If you want to know what moves Bjarke Ingels, consider where he lives: In 2016, the renowned Danish architect purchased a retired ferryboat and transformed it into a chic floating home. What previously was an open driveway for cars is now a spacious living room with sliding window walls and an outdoor terrace. Where once stood chimney stacks and a navigation bridge is now a glass-enclosed primary bedroom. And below deck, the hull is now a whimsical playroom for his son, Darwin.
“I’ve taken a piece of decommissioned port infrastructure and converted it into infrastructure for my family life,” boasts Ingels, whose home in Copenhagen’s historic harbor embodies the climate-resilient designs he champions as founder and creative director of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), his eponymous architecture firm.
The “SS Ingels” overlooks yet another prime example: CopenHill, a BIG-designed skiing slope-cum-hiking trail that occupies the pitched roof of a low-pollutant waste-to-energy power plant. At once fun and functional, it exemplifies Ingels’s self-described “hedonistic sustainability” point of view. “Hedonism is about hot showers while sustainability is about cold showers,” he says. “But somehow, when you integrate the two, you have a building or city that’s more environmentally friendly and therefore more enjoyable to live in.”
“Utopian pragmatism” is another term Ingels uses to describe his work. “A utopia is a place so perfect that it can only exist in your imagination while pragmatism deals with the reality of the everyday,” he says. “Every time architects get called upon to imagine a space or place, we try to make that little corner of the world exactly like our dream world.”
In his dream world, the environment is protected and the people living in it are happy, says Ingels, who sees sustainability not as a political or social issue, but rather as a design challenge. “As designers and architects, it’s our job to make the sustainable alternative more desirable,” he says, citing CopenHill as an example. “Normally, if you propose building a waste management facility and power plant in their backyard, people protest. But when you build a power plant with a ski slope on it, what might have been a problem suddenly becomes an asset.”
Ingels seeks the same outcome from The Dryline in New York, which he conceived after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. America’s largest urban climate adaptation project, it’s a 10-mile, U-shaped flood barrier that reimagines environmental infrastructure as social spaces like parks and bicycle paths. The first of several planned segments—the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, spanning 2.5 miles from Montgomery Street to East 25th Street along the East River—began welcoming visitors last year.
“It’s designed like an archipelago of green islands where each island has been tailored to the requests and requirements of the people living close to it,” Ingels says. “Not only is it going to make the waterfront more enjoyable and accessible … but it also will stop the next Sandy from flooding the East Side.”
