Bjarke Ingels, the architect touched by Barcelona

[dropcap letter="C"]

When Danish architect Bjarke Ingels was little, he used to climb onto the roof of his parents' bucolic lake house, until he was scolded and told to please come down. "The perfect view, from on top of that roof, what a great waste of resources! I think that inspired the architecture I do," he explains in the documentary Big Time. At 30, Ingels began designing buildings with walkable rooftops, and this year, having turned 44 and become the latest great promise of world architecture, he will inaugurate an even more spectacular project: Copenhagen's new power plant, with a ski slope on the roof.

Ingels could have built a standard power plant, but why not go further? And that's how they decided that the greenest power plant in the world would become an artificial hill. The idea is fantastic, because in Copenhagen they have snow for many months of the year, but they don't have mountains and have to travel hundreds of kilometers to ski. This way, with the excuse of the power plant, the Danes will get a green, a blue, and a black slope as a gift.

All of Bjarke Ingels' architecture tries to go further and change the norm and what is usual, providing unthinkable second and third uses in everyday infrastructures, and changing our expectations, like a Da Vinci of Autocad. In this sense, the BIG portfolio –the name of the studio also reflects this excessive ambition– is full of unusual ideas, such as the expansion of the Gammel Hellerup Gymnasium, with a soccer field on the roof that rises 45 degrees behind the goal so that the balls return by themselves and never have to be retrieved.

And the most surprising thing about Bjarke Ingels is the speed with which he has built this meteoric career, reaching the level of star architects with decades of experience: currently the BIG studio has more than 500 employees, three offices and dozens of projects underway, some on a small scale, such as René Redzepi's new Noma or the Lego House in Billund, made with giant pieces, and others more spectacular, such as Tower 2 of the World Trade Center, which will be a dizzying game of elevated boxes and gardens, the new Google Campus in Cupertino or the facilities of the Hyperloop project, an experimental and revolutionary means of transport that would allow passengers to be transported at 1,100 kilometers per hour inside vacuum pipes. Oh, yes, and the Mars project, of course: the Ministry of the Future of Dubai (it's not a joke, it exists) has already commissioned him to think about what a colony on the red planet would be like if we were settled there in 100 years.

Curiously, what is less known about the architect of the moment – chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world – is that he always explains that he owes everything to Barcelona. He was in the city on Erasmus in 1996, attending Enric Miralles' classes at ETSAB, and apart from learning Spanish and sporting an unusual tan for a Dane, that year he opened his first office in the Catalan capital, on Carbassa street (the adventure lasted 6 months). Since 2017 – coinciding with the referendum – Bjarke Ingels has intermittently returned to live in Barcelona – his first child, born last week in the Catalan capital, is, therefore, a native of Barcelona – and his Instagram is full of corners of the city seen through his architect's eyes. In fact, in 2016 he already presented a proposal for the remodeling of Camp Nou, finally discarded by the board, and is currently preparing three projects in the Catalan capital that could be announced very soon.