“I think the whole notion of style is a question of a certain uniformity. And, of course, I don’t think that we can 100% renounce that we have certain idiosyncrasies and certain preferences, certain things that fascinate us more than others. The whole process of form-giving is a vehicle to deliver certain things that we want to see in the world. However, I’m striving towards the other side of styleless-ness, which is to be free in every moment. To choose whatever means, whatever forms, whatever materials that most serve our purpose in each particular situation. Style is a prison, it’s a straightjacket, it’s a form of inhibition. It’s a self-imposed inhibition, to have to do certain things and not be allowed to do other things and I want us to be able to allow ourselves to do exactly the one thing that will make the greatest difference in each specific situation. One person who is vocal and eloquent about creativity is the illustrator Christoph Niemann. You can follow his thought process in the documentary Abstract on Netflix. The episode about him and his work has almost become an absurd comedy; like a Woody Allen film. I loved following him because he’s actually doing, what I thought I was going to do. I thought I was going to be an illustrator or a cartoonist myself before I ended up as an architect. He has a beautiful quote in the series, quoting the painter Chuck Close who said “inspiration is for amateurs, professionals go to work.” And that’s exactly how we work! Once in a while, I will be blessed with a priori idea, but most of the time I start with a completely empty mind and then we start working. But the other thing he says is that he strives to “be a much more ruthless editor and a more careless artist”. That is also exactly how we try to work in BIG and that’s why BIG is actually scalable and maybe that’s an important point. It’s important when you create, that you drop all your inhibitions and all your preconceptions and you allow yourself to say stupid things and make ugly things. But then in the moment of choice — when you decide what you do, you have to be rigorous and ruthless, without mercy. It doesn’t matter where it comes from — or who it comes from — what matters is why you choose to do it. It’s the basic Darwinian recipe for evolution — nature’s own form-giving process — that life forms evolve through excessive variation and selection. The variation is based on random mutation, the selection is based on performance (in the form of survival or not).”

— Bjarke Ingels in an interview with Kristoffer L. Weiss, “Adventures in Conceptualism”

“In architecture, it's very hard to find any reason to go beyond the standard solution. And the standard solution becomes one because it's such a good solution to what you're trying to do. But the problem with it is that it's often looking at a single criterion. And a typical standard solution in architecture is a very Bob Moses New York public housing. You know they need X amount of units, they need east/west exposure, they need a minimum distance between them, there's a certain height that's good for the elevator runs and the number of fire stairs. […] But it says nothing about the diversity of household types, the programmatic diversity to create a lively neighborhood, the life between the buildings, or the prevailing winds. There are so many other factors you can take into consideration. And I think the secret recipe we have developed [at BIG] that allows us to go beyond the standard solution is that we don't try to just provide X amount of real estate within a certain density, we actually try to pile on more demands. We also need to create a nice social space at the heart of the city block, we also need to ensure sunlight exposure, outdoor spaces, all kinds of things. And as you pile on these demands, suddenly the standard solution doesn't work any longer and you force the architecture into something different. […] By piling on more demands, by making the architectural problem more difficult to solve we escape the straightjacket of the standard solution and we come up with something that answers a more difficult problem.”

— Bjarke Ingels in an interview with Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times

1. “Identify the change that is happening, or has happened recently, within the field of a particular project. It can be in the neighborhood where the project is, it can be in the building code. But it can also be in the behavior of the program that’s going to go into that building, it can be in the technology that’s used to build the building. […] Once you’ve identified the change, each project has to address the consequences, conflicts, problems and potentials that arise from this change.”

2. “Give a gift. Since we neither have the money nor the political power to make things happen [as architects], all we have is the power of interpretation. Then we can take all of the necessity that comes from the client, and we can take all of the rules and regulations that come from the city — there’s also a climate we have to respond to and all these other things. We can try to respond to that in a way that is not just answering all of the questions we’ve been given, but also putting something else forward in addition. We call this a gift. […] It can be provoked by the identification of the change, it can be that the change actually allows us to do something that would have previously been unimaginable or impossible.”

3. “Request that each project has to insert itself into the future of one of the six fields: thinking, sensing, making, moving, feeding and healing. By doing this, we ensure that we start generating some new knowledge, start opening some new doors, start actually creating new avenues of exploration.”

— Bjarke Ingels in an interview with Andrew Zuckerman, Time Sensitive