Bjarke Ingels of BIG

As his firm’s name implies, Bjarke Ingles thinks big. At 34 years old, the founder of BIG, the Bjarke Ingels Group, has broken into Denmark’s architectural scene, which has historically been a tightly closed-off old boys’ club, and shattered the conventional molds of building typologies. He’s an architect, yes, but that’s not a word he frequently uses. He describes his role as a “midwife of this continuous rebirth of the city rather than the actual creator” and an “alchemist” who combines seemingly incongruous ideas to create architectural gold. Dwell’s Miyoko Ohtake sat down with Ingels in his Copenhagen studio to find out how this aspiring cartoonist has become one of today’s most innovative designers.