissors that he played with friends when they were students. "There's an iconic image of Nouvel smoking a cigar, so this was him," he said, taking a hand off the steering wheel to make a V, with two fingers. "Toyo Ito, the Japanese architect, was doing ovals back then, all the time, so it was like an egg shape." He made the shape with thumb and forefinger. "And then Rem Koolhaas"—the celebrated Dutch architect, who became Ingels's first and only boss—"was 'Fuck context!' " Ingels raised one finger. "We all loved all three architects, but we all had our favorite. My favorite was obviously Rem Koolhaas. The system was that Rem Koolhaas was more brutal than Toyo Ito, and Toyo Ito was more poetic than Jean Nouvel, and Jean Nouvel was more . . . French than Rem Koolhaas."
Frank Gehry was seventy-five when construction began on his first Manhattan building. Jean Nouvel was fifty-nine. Frank Lloyd Wright was in his eighties. Among the past ten winners of the Pritzker Prize, the profession's leading international award (and one that Ingels seems impatient to secure), six have not built in the city. Ingels's New York, and North American, début will contain nearly nine hundred thousand square feet of apartments and ground-floor commercial space, and is expected to cost half a billion dollars, which—as Ingels pointed out, in a conversation about barriers to early success in architecture—is not outlandish in this context but still exceeds the budget of the most expensive film ever made.
The building, known for the moment as W57, will stand between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth Streets, next to the West Side Highway. It will be unmissable from the river, and should present a dazzling view to drivers approaching from the south. The form of W57 is what you might have if snow drifted steeply into the corner of a yard, and then you removed the yard. Recessed ocean-liner balconies will interrupt the smooth slope, and so will a deep courtyard running from east to west. Its sharp northeastern peak will be forty-one stories high. As we passed the U.S.S. Intrepid, Ingels pointed ahead. "A gigantic triangle down to the waterfront!" he said. "It's going to be the most insane view of anything in New York."
Like several of Ingels's projects, this one could be called the Mountain, although he already used that name for an apartment building in Copenhagen, in a country with no mountains. (For that city, Ingels has also designed a garbage-fuelled power plant, as yet unbuilt, that has a ski slope running down its side.) As he turned off the highway, Ingels said, "You can do architecture where it's all about how expensive a veneer you are going to laminate onto the same box that everyone does, and where nothing is left if you strip off all the cosmetics"—he had just spoken of the "relatively generic modern high-rise" that Renzo Piano designed, several years ago, for the Times. "Or you can attempt to invent a new typology."
Workers at the gate let us onto the site, with a warning about sinkholes, and with a few jokes about the complexity of the construction ahead. "We didn't want you to get bored," Ingels said. We walked across grassy rubble to the center, where the future courtyard—it may feel more like a canyon, despite grass and trees—will frame a westward view of the Hudson. "When I got this job, I was thinking, You can't fuck up in New York and then sweep it under the carpet," Ingels said. "It's really going to be in everybody's face. So I thought, Let's do something really, really simple." His client is Durst Fetner Residential, a partnership between the Durst Organization, whose projects have been largely in New York commercial real estate, and Sidney Fetner Associates, a firm of residential developers. Durst, which owns ten commercial towers in midtown Manhattan (including 4 Times Square, where The New Yorker is published), is not known for architectural bravura. To Ingels, a building with a courtyard "was the simplest thing I could imagine." He laughed. "And then suddenly it became this . . . incredible thing." It's a key part of Ingels's rhetoric to describe a building as an almost inevitable expression of the constraints acting upon it. He portrays W57 as an object straining, with absolute logic, to make the most of river views and sunlight, while giving up none of the density that the site's zoning allows. "People will think we're just crazy artists who are doing something wack," he said, when in fact W57 occupies a singular "evolutionary niche." (Such talk is complicated by the fact that BIG's first scheme for the site involved more than one peak.)
He added, "It'll raise the fundamental question: If you can do this, why is everything else a box with another box on top?" (That is, a flat-roofed skyscraper topped with air-conditioning and elevator machinery.) Ingels has ambitions to set precedents and, as he put it, "gently alter the course of history." At this point in his career, Ingels is recognized not for exquisitely finished architecture but, rather, for precociously confident reimaginings of building types. "The way you really create change," he said, is to "open a possibility that you can't even argue with." He added, "You can't say that it's impossible to do a courtyard building in Manhattan, because you can." (Ingels was overlooking a few local predecessors to W57, including London Terrace Gardens, in Chelsea.) "Even with the same developers who've been here for the past three generations, and with the same building code, in the same city, the same market. It's the same ingredients, mixed differently, to produce another effect."
We walked back across the grass, and Ingels, in a rare dip in optimism, observed that, though construction was about to begin, everything could still turn to dust. "Take the Chicago Spire," he said. That tower, a two-thousand-foot drill bit designed by Santiago Calatrava, was abandoned in 2008, after years of financial muddle, and is now just a hole in the ground.
He dropped off the car for repair and returned to his office, which overlooks the Hudson, at Twenty-sixth Street. It was a Friday, when BIG tends to hold an after-work office party involving costumes and the opportunity to "drink like Vikings"; that night, Ingels was planning to make an announcement about a key architectural competition that the firm had entered a few weeks earlier, for the Kimball Art Center, in Park City, Utah, the ski town that hosts the Sundance Film Festival. Ingels was impatient for his first North American competition win. With an hour or so to spare before the party, he decided on the shape of a pair of Miami apartment buildings.
A Christmas Eve dinner in Denmark begins with individual dishes of rice pudding. In one dish, there's a single almond; whoever finds it gets a gift. When I had lunch with Ingels and his parents, last December, in the house where he grew up, on the suburban coastline north of Copenhagen, his mother accused her son of always cheating at the almond game. Elisabet Ingels is a dentist; Knud Jensen, Bjarke's father, is an engineer of fibre-optic cables. (Their three children were called Ingels because it's a more interesting name.) Over lunch, Elisabet said that it was Bjarke's habit, before Christmas Eve dinners, "to come into the kitchen and take an almond and put it in his pocket, so he always gets an almond." Bjarke disputed this, and, over his mother's loud denials, told me that she took the excitement out of the game by hiding an almond in every pudding. "My mother has specific almond gifts for everybody!" He laughed. "Almonds-for-all is the end consequence of the welfare state."
We were in a single-story house from the nineteen-fifties—a small rectangular box, clad in wood, with a flat roof, on a grassy bank that dropped down to a lake. Over lunch, there was talk of Bjarke's ambition, when he was a teen-ager, to become a comic-book artist, and I saw some drawings, including an illustrated note that Bjarke had once created to remind himself to feed the cat. According to Elisabet, "Bjarke was in his own world, so things like feeding the cat—normal things—were not what Bjarke wanted to remember." She spoke, with mock disdain, about the life he currently leads. (Ingels rents a Tribeca loft.) "Now he has got a personal assistant and a man coming to clean his room and a restaurant to make his food." She called him Mr. Big.
Ingels was spending a few days in Copenhagen to see his family, check in with his Danish office, visit night clubs, meet government officials about the ski-slope garbage power plant, and talk with friends (gallery owners, filmmakers) over long meals. The restaurants he visited served food in the new Scandinavian style: many small dishes of scrupulously local and seasonal fare, with a waiter interrupting the conversation every few minutes to make a scolding announcement: "December cabbage!"
Over dinner with half a dozen people one night—a meal that, for all the delights of "oyster snow," caused Ingels to reflect on restaurants where you have "a slightly stronger feeling that you're actually eating"—he recalled how, at eighteen, he decided to study architecture. He ruled out a degree in fine art, because he didn't have a suitable portfolio, and "back then my conception of contemporary art was canning your own feces, and I was more into telling stories, and drawing." It was the early nineties, when architects still worked with pens, and Ingels saw a path to a career as a graphic novelist. "My thinking was, I'll do architecture until I have a better idea," he said. "And I simply never got a better idea."
In 1993, he began a six-year course at Copenhagen's Royal Academy of Arts. At first, he was adept but not fully engaged. The fourth year, spent in Barcelona, transformed him into "a completely new person." He had an intellectually inspiring roommate, read Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze, and became, he thinks, a better conceptual thinker for having to build sentences in a new language. And he "fell in love" with Koolhaas, whose firm, OMA, was then as much admired for unrealized designs—in particular, two library projects in Paris—as for finished buildings. As Ingels saw it, architects before Koolhaas had tended to establish themselves "by creating a specific aesthetic that's based on certain assumptions—that, you know, curvy is more beautiful than rectangular, or concrete is cooler than brick or glass. And, essentially, what defines them as an architect are the things they don't do. 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."
Returning to Copenhagen, Ingels recalled, he was "on fire, cranking out ideas." Christian Madsbjerg, who runs a New York-based business consultancy and sits on the board of BIG, met Ingels around this time, and noted a level of confidence and ambition that was formidable and—given Denmark's fondness for self-mockery—un-Danish. "Bjarke said, 'There was Le Corbusier, there was Rem Koolhaas. And here I am!' " (Ingels is sure that he did not use those words.) By midway through that fifth year, Ingels had built up a portfolio of designs—including a car dealership, built underground—that was strong enough for him to secure an internship at OMA in Rotterdam. He was there for six months, but, he recalled, "I didn't feel that I'd achieved what I'd set out to do—be part of the conception of a masterpiece."
Returning to school, he completed his thesis project, a sloping combination of apartment building and sports hall for a site in Ørestad—a strip of unused land, about the size of Central Park, between central Copenhagen and the airport. This land had just been opened up for development. Upon graduating, in 1999, Ingels turned down several unsolicited job offers, and instead had hopes of getting his project built: "I thought that, at twenty-four, I could persuade clients to build a three-hundred-thousand-square-foot building. I don't know what I was thinking."
The plan was interrupted, that summer, by a call from OMA. The firm had just won a competition to design the Seattle Public Library. Ingels moved back to Rotterdam as the design was taking shape, in the form of an irregular stack of boxes, wrapped in a lattice of glass and steel. Ingels became the lead designer of those interior boxes, whose outline had already been sketched; the largest box held the main public collection of books, arranged on a spiral ramp ascending four floors.
He was at OMA for about a year—long enough to play a key role in one of the great American buildings of recent decades. By then, Ingels told me, "I felt I had paid my dues." He was not keen to keep working on the library beyond the point where the role of an architectural firm "slides from being a creator to being a controller"—from design to documentation, and then to oversight of construction. Nor did he want to rise in rank at OMA, acquiring "more and more sorrows" and creating "space for designers beneath me in responsibility to crank out cool stuff." And OMA could be a difficult place to work. Ingels said, "In architecture, there are so many constraints. You have all the constraints of the client, of the site conditions, of the economy, of gravity—you name it. But a highly unpredictable boss is yet another constraint." He recalled episodes of yelling, and hurling of office supplies. He added, "I think you can have high competence, ambition, without having stress and fear as the motivating factor. It's one of the ideas of 'Yes Is More': you can be critical through affirmation rather than negation. You can be critical by putting forward alternatives rather than spending all your energy whining about the alternatives you don't like."
He returned to Copenhagen and, with Julien De Smedt, a Belgian who had been an OMA colleague, set up a firm called PLOT. Ingels was at a stage when an ambitious architect might foresee spending a decade travelling the world, and working at three or four firms, before considering self-employment. Ingels and De Smedt, however, appeared to need no further orientation. Jeffrey Inaba, a friend of Ingels's and a former OMA employee who now directs C-Lab, an architectural-research institute at Columbia University, described Ingels as "really mature" at that age, but added that, to some, an early focus on building might suggest a disagreeable lack of restlessness. Young graduates striving for originality, he said, often focus on "work that's experimental or radical to the degree that it's unbuildable." In an effort to make a mark, such an architect may, for some time, make no mark at all in the built world. "With Bjarke, there is a sense of confidence in the profession—that at its core it works, and there isn't a need to question it in a fundamental way," Inaba said. "There's a belief that making buildings is what an architect should do."
The PLOT architects lived and worked in a shared apartment, and began to enter, and win, architectural competitions. They designed an indoor swimming pool in the form of a looping canal—the first of many loops in Ingels's portfolio. The project later stalled, but it allowed PLOT to establish an office. Less than a year into the life of the firm, Per Høpfner, a local developer, heard about their work through a chance conversation with a PLOT intern, and came to visit. Ingels's view of Høpfner was that he'd done "some of the worst projects" in Copenhagen, including "super-boring" apartment blocks. (Ingels added that Høpfner was also likely to describe these projects with a similar lack of enthusiasm.) "He's kind of a tough cookie," Ingels said. "On the surface, he seems like a typical crook—a good-looking guy with completely white hair, always suntanned. And then he's very smart, and very frank."
At the time of his visit, Høpfner was in the process of buying land in Ørestad. The city was selling lots zoned for dense, mid-rise residential use. A few days later, Ingels called him. Høpfner said, "I bought a site. So can you draw something?"
Ingels has compared designing a building to telling a joke. The punch line makes perfect sense, in the world of the joke, but still creates a moment of surprise, and may reveal "an alternative reality nested within reality." A few years ago, Ingels made a short video to explain a design idea called the Escher Tower, and posted it online. He sat in his Copenhagen office, with an M. C. Escher print of an impossible, doubly oriented building leaning against a wall behind him. Handling a series of pink foam blocks, he talked to the camera about how, beyond a certain height, the primary load on a building shifts from being vertical (gravity) to being horizontal (wind). So people don't build very tall buildings in the form of thin, wide monoliths with little foothold—even though thinness is desirable, at least in some climates, because it makes it easy to distribute daylight and ventilation. Within a few moves of his blocks, Ingels had reached his punch line: a tower that began, at the ground, as a slab oriented one way, and ended up as a slab oriented at a ninety-degree difference, by twisting around a vertical core. Ingels held up the model. Seen from different angles, its profile changed: a rectangle, a bottle, an hourglass. "It looks surreal, but it is essentially a creation of common sense," he said. He put his Escher Tower on the table next to a monolith of the same height and surface area, and blew gently on both. The monolith fell over.
No architect is better than Ingels at this kind of concise, relaxed storytelling. Others explain and justify their own buildings, but often with high-flown language, or a retreat into metaphor. Although BIG has a ridiculously unusable Web site—here, the firm follows architectural conventions—most of Ingels's public communications, of which there are many, are charming. For a 2010 promotional film, he rode down the bike path running through the heart of his beautiful, double-looped Danish Pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo, to a soundtrack of "I Gotta Feeling," by the Black Eyed Peas. Ingels is wary of compliments about this kind of thing, fearing that they carry, on their flip side, the charge of glib salesmanship. "Our capacity to communicate the ideas is because of the clarity of the ideas," he said. But it may also be true, as Christian Madsbjerg told me, admiringly, that Ingels "could sell anything."
Alejandro Zaero-Polo, the incoming dean of Princeton's architectural faculty—and a former OMA employee who co-founded an acclaimed London firm—recently noted that BIG's level of public engagement was rare in architecture. He recalled the hoopla surrounding Ingels's request to uproot the Little Mermaid, one of Denmark's leading tourist attractions, from its place on a rock in Copenhagen's harbor, and install it, for six months, inside his Shanghai pavilion, in a round pool of imported Copenhagen harbor water where visitors could swim. The hope was to exhibit a part of Denmark itself, rather than the usual Expo fare of "state propaganda in papier-mâché," as Ingels put it at the time. (Ingels succeeded, though the far-right Danish People's Party raised objections in parliament.) "He was playing that game very intelligently," Zaero-Polo, an admirer of BIG's work, said, adding, "When a discipline moves from being a purely technical discipline into being part of public debate, I think that's always good." But he also sees the danger of a building's becoming, in effect, its own public-relations pitch: he mentioned Daniel Libeskind's announcement, in 2002, that his design for a tower at the World Trade Center site would be 1,776 feet high.
One morning, in BIG's Copenhagen office—across the road from the cemetery where Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen are buried—Ingels gave me a tour that had the air of a TED Talk, and included an invitation for me to get beneath a model for a museum, and then stand up with my head inside the structure. Later, I witnessed a discussion of a competition entry to design a municipal office building in Huddinge, Sweden (or, as Ingels later remembered the location, Bumfuck). The site was two hundred and seventy-five feet by two hundred and thirty feet, and the clients were looking for a structure that used most of this space, up to a height of fifteen floors. So the implicit form was a cube—although any structure as deep as that would need to be somehow opened up to light, or divided into separate buildings. A couple of Ingels's colleagues had made preliminary sketches, in the form of a dozen small foam models: an array of BIG prototypes, including a twisting shape and an echo of W57. (BIG makes extensive use of automated foam cutters.) "They want it to be a landmark?" Ingels asked. "In all competitions they say that, but the question is: to what extent do they mean it?" He placed the foam buildings, one by one, onto a model of the site.
Ingels has made seven colleagues his partners; they now own about a quarter of the company. Each BIG project is led by a partner or another senior architect, and when Ingels and his colleagues are separated they communicate using PDFs of designs, with comments overlaid with cartoon-speech bubbles. "I can't afford to lose myself in a single project," Ingels later said, and he has almost enough charisma to pull off the suggestion that his co-workers are, to some extent, glorified pencils: "When I started in architecture, I was drawing with crayon on special paper. Then we moved to computers. And then you graduate to work with people." When I asked Ingels and others to describe who did what on any BIG project, the replies were evasive and smiling, but the answer seems to be that, although Ingels has often had the driving idea for a building, his role resembles Zaero-Polo's description of Koolhaas: "He was almost our editor. He gathers a number of people, lets them run, and then he picks up whatever he finds interesting. As opposed to the architect who's the originator, like Frank Lloyd Wright—who's super-talented and does a sketch and the team turns the sketch into a piece of architecture." (Ingels seems to lead with good humor, if not with abundant salaries; by all accounts, he has avoided replicating the tense atmosphere he found at OMA.)
Handling the models, Ingels suggested refinements while asking his colleagues about neighborhood density and demographics. In one of the designs, a quartet of squat towers was arranged in a tight cluster: four foam blocks had been glued to the same base. With two hands, Ingels squeezed the tops of the towers together; this would create some expansive office space, link the towers, and allow more light to reach the surrounding streets. Peering at the ground-floor intersection where the paths between the four blocks crossed, he wondered if the paths could be arranged like the spokes on a pinwheel, creating a courtyard at the hub.
This is when the work looks like the videos: when a building's design, and a building's later life as a design story, seem aligned. But the process can appear less delicate. I sat with Ingels and Andreas Klok, one of BIG's partners, as they considered a commissioned proposal for Europa City, a five-billion-dollar development on Paris's northern outskirts. BIG had envisaged a disk of shops and offices more than half a mile across, with an undulating, grass-covered roof divided into five areas by paths that cut through the disk. The conversation was supposed to generate preliminary answers to the question: What to do on the roof?
Ingels was playing with a retractable pen: click-click. "It could be nice to have five destinations—what could they be? Mini-golf?"
"You could almost have real golf," Klok said.
Ingels, thinking of injuries, laughed: "Real golf combined with tons of pedestrians . . . "
There was a pause, perhaps containing discomfort. BIG's least seductive ideas seem to result from unconstrained circumstances—from the awkward gift of a blank canvas. In a recent, failed competition entry, BIG designed a pier for a city in Florida; it ended in a hundred-and-thirty-foot-high loop that had a garish, theme-park connection to the idea of a breaking wave. Ingels is adept at solving architectural problems, but the only problem in Europa City was emptiness. An intern who had at this moment said "safari park" might have affected the future lives of many people and animals.
Ingels suggested installing swimming pools that could draw heat from the building below. This embodied an idea that has become a BIG catchphrase: "hedonistic sustainability," or eco-awareness divorced from thoughts of privation. And then: "Should there even be a go-cart track?" He imitated the buzzing whine of a track heard from afar.
"You could have some vineyards," Klok said.
"What urban farming would make sense?"
"Tomatoes, maybe."
"What about a spice garden?" Ingels, hearing himself, laughed.
One afternoon, Ingels drove me out to Ørestad. It was cold, and the sun was beginning to set. After central Copenhagen, the view—stray buildings dotting a windy, flat landscape—was dispiriting. "From here to the horizon, it was supposed to be dense city," Ingels explained. After the 2008 financial crisis, he said, "most of the people who bought sites went bust."
Few well-known architects since Le Corbusier have made their names with inexpensive housing. Cultural or corporate monuments more easily allow for extravagances in materials and form. But Ingels seized the challenge posed by Per Høpfner: "Make it interesting, make it attractive, and make it dirt cheap." Ingels and De Smedt designed two parallel, glass-curtained apartment blocks: to open up views, one block formed a shallow V, and the other an M, as seen from above; the V had spiky triangular balconies that, perhaps, tried too hard to be characterful. Finished in 2004, the VM Houses were the first apartments available in Ørestad. Conceived as homes for nurses and police officers, they sold as designer apartments, triggering a local boom.
The Mountain, next door—a more engaging building, where much of "Denmark's Next Top Model" was shot in 2010—was part of the boom; some of the apartments originally sold for a million dollars, although last winter they cost not much more than half that. Høpfner, this time with a more generous budget, asked PLOT to combine a neighborhood parking garage and an apartment complex. Ingels's solution—a variation on his thesis project—was a terraced outer layer of light-filled apartments, each with a deep wooden deck. The illusion, in every unit, was that you were perched on the building's highest floor. Hidden beneath the apartments was a mountain full of cars. To reach the housing, you passed through the interior garage in a glass-walled elevator that rose at a funicular thirty-degree angle. This allowed you to admire an airy space decorated with murals of an elk and a wolf. Ingels is pleased to have expanded the notion of what a parking garage can look like, although when I later returned to the building there were unruly boys shrieking and setting off firecrackers, out of respect for an earlier parking-garage paradigm.
At the end of 2005, two years before the Mountain was finished, Ingels and De Smedt dissolved PLOT. By then, their portfolio had grown to include other Danish projects, among them a boathouse that had solved the problem of toxic land by sealing it beneath a warped wooden deck. But the partners "just didn't hit it off anymore," Christian Madsbjerg, the BIG board member, said. (Ingels and De Smedt both rejected this description and said that they are still friends.) When, in 2006, Ingels formed a new company, he considered naming it Play. But he chose BIG, feeling that it captured his desire to "work on big ideas—on big-picture thinking." Madsbjerg said, "Bjarke was criticized at that point for wanting to make things so large, and we thought, Why not BIG? Why not say so? It's quirky because it's so self-obsessed."
Ingels drove us to the southern end of the Ørestad strip. Here, the 8 House, the third of Ingels's projects for Per Høpfner, looks out over a nature preserve of tall grass. Being very large and—for the moment—rather alone, the 8 House feels more like a colony, a housing contraption, than like an apartment building. As Ingels acknowledges, "It's simply too vast, too spread out, to be a charming object." But it's still a pleasure to see. From above, the building is an elongated, spiky figure eight, which creates two inner courtyards, north and south. At ground level is commercial space; on top of that is a layer of two-story "town houses," as Ingels described them, and then a higher layer of apartments, and then another layer of town houses. Within each layer, the units are staggered on a gentle rise. A wide outdoor path follows that rise, and spirals up and around the building, sometimes on the building's exterior, overlooking the landscape, and sometimes—after tunnelling through the building's perimeter—on the inside, overlooking the courtyards. The town houses have little front yards opening onto this path, which eventually takes you, on foot or by bike, to the tenth-floor summit.
The building, which was named the best housing complex at the 2011 World Architecture Festival, feels exuberant, and takes the risk of looking improvised, even impermanent. Like the Mountain, it is not an exotic shape into which apartments have been jammed; it's quite legibly a stack of salable housing units. Jens Thomas Arfred, one of Ingels's former professors, wrote a delighted account of the 8 House as it neared completion, calling it a daring orchestral work "free of any harmonics," and a "great urban organism" that "becomes one with the surreal, magnificent views over the meadows."
Some contemporary architects are like tailors working on the perfect modern version of a bespoke suit; Ingels hopes to invent fabrics that launder themselves. Kent Martinussen, the director of the Danish Architecture Center, who knows Ingels well and admires his work, told me that he agreed, to a point, with those who criticize certain BIG designs for being "uncontrolled, untamed, imprecise." The 8 House, he said, came close to having "too little composition." He said that works by Zaha Hadid and by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron gave a better sense of "things fitting together—everything is done in the same spirit." With Ingels's work, he said, "you see that it's really teamwork. Someone did the pavings, and got an idea." But the 8 House was filled with fresh concepts, and was done cheaply. For Ingels, Martinussen said, "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."
"There is something very human about the strange structure," Palle Jensen, a sixty-eight-year-old engineer who lives in the 8 House, recently told me, in an e-mail. "There are so many strange angles in the building—the same as can be said about any human being." Before moving in, he had been skeptical about modern architecture. But, he said, he and his neighbors "cannot help loving this place, despite its problems (doors not closing, too many visitors, very windy, etc.)." Residents, he said, enthusiastically used the building's intranet, and its sunny communal rooms, for various clubs, including a photo group, a running group, and a "meat group." He said, "I plan to live here until I die."
When I walked with Ingels up the path, which is tiled in black and white, we glanced into windows to see young people preparing dinner. It was a little like walking up the street of a hilltop village. "You get this total medieval strangeness that you don't normally find in a modern housing neighborhood," he said. In the darker, northern courtyard, we dropped down to the commercial level and visited Per Høpfner, who has his office there. He greeted Ingels warmly, offered brandy, and said to me, in imperfect English, "Most of the older architects don't care a shit with the owner. It's: 'We know best.' " Ingels was always willing to listen, he said, adding, "It's the first time we're working with such a young architect company, no experience at all. But sometimes—" He then used a Danish phrase, which Ingels translated: "Where nothing is, everything is possible."
After leaving the office, Ingels and I became a little lost in a stairwell. (He is not an architect of obsessively realized—or recalled—interior spaces.) Retracing our steps, we found our way outside and walked a few paces north of the building, then climbed onto a square concrete plinth, thirty-three feet by fifty-two feet. BIG's original plan called for a skinny, fifteen-floor tower on this spot, which would have twisted to offer views to the south. The tower was abandoned after the 2008 crash. But, Ingels explained, "I liked the idea of putting in a space-holder. The city's full of the ghosts of stuff that didn't happen. It's the ruin of an unbuilt building."
Late one evening, Ingels walked out of a fashionable Copenhagen bar called the Log Lady, where the model Helena Christensen was among those drinking. On the sidewalk, he spoke passionately, and only a little drunkenly, about a beloved scene in "Adaptation," the Spike Jonze film written by Charlie Kaufman. Ingels's relationship with the architectural avant-garde is suggested by his taste in movies: his heroes are Kaufman, David Lynch, and Christopher Nolan, whose formal experiments secure Oscar nominations and large audiences. Ingels's rhapsody was loosely connected to a conversation he'd just had with a former girlfriend. (There are a number of these, and someone I met joked that Ingels had moved to New York because he'd exhausted his romantic opportunities in Copenhagen.) In "Adaptation," Ingels noted, there's a key exchange between the characters named Donald and Charlie Kaufman, both played by Nicolas Cage. Donald reveals that, in high school, he always knew that the girl he admired mocked him behind his back. "But she thought you were pathetic," Charlie says. Donald replies, "That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you."
"It can't be said any better!" Ingels exclaimed. "It's a question of what you want and not what everybody else wants. Love is about giving, not about taking! He didn't give a shit, because he loved the girl! You shouldn't aspire for appreciation—you should aspire to do what you want to put out in the world."
Ingels, who perhaps cares more for appreciation than he was here suggesting, said of the Charlie character, "Any intellectual that ever creates is Charlie Kaufman. The masturbation, the procrastination, the self-loathing—that's me. Then there's his twin, who's stupid and lame and blatant and straightforward, and you think he's an idiot all through the movie. But, in the end, he reveals that he actually has an insight that is much more powerful than his brother has."
A car drove by, and a drunk young man leaned out of the window to shout, in Danish, "Merry Christmas, cocksuckers!"
We were in the city center, where there are no structures built by Ingels, except for a sleek wooden swimming deck by the harbor, which PLOT completed in 2003. He is famous in Denmark—to the extent that a senior politician told me that Ingels was "very sexy"—and some grumble that he is overexposed in the media. But he is also a little underused. Kent Martinussen recalled Ingels asking him, not long ago, "How do I get Danish commissions?" Martinussen has detected a national tendency to "distribute the luck"—along with almonds—so that once Ingels found early success in Ørestad he was thought to have all that he was owed. Martinussen observed that Jørn Utzon, the Dane who designed the Sydney Opera House, barely had a career at home after winning that competition.
Martinussen may be right: in 2006, BIG won significant public support, but not final political approval, for what would have been a (possibly monstrous) two-mile loop of middle-income housing around the edges of a Copenhagen park. But the great brake on Ingels's local career was the 2008 crash. In the capital, BIG lost commissions for a city-center tower with a flared base and for a development nicknamed the Lego Towers—hills and valleys built out of modular blocks. (A giant model of this, made of Legos, stands in the Copenhagen office.) In all, BIG lost five major commissions. To give a sense of the financial cost: an architect typically asks for between five and twenty per cent of a building's budget, and the Lego Towers budget was four hundred million dollars.
Ingels looked for new opportunities. BIG had been taking assignments from developers more than it had been entering competitions, a process that can be expensive and time-consuming. But now he had spare capacity, because, even though he laid off many people, Danish law required him to keep them on paid notice for several months. "So we ended up shooting at some competitions we might have not done," Ingels recalled. "We did one for the city hall in Tallinn, and we ended up winning. And we won the national library in Kazakhstan. We would never have done that." He paused. "But that's a tragic story."
BIG's entry for the library was a fat, tilted Möbius loop, like a car tire that's spinning on its rim and about to come to rest. The firm won the competition in early 2009—its first major victory against leading, Pritzker-winning international architects, including Zaha Hadid and Foster + Partners. Ingels began travelling to Astana, Kazakhstan's new capital, and that summer he gave a presentation to President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who did a double take when told that Ingels was the architect in charge. "He's looking at me as if I'm a child," Ingels recalled, describing it as the final "endearing moment of the whole process."
The building was largely paid for by Kazakhmys, a copper-mining company closely connected to the Kazakh government. Ingels referred to the company as his client, although a Kazakhmys representative in London demurred, telling me, "It was a one-off philanthropic donation." According to Ingels, who has not spoken publicly about this episode before, the people with whom he worked in Astana demanded haste, tried to delay the signing of a realistic contract, and showed no interest in the library's interior arrangement. "It's bizarre to be in a situation where the architect is the only one who cares about the building," he said. While he was in Kazakhstan, he was asked to pay bribes, which he didn't pay, and he declined the services of self-identified "consultants." Apparently, BIG was "clogging the pipes of cash flow," and Ingels guesses that this contributed to the acrimonious working conditions experienced by BIG architects in Astana. Ingels advises architectural firms working in Kazakhstan to appoint, as a project leader, a man who weighs three hundred pounds "and has enormous hands."
"We really wanted to do this building," Ingels said. But in October, 2010, with the ellipse-shaped foundations finished, and the library starting to rise above ground level, he began to hear rumors that a rival to BIG's contractor in Astana was angling for the job, and was shopping an alternative design that would build on BIG's foundations. As the atmosphere grew increasingly hostile—at one point, there was a hint of a threat that BIG's team might be framed as drug smugglers—Ingels pulled everyone out and quietly withdrew from the project. (After negotiations, BIG received a payment that, according to Ingels, probably covered his costs.) Not long afterward, Ingels heard that Foster + Partners was constructing a new library on BIG's foundations. But Foster + Partners did not announce its involvement, though the firm's Web site has renderings of forty current projects. When pressed on the matter for this article, Foster + Partners issued a statement that finally acknowledged the library: "The building is called The Foundation and Library of the First President of the Republic of Kazakhstan. It is on site and due for completion in July next summer in time for the President's birthday. This is our third built project for the President in Astana and continues a successful working relationship with the President."
Ingels's drama in Kazakhstan leaves open the thought that it was ill-judged to accept the commission, in a country whose President, at his last election, won 95.5 per cent of the vote. Ingels recalled asking himself, when considering the job, if Astana was "going to be better off with or without our involvement." He was not designing a prison, after all, but "a goddam national library." That argument looks a little weak; and, when the rhetoric of "Yes Is More" is set alongside projects like Astana, or a proposed island-resort complex in Azerbaijan, it can seem, to some, that BIG is servile before power. In Denmark, Ingels's pragmatic, capitalistic, center-left spirit can look almost right-wing. Kent Martinussen remembered a Danish academic calling Ingels a "fascistic service-agent of capitalism" at a public meeting a few years ago. (Ingels and the professor both told me that this characterization wasn't as bad as it sounds.)
In "Yes Is More," which appeared in 2009, Ingels writes, "What if design could be the opposite of politics? Not by ignoring conflict, but by feeding from it. A way to incorporate and integrate differences, not through compromises or by choosing sides, but by tying conflicting interests into a Gordian knot of new ideas." Ingels warned me that the book should not be mistaken for "a manifesto for promiscuity, or selling out," adding, "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." He went on, "The difference between being a pragmatic utopian"—a phrase from his book—"and a utopian is that a utopian is really longing for an ideal state universally implemented, which is why their visions become horror visions: they are the perfectly realized fantasy of a single mind. There are a lot of lost opportunities or overlooked alternatives." A pragmatic utopian, however, can negotiate his way to an architectural novelty—a bike path to a roof, say—and that novelty may have a virtuous influence on future buildings and lives. "In the built world, even the smallest breakthrough is incredible," Ingels said.
Architecture courses tend to be built around semester-long design projects, or "studios," often taught by visiting practitioners. Yale has an endowment for a studio run jointly by an architect and a developer, and, one morning in January, Ingels and Douglas Durst, the chairman of the Durst Organization, met at Penn Station to take a train to New Haven for their first class. Durst is a reserved man in his sixties, but he seemed to be in a mood of happy truancy; he was dressed in a green beret and a silky bomber jacket. On the phone with his wife, he laughed and quietly promised to "kick some butt."
The previous evening, Ingels had returned from a trip to Mexico with his then girlfriend, a landscape architect; he was feeling a little bad that he had allowed the vacation to drift into business affairs, including a ride on a private jet. On the train, he began assembling a slide presentation that would pitch the Durst-Ingels studio to Yale students, who that day would choose among this and studios taught by Frank Gehry, Greg Lynn, and several others. One of Ingels's slides showed the Ponte Vecchio, in Florence: his students would be asked to incorporate real estate into new bridges. Half of them would design a new crossing where the Tappan Zee now stands; the other half would create a crossing, perhaps for pedestrians only, spanning the East River at Forty-second Street. (Ingels told me that Amanda Burden, the New York City planning commissioner, had encouraged him, in a recent conversation, to consider this location.) Studios often result in radical, fanciful designs, but Durst would take the role of sober pragmatist, urging students to be mindful of city permits and elevator banks.
Durst and Ingels met a few years ago, at a conference about green high-rises, and then again in 2009, when Ingels was still living in Copenhagen but teaching a studio at Columbia. The following spring, Durst was in Copenhagen with his Danish-born wife, and visited the BIG office. Ingels told me that he had not imagined ever working with Durst. "It was kind of funny to hang out with this big-ass New York developer," Ingels said. But then Durst e-mailed him; as Ingels remembered it, the message read, "I have a small project that you can take a look at."
On the New Haven train, Durst explained to me that, in 2000, he had signed a long lease on the W57 block. One attempt to build residences at the site was scuppered by the financial crash. By 2010, he was ready to re-start, and after visiting Denmark he could see that "one of Bjarke's many talents is designing things that can get built." He looked over to Ingels. "Do you see his head growing?" He went on, "Bjarke designs buildings for each site. You might be able to guess a building was designed by him"—he then addressed Ingels, who lifted his head from his laptop—"but I don't think you'd say you have a style."
"We try to pride ourselves on not having a preconceived recipe," Ingels said. Of course, his buildings are recognizably of the moment, and he is happy to use elements that his contemporaries also use—green roofs, say—but his hope is that the whole takes a step toward innovation.
Durst invited Ingels to bring ideas about W57 to a meeting, in April, 2010. A BIG team presented a few ideas; one was a perimeter block with the appearance of having been assembled out of adjoining but separate buildings—a Hollywood mockup of midtown. But Durst and his partners preferred another scheme: two peaks, one in the east and one in the west, rising above a courtyard. The western peak, by the highway, would be the dominant one, placing as many apartments as possible close to the Hudson.
BIG began developing this proposal. Three months later, Durst called. "I just couldn't live with it," he told me. "It bothered me. There were two towers, two separate cores, two entrances." Unlike in Copenhagen, New York residents would expect those entrances to be manned. "But the major thought was: why put all these apartments on top of a highway?" The design also had what Durst called, with a laugh, "a huge cantilever"; at the southwest entrance, it would have looked as if someone had lifted up the corner of the building. (It's exciting and expensive to create such overhangs, and "that's why architects love them," Ingels joked.)
"Many architects would say, 'No, this is the design, we're not changing it,' " Durst said. "But Bjarke jumped in and came up with a fantastic building." Two peaks became one; the apartments were pushed away from the traffic. There would be just one entrance, at the eastern end.
"It felt like we were starting from scratch," Ingels recalled. "But somehow, miraculously, we could save everything."
We reached New Haven. Ingels and the other architects took turns pitching their studios to the assembled students, and then the students, out of the view of the architects, declared their preferences. Gehry won the most votes; Lynn was second, Ingels third. When I spoke to Gehry, he affably declined to comment about Ingels, saying that he hadn't met him until that day. Ingels, for his part, described Gehry's work as "a sort of genius architecture," adding, "He's achieved amazing things, but I don't know in what way you can learn from it." (That is, Gehry's style is too personal.) Later that day, the Yale students met their new professors, and Ingels told his class that there was a clear opportunity, with a well-executed project, to influence New York City policy. "The dream scenario," he said, would be if Durst were persuaded to build the midtown bridge himself: "Given that he owns half of Forty-second Street, it would be nice to expand his territory."
A few weeks ago, Ingels was walking through Tribeca at dusk, pushing a Puma-branded bike, with chopper handlebars, that was conceived by Kibisi—a product-design company that he created, with partners, in 2009. He was on his way to meet a friend at the Odeon, while talking about "Game of Thrones" and about the "moment of reflection and possibility" that he sensed in American culture in the years after the financial crash. He seemed at home. "He's American," Christian Madsbjerg had said, matter-of-factly. "He's not Danish."
Even before opening BIG's New York office, Ingels had planned to spend a few months in the city to write a novel, a conspiracy thriller based on the fact that several illustrious modern architects had un-peaceful deaths: Le Corbusier (drowning), Antoni Gaudí (trolley-car accident), Louis Kahn (heart attack in a Penn Station men's room). He didn't write the book, but still intends to—perhaps, he said, with a protagonist named Bjarke Ingels, and with a final violent struggle on the sloping exterior of W57. Discussing the novel, Ingels referred to "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," the 2002 film, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by George Clooney, which imagines Chuck Barris's double life as a game-show host and a government assassin. Ingels may call his novel "The Big Plot."
The pace of work at BIG continues to accelerate. "Did you get our spam?" Ingels likes to ask. He means: did you receive the e-mailed press release announcing, say, the resort hotel in Norway (which will be the first to realize the ski-slope-roof concept) or the double tower in Seoul (which resembles a hash sign)? This spring, such announcements streamed out of the office. And, each time I spoke with Ingels, he mentioned developments that weren't yet public. He was being considered to renovate a beloved American museum; he had begun an architectural collaboration with a leading Hollywood production designer.
Other architects—Frank Lloyd Wright and Eero Saarinen—have had international success while still young. Richard Rogers (who told me that Ingels was a "very good, extremely interesting" architect) was thirty-seven when he won the competition for the Pompidou Center, in Paris. But, at that age, those architects had nothing like Ingels's portfolio, or scale of operation: more than a hundred employees, working on everything from skyscrapers to salad servers.
I recently talked to Philip Ryan, a thirty-seven-year-old senior associate at the New York firm of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, which creates meticulous designs for cultural institutions and nonprofits; the partnership built the new Barnes Foundation museum, in Philadelphia. The firm has never had a client like Durst or Høpfner. Ryan likes and admires Ingels, but talked about him the way a concert violinist might, with sincerity, praise a pop star. At one point, he said, "Whether he can be compared to Herzog and de Meuron or Zaha Hadid is almost irrelevant. He needs to be compared to Apple." He added, "People outside architecture—my friends in digital design, people who are used to working in shorter cycles—I think they view him more as a comrade."
Kyle May is a New York architect and the editor of CLOG, the magazine that devoted an issue to skeptical takes on BIG. "Bjarke literally builds his diagrams," he said. That is to say, Ingels offers little beyond the primary gesture: the twist, the slope. If you've seen the video accompanying the initial pitch, May argued, "you know the building." When he visited the 8 House, he looked in vain for the "moments of discovery" that he is used to finding in masterworks. "Look at what he's building these things out of: window wall, the same thing that condos in Williamsburg are made of." He went on, "I mean, he's been mentioned for the Pritzker!"
According to Christian Madsbjerg, the BIG board member, Ingels is among those who have wondered if he might win the Pritzker, which has never been won by an architect under forty, and won only twice by architects under fifty. "He thinks it's kind of time he got it," Madsbjerg said, teasingly paraphrasing his friend's alleged reaction to the annual announcement: "This jerk got it? Why not me?" Madsbjerg takes a firmly un-adoring view of Ingels, calling many BIG projects "flamboyant and Disney-like." He reserves his praise for a few buildings—including BIG's recent winning proposal for a scientific-research center for the Sorbonne, in Paris, which has the grand, cantilevered entrance denied W57—and for Ingels's broader thinking about how people might interact with cities: "Swim in the harbor, ski on the power plant—Bjarke likes to figure out how you could push cities to be different." Madsbjerg, who warned that Ingels could "burn out," offered this advice: "Turn introverted now. Make sure the buildings are good buildings. Get W57 and Paris to be pristine and beautiful. If they fail, people will dismiss you, saying, 'We gave you a shot.' " He added, "Stop the marketing campaign for a while."
In January, a few weeks after BIG and four other firms had submitted designs for the proposed expansion of the Kimball Art Center—a single-story former automobile-repair garage—there was a day of presentations to a jury, in Park City. The previous evening, at the Kimball, Ingels attended a public exhibition of the designs. The client had asked for a landmark that would preserve the existing building while adding a new element on an abutting plot. Ingels had seen the challenge as: "Can you do something new in Park City without being alien?" Brooks + Scarpa Architects had proposed a glowing-white crumpled tower; Tod Williams and Billie Tsien had suggested placing a second story, encased in panels of hammered copper, atop the garage. Ingels declared, "In my own humble opinion, we were the ones who managed to discover, or uncover, something that could be uniquely Park City. I think the other ones have done great contemporary architecture."
The architects made presentations to the jury before an audience of more than a hundred people. In a morning session, Williams and Tsien, alongside Philip Ryan, made the kind of delightfully self-effacing presentation that an esteemed firm can afford to make. They not only treated their entry as imperfect and provisional—its "weaker part," Williams volunteered, was at the street level—but imagined that the finished building, too, might be a kind of work in progress. Although their initial design was low-rise and handsomely sober (not to mention expensive), Williams noted that "it could be added to by a more flamboyant piece in the future." The process of creative exploration, in other words, had just begun. His final comment was "I don't have answers—I'm just saying we're willing to work on it."
BIG used a different model of courtship: the difference between a downward glance and, say, Anthony Weiner. Ingels, in a black suit and a white shirt, launched himself at the jury with funny, calibrated messages about his respect for the town and its history, illustrated with two hundred and forty images, starting with shots of BIG employees snow-tubing—"testing some recent technology in movement," he said, dryly. He linked the town's mining past to the Kimball's occupation of a garage, setting up a theme of repurposed infrastructure. Park City was a place where "the plumes of the smokestacks became the plumes of the snow cannons."
One photograph showed both the old Kimball Garage and, a few blocks behind it, an eighty-foot wooden tower, a former mining building, that was the town's tallest structure until it burned down, in the nineteen-eighties. With that conjunction now in his audience's mind, Ingels started showing photographs of various blue foam shapes. BIG's search for the right form had "turned into this odyssey," Ingels said, as the slides sped up—a spike, a stack, a blob—then sped up further, to laughter from the audience, until the effect was of cartoon characters in the dusty blur of a fistfight. We saw a hundred models in about twenty seconds.
Robin Marrouche, the Kimball's director, later told me, "They tried it every which way on that space. That was really impressive. They'd thought this through." But there was some showmanship here; the BIG office did make those models, and doubtless considered every option, but Ingels later acknowledged that the process was unusually quick, telling me, "We basically hit this one after a week."
And now he showed the proposed building: a twisted log cabin, eighty feet high, with the existing building largely untouched. Architects like Zaha Hadid and Greg Lynn are defined by elaborate curves made manageable by modern software; Ingels calls this "blobby, ultra-complex stuff." BIG has an appetite for curves, where conditions encourage it, but also a desire, shared by OMA, to think of a building as a stack of architectural spaces that visually explains itself to its users. BIG's Kimball scheme showed both instincts, and included a hint of the Seattle Public Library. Three simple boxes, for art galleries and staff offices, were contained in a larger, torqued box made of reclaimed railroad timber that, Ingels explained, was available to be drawn, pickled, from the bed of the Great Salt Lake. The space between the gallery boxes and the log-cabin wall—space that, at first glance, looked a little awkward and uncomfortable—would be used for staircases and a café, while the outer structure's forty-five-degree twist allowed the top floor to face the street from which many people would approach the building. A woman sitting behind me said of the ribbed, brown, neck-craning structure, "It looks like E.T."
Ingels presented beautiful renderings of the building in the day and at night, in the dry and the wet, and, to a collective swoon, he showed a mockup box of toy "Kimball Logs," in the style of Lincoln Logs. When he was done, the jurors asked, Won't twistedness date? No, he said. Could one side of the tower be made to look less monolithic at street level? Yes, he said. And: "Where do I buy some of those logs?"
Afterward, as other firms gave presentations, he sat down in a restaurant with his team, and, sensing victory, said, "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." He allowed himself to imagine the delights of a time-lapse video showing logs being laid during construction. He told me that Leon Rost, the project leader, had expressed worry that the echo of a log cabin might be perceived as an urban snob's understanding of yokel vernacular. But Ingels felt that his Scandinavian heritage gave him a little cover. "And I was convinced that we could do it in a very cool way," he said. "In general, I think, if you're cool, then you don't have to worry if what you do is cool."
He snowboarded the next morning before flying back to New York. "I must say, I think I'm a true extrovert," he said on the plane. The work of persuasion is not a burden, he said. He found it useful: "I speak, therefore I think." He laughed. "If you're a sculptor, you can work with a hammer and chisel on a block of marble until it looks like the woman you're trying to portray. If you're an architect, you can't do anything with your own hands. You need a whole team, you need to involve clients and politicians and city officials. Your capacity to communicate ideas is your hammer and chisel."
A few days later, Ingels learned that he'd won in Park City. "Our first American competition win!" he announced to his staff, and they whooped and raised beer bottles. "It's pretty historical," he said.
The jury had been unanimous. Robin Marrouche, the Kimball's director, acknowledged to me that, last fall, she had considered BIG as "the outsider candidate," and had assumed that the firm's proposal would be "very pop and futuristic." But Ingels, she said, had "honored the past without repeating it."
The next time I was in BIG's office, Ingels had just had a visit from Steven Rockefeller III, a grandson of Nelson Rockefeller. His company, Rose Rock Partners, has asked BIG to design the complex of buildings in Tianjin. Ingels described the project as "a contemporary Chinese interpretation of Rockefeller Center." BIG's plan includes a tapering, terraced skyscraper that would become the second-tallest building in the world; four shorter, blockier towers; and what Ingels described as a "cute little" perimeter building made of eight precarious-looking slabs, "each the size of the Standard Hotel." He played an animation of his proposal, first explaining that he had wanted to use the score of "Inception" but learned that it was too expensive. He loves that film, especially the hero's dream-world marital home: a house with a garden, somewhere in a skyscraper. (As Ingels said, "What architects should do is make the world a little bit more like our dreams, in a very practical way.") To a driving, "Inception"-ish soundtrack, the animation raced up the side of the tower, to show what Ingels called its "cascade of terraces," until we had left behind the four neighboring towers—"One of those is taller than the Empire State Building," Ingels noted. The shot continued, upward, for fifty more floors. ♦


text:
Race in America
They buried more history on Tuesday. Not many of them left now. This is a precious resource, an irreplaceable connection to a proud and triumphant history that is already too often overlooked. What will happen when all the voices are gone? What will people remember about the Negro Leagues' place in the Civil Rights movement?
Mickey Stubblefield died last week. He played two seasons for the Monarchs. Learned his curveball from Satchel Paige. He played for teams across the country. Saw black bodies hanging from nooses on the way to games, where he sometimes heard the worst insults human minds can imagine, and then slept on the bus because a hotel owner wouldn't give him a room. He helped raise 10 children, worked as a janitor at a tire factory, and was the grand marshal in his hometown's parade. It was a good life. He was 87.
Only one known former Monarch is older. Fewer than 100 men who played in the Negro Leagues are known to be alive. The museum here in Kansas City dedicated to telling their stories must shift focus.
"We lose a piece of history every time we lose one of those guys," says Bob Kendrick, Negro Leagues Museum president. "The reality of it is, we're about to lose all these folks."
Mickey Stubblefield stood 5-foot-9 and weighed about 160 pounds, but if you painted his image to scale he looked an awful lot like the legendary Satchel Paige on the mound. That's why they called him "Lil' Satch." Same loose, quirky, athletic delivery. Ball came easily out of his right hand, just like Big Satch.
So he began to answer to Lil' Satch, which was just as well because Mickey wasn't his real name, either. They called him that because he wore hand-me-down spikes a few sizes too big. Made his feet look abnormally big. Mickey Mouse had just come out, so, yeah. Wilker H. T. Stubblefield became Mickey.
These are the kinds of stories Kendrick's museum tries so hard to push. They want to show these ballplayers as human beings. These were men trying to do what all men do — provide for their families — and if telling those stories means knocking some of the legend off, well, at least they get a fuller picture.
Not that they had to knock any legend off Stubblefield's story. He was a good player, not a great one. He was the middle class of the Negro Leagues, good enough to make a career and be drafted by the Pirates after integration.
Baseball became the love of Mickey's life in the Negro Leagues. After his time with the Monarchs was done, he broke the color barrier in a league in Kentucky, Illinois, and Tennessee. They gave him a standing ovation when he debuted there, but his team, the Mayfield Clothiers used him only in home games because of safety concerns. They made one exception, when he pitched in front of the largest crowd in his league's history, against a rival in another Kentucky town, Paducah.
After his playing days were over, Mickey's attention turned to family. He made sure his boys played baseball. He told them that when you shake a man's hand, shake it like you mean it. If you're a good person, life will be good to you. Go to church, he said. You get out of life what you put into it, good or bad.
"I've been living that motto myself," says Dennis Stubblefield, Mickey's youngest son. "He taught me a lot about becoming a man."
Mickey worked a factory job in Kentucky. That name stuck with him, too. People knew him for years and would've been clueless if you asked about Wilker. That name was for Social Security forms, retirement pensions. Wilker became Mickey through baseball, and he stayed Mickey for the rest of his life.
There are dozens more men with stories like Mickey's, but not nearly as many as there used to be. There will be fewer next year, fewer still the year after.
Kendrick thinks about this every day, of course. He has to. Keeping a museum living while the history it's dedicated to is dying isn't easy. They have around 40 recorded oral histories of the Negro Leagues, stories and anecdotes from the men who lived them. The most famous is from Buck O'Neil, on camera telling about the day he hit for the cycle and met the woman he'd be married to for more than 50 years.
"My best day in baseball," he always said.
But it can't go on forever like this. Nobody knows this more than Kendrick. That's why he and the museum are in the beginning stages of shifting their focus forward. They will still celebrate the heroic and historical accomplishments of the Negro Leagues. But they will bring their eyes forward, too.
Last month, the museum announced it would no longer hold the Legacy Awards. For years, the celebration has been the museum's centerpiece event and fundraiser. But it became increasingly difficult to persuade current players to show up — this year, San Diego's Everth Cabrera was the only one — which diminished appeal for fans and donors.
So Kendrick has a plan, like always. They're going to recognize more recent big leaguers, guys who played after integration but who carry the spirit of the Negro Leagues into the majors. No decisions have been made, but guys like Ozzie Smith, Cal Ripken, and Bob Gibson seem like obvious choices.
These former players figure to be more likely to show up at the museum. Plus, the event can be held around Jackie Robinson Day in April. This is a scary transition for the museum, and for everyone who cares about it. But Kendrick figures it's better to be proactive. They have to try something.
Every week, it seems, the museum gets a reminder that the history it's trying to preserve is literally dying off.
"It's not a matter of if, but when," Kendrick says. "The reality is with each passing generation we become less affected by the struggles of others. It's like, 'That was then, and this is now.' But we still need to be reminded of what people went through. This is important. It's American history."

subset: commoncrawl


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Eric Brockmeyer's '62 Rambler
If the name Eric Brockmeyer sounds a little familiar, it should. The 40-year-old from Viera, Florida, has made a good name for himself in the last decade providing automotive illustrations to some of the biggest names in the street rod industry. To name a few, Bobby Alloway, The Roadster Shop, Alan Johnson, Boyd Coddington, Legens, Dominator, and Rutterz Rods have all used Brockmeyer to put pen to paper and conceptualize and design new ways to look at the hot rodding hobby.
But Eric's full-time job drawing and designing was, at first, a hobby that came from building model cars as a kid and worked its way into gainful employment by the time he was 30 after graduating with a bachelor's degree in industrial design from the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale. Designing most every aspect of what a boat could look like for Sea Ray for four years, Eric decided to branch out on his own in 2003 and opened Brockmeyer Design to start working on what he really liked: hot rods.
It was the same year he'd found a little '62 Rambler (offered for sale by its original owner!) on the Internet and it was only a few hours from his home. Eric had seen a white Rambler for sale at a cruise back in the mid-'90s and really liked the "dare to be different" mentality. That car had always stuck in the back of his mind and, when the opportunity came up to join the Rambler fraternity, he jumped.
The car still had its straight-six flathead and three-on-the-tree and, for $1,700, Eric was able to drive it home. The concept was to keep the car a low-buck cruiser—something he could drive to the Goodguys Columbus show (a 1,000-mile one-way trip). He took the car down to Maaco and got an all-white paintjob, tossed on some custom wheels, and drove it that way for a year (picking up a Custom Rodder Top 10 award at the 2004 Goodguys Columbus show along the way).
His car's overly sensitive clutch and general lack of power soon got the better of him, and he began talking with one of his clients he'd done some T-shirt designs for, Matt Link of Link's Rod Shop in Heath, Ohio, about what he could do to better the car.
He dropped the car off with Link in 2004 and they began discussing what the car could look like. Feeling a small-block Chevy would be too common, and since he was already geared to going through the car from top to bottom, Eric asked if a small Hemi could fit under the hood. Matt is a "whatever you want, we'll make it work" kind of guy, so the theme of the car took off after the choice of powerplant was made.
The Rambler, being of unibody construction, made it a bit harder to dial in the suspension both front and rear, but nothing was out of reach for the team at Link's Hot Rods. They started by adapting a front IFS clip with tubular arms from Art Morrison and created new floors, tunnel, firewall, and inner fenders along the way. The stock 100-inch wheelbase was kept, and a narrowed Ford 9-inch posi rear (3.50:1) was added, along with outriggers to attach it to the unibody. Adjustable coilovers are used front and back, as are Wilwood disc brakes. Rollers are big 18×7 and 20×10 Junkyard Dog wheels from Boyd Coddington, which are wrapped in Goodyear Eagle P235/45R18 and P295/40R20 rubber.
The '55 354 Hemi was handed over to Bob Beach of Beach Performance in New Albany, Ohio, to be machined and assembled with a stock rod and crank combo, but Ross Racing pistons and a camshaft from Hot Heads were also used in the buildup. Hot Heads also provided the machined aluminum adapters to run a big-block Chevy water pump while the radiator came from Performance Radiator.
Stock, cast-iron heads were bolted up with a pair of Moon aluminum valve covers, and twin Edelbrock 600 carbs feed the V-8. Link's had to fabricate mounting brackets for the accessories, and they used a billet aluminum adapter from Hot Heads to mate the TH350 transmission (outfitted with a TCI Automotive converter).
The body got the full treatment, too, as it was completely stripped and then media blasted before some modifications were done, such as the left taillight that hinges open to reveal the gas filler and the Shaker-style air cleaner/hood opening lifted from a Dodge Dakota pickup (it's smaller than ones you'd find on a '60s 'cuda).
Custom center emblems for the '64 Plymouth grille and horn button were made and, though the back bumper is stock, the bumper guards were removed both front and rear. The license plate recess on the front bumper was removed, too.
Inside the car the dash was moved 3 inches closer to the driver and a painted ididit column topped with a Grant wooden steering wheel was added. Auto Meter gauges (linked with a Painless Performance wiring system) were set into a custom enclosure fabbed up by Link's Rod Shop, and controls for the air-conditioning system (from Hot Rod Air) are located to the left of the column.
The rest of the interior was built up over a base of Dynamat and black Daytona weave carpet. The bucket seats, from a '66 GTO, were re-foamed by Dan Weber's Custom Interiors, who also created the rear seating from scratch (made a little more difficult due to the wheel tubs). Black leather is used throughout, and other dress-up items include handles and pedals from Billet Specialties and the custom tach housing mounted on the trans tunnel (behind the B&M Ratchet shifter) by Link's Rod Shop.
H&H Auto Body in Coshocton, Ohio, did the bodywork on the car before H&H's Steve Newell sprayed the custom-mixed Sikkens paint (now called Brockmeyer Gold). Eric's brother, David, created vinyl templates to mimic the graphic look of the '60s-era AAR Barracudas, though this version has the word "HEMI" at the end of the charcoal metallic stripe that was then covered with a satin clear finish.
Watching Brockmeyer's Hemi Rambler roll into a parking lot is a unique experience. At first you're caught off guard by its shape—it's not your typical hot rod and your mind searches your memory bank for a moment so you can identify it. Then the color, stance, and big-inch wheels stuffed under the fenders give you the signal this ain't no poser and, once Eric parks and pops the hood, you're smiling and nodding in agreement with the Hemi shoehorned into the engine compartment. We suspect it'll be an experience shared by the thousands of folks who will be seeing this ride around the country in the following year.
Street Rodder will be running a few more photos of this car's construction in the next issue of the magazine, plus you can find more on the car at the streetrodder.com website, along with some of Eric's acclaimed artwork.


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The Lee Westwood Foundation
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Udo Merten eBooks
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System Architecture with XML
Berthold Daum & Udo Merten
Elsevier S&T, June 2002
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Hi profloater,
Now I use "Visitor Messages". Do you think you can paste the paper link in my Profile?
Hi John,
I have only tried minimal experiments so far, but so far peroxide remains undetected. Thanks
Hello profloater,
How did the selective ion electrodes work for you? Were you able to adjust to the conditions that were required?
Established Member
Order of Kilopi


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Warning: Someone you know may show off their naughty photos on this site!
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It's no secret that dating SSBBW is an awesome experience. These ladies are full of love, life, and excitement! Meeting SSBBW singles may be a bit of a challenge when you're new to Mesa because you don't know where to go, but you know where you can go and be guaranteed to find s sexy SSBBW? NaughtyDate is the best place in Mesa where you and SSBBW meet, judgement free. Find out what it's like to meet one of these lovely ladies for yourself!


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Mitsubishi L 200 double cab (1983 to 1996)
also known as - Mitsubishi Strada double cab
- We stock roof bars and roof bar components from CRUZ, Atera, Thule, and Whispbar.
- You'll be offered a choice of steel bars or aluminium bars.
- Roof bars are always supplied in pairs.
- Please be sure to choose bars that will suit your vehicle roof type; for example, "for cars with raised roof rails"
AutoSock are the original car snow socks; they're much the best for quality, performace and wear rate. Pull a pair of AutoSock over your driving wheels if you get stuck on snow, or e.g. want to be sure about driving safely down a snowy hill, and you'll be amazed at just how well they work! There's a free delivery option.
We're also listing AutoSock's SnowGecko snow socks, with prices as low as £24.95, depending on availability for your tyre size. Compared to RRP it's a 2 for 1 offer, but only while stocks last!
We stock chains from König, Maggi, Polaire, RUD, Spikes-Spider and Thule to keep you moving on snow or across rough country. There's a free delivery option.
We'll also show you the amazing AutoSock vehicle snow socks, if available for your tyre size.
This season we're clearing out our Thule-branded stock at massive discounts - first come, first served!


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Get your home looking spring-ready with these top trends.
Spring is finally upon us, and with it, brighter mornings, blossoming branches, the ever-faithful daffodils and an undeniable desire to spring clean and redecorate. We're emerging from a long, grey winter and, quite frankly, we are in need of some colour. So, farewell hygge, we're all about light and airy spaces for the new season.
Green is back in all its glory – that is until it's warm enough for us to spend all day outdoors, obviously – and no, we don't just mean the fiddle leaf fig kind. We mean Greenery, Pantone's 'fresh, zesty yellow-green' colour of the year. Think freshly mown lawn (is there a more spring-like smell?), dimpled lime peel kissing the edge of your Margarita glass, lush palm leaves and crisply bitter green apples. Rejuvenating, bright, refreshing and new. If an eye-catching statement wall or a crushed velvet sofa is a bit too 'jungalow' for you, try different tones of green, like adding emerald linen napkins to your dinner table or pairing palm print scatter cushions with crisp white bed linen. And, of course, the humble houseplant is back in the spotlight so don't forget to give them some TLC with a regular watering and a spot in the sun.
Well-curated textures are the key to sending an almost-there-room to the glossy pages of your favourite magazine. Tactile pieces turn a room from something beautiful to behold into something enticing to experience, adding curiosity, interest and the undeniable, irresistible urge to reach out and touch everything. Swap out your traditional dining chairs for acrylic ones, and add cushions in bright, contrasting prints. Collect magazines in roughly hewn grass baskets or create a focal point in your bedroom with abaca side tables. Combined with statement lighting, contrasting texture will add that bespoke 'collectors' feel, while upholstered headboards are a quick and classy way to up the opulence-factor in the bedroom.
Geometric lighting
If we're honest, we've seen one too many Edison bulbs hanging from bistro ceilings and the windows of our local coffee shops. Welcome to the classier, more artistic option: geometric lighting. From warm metals like brass and copper to structured chandeliers, spring sees lighting take on a sharper, more sophisticated look. Gone are the days of hiding your light bulb under a floral-print, frilly-bonnet shade. These days we're all about strong lines, cage-like creations and hexagonal shapes. If you're looking for an excuse to hang a geometric-inspired conversation-starter chandelier in your entrance hall, look no further. Statement lighting fixtures, just like first impressions, are everything.
Upholstered headboards
You just have to spend a few minutes flipping through design magazines or perusing interior websites to know that this trend is on the up. Chic fabrics, iconic prints and unusual shapes are all big players in the bedroom this season. Choose a statement colour (we'd recommend green, obviously), pair it with an eclectic mix of linen in different textures – think roughly woven throws – and plush cushions and you've effortlessly combined three trends into one (so smug). Bedrooms are the centre of rest and relaxation and a luxuriously puckered headboard, or a simple wingback will add an undeniable old-world charm.


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Fruit Ninja Developer Halfbrick Announces Free Downloads Of Entire Game Catalog
Looking for a quick and inexpensive gift for your favorite iOS gamer? Look no further than the uber-popular Fruit Ninja game by developer Halfbrick. Starting now until 1:00 am EST Tuesday, December 18th, iOS users can slice holiday fruits and veggies (if there is such a thing) for free.
To sweeten the deal, Halfbrick will offer all its titles, including notable titles like Monster Dash and Age of Zombies for free during the same time period - This includes iPad HD versions. "...Over the past three years we've given everything we have to make our games the best, and were rewarded a million times over with love and support from our fans. Now it's time to give something back..." said Halfbrick's Chief Marketing Officer Phil Larsen.
'Tis the season to get a great deal on solid iOS games.
Links: Fruit Ninja | Fruit Ninja HD
For more from Terrance Gaines, follow him on Twitter @BrothaTech


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Yev necesitaba un nuevo diseño de logotipo y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 114 diseños de 41 diseñadores freelance.
My professional background is in providing custom software development and technology services for the media and financial industries, but not limited to those specific industries. I have been focusing on providing efficient software development thru all aspect of the software cycle. I try to educate my customers thru the software cycle as I feel it is important to understand what roadblocks maybe encountered from inception thru delivery. Many newbies to the software industry do not understand the intricacies of software development.
In addition to custom development I provide software development audit services. During the early software development cycles it is important to put yourself on the right track, whether you are a start-up, big or small company. Audit services cover all aspects of the cycle. Early audit can discover inefficiencies and wrong turns start-ups and small to medium business take but don't pay attention to.
I have been an independent contractor for a few years and at this stage trying to project a unique, focused, and professional image. I would like to user the logo as part of my future website and stationary as well.
Target audience is start-ups, small, and medium sized businesses.
I am looking for a unique, professional, non-copycat image. It took me a long time to come up with the edafeks name. The "edafeks" is a pronunciation of the idea of "idee fixe" related to the following "The related idea of the idée fixe was coined by Hector Berlioz in reference to his Symphonie Fantastique, a purely instrumental work that has a recurring melody representing the love of the central characters". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitmotif)
Any kind of professional work is successful when the same process is applied to new ideas over and over. Small adjustments are made as you move forward but overall success lies in efficiently working through a project/idea over and over.
Another aspect that's important is keeping your customers as a focus point, because their ideas should be embraced and listened to, to be successful and meeting their requirements.
Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.


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Chemist address: 560 Holburn Street Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, AB10 7LJ
Chemist address: 2 Abbotswell Cresent Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, AB12 5AR
Chemist address: Garthdee Road Bridge of Dee, Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, AB10 7QA
Chemist address: 9 Millburn Street Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, AB11 6SS
Chemist address: 156 Union Grove Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, AB10 6SR
Chemist address: 34 Holburn Street Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, AB10 6BT
Chemist address: 3 Alford Place Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, AB10 1YD
Chemist address: 391 Union Street Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, AB11 6BX
Chemist address: 475 Great Western Road Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, AB10 6NN
It's a sad fact of life that most of us will need to rely on the emergency services from time to time.
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So, with that in mind, here's the location of your nearest emergency services to AB10 1BU. Hopefully you won't be needing them any time soon.
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