House by Bjarke Ingels Group

Good things come in threes and for Danish superstarchitect Bjarke Ingels, it’s no different. As he makes his new home in New York City, the founder of BIG (the Bjarke Ingels Group) sees the opening of the third of his housing projects in Ørestad, a still-new neighborhood in Copenhagen. Like the VM Houses and The Moutain, which came before, the Eight House is yet another example of Ingel’s architectural alchemy turned gold.

I met Ingels in his studio in Copenhagen in the fall of 2008.

Completed in 2010, the 656,600-square-foot Eight House comprises over 107,000 square feet of office and retail space at...

The inspiration for the project was the popular neighborhood in Copenhagen known as Potato Row.

Ingels refers to the Eight House as his second work of architectural alchemy—and the similarities between The Mountain...

A footpath to the Eight House's interior offers another resemblance between The Mountain and Ingel's latest work.

At The Mountain, the garage offers soaring views of structural beams offset with brightly colored ceilings and...

Though the apartments can be reached by elevator, a figure-eight path on the exterior “lets you walk and bicycle along...

Inside, the units are flooded with natural light.

In Copenhagen, where the cost of living makes a dinner out worth weeks of savings, the residents spend much more time...

And even when Eight House residents go out, in Ørestad, there’s a limited selection of what to do—something Ingels...

“The result of a figure-eight shape with a mix of rowhouses and office and retail space,” Ingels says, “is that it lets...

The VM Houses were about openness (a resident recalls in our September 2009 article that from his unit one of the two...

From the penthouses, the view stretches across the Eight House and beyond, to protected open spaces.

On two of the Eight House's sloping roofs are more than 2,000 square feet of green roofs.

Though Ingels emphasizes the possibility of social interaction throughout the vertical space of the building, its the...

"When we design project, we ask ourselves why you would ever want to move there," Ingels said before we parted ways.