Danish wunderkind Bjarke Ingels is working on some of the most prominent projects in New York City right now, architecturally speaking—from the stalled 2 World Trade Center to a Hudson Yards skyscraper to the triangular tetrahedron on Manhattan's west side—and in a new 60 Minutes interview, he talked about those projects, along with his path to becoming one of the world's current starchitects.
On a New York Water Taxi ride with anchor Morley Safer (which is just as charming as it sounds), Ingels reminisces on his childhood in Denmark, sharing that he only went to architecture school because there was no option for cartooning school. Here are some other gems from the interview, which you can watch above:
- Ingels says that naming his firm BIG (an acronym for Bjarke Ingels Group) was because of "local, small-country humor." "If I had started it in America, I'd have never called it big," he said.
- He explained the thinking behind his (somewhat controversial) design for 2WTC as such: "a series of seven city blocks of different proportions stepping to the sky."
- Speaking of 2WTC, Safer referred to the snafu with Fox News's funding for the building as "when Rupert Murdoch went from Daddy Warbucks to Scrooge." Heh.
- Archicritic Michael Kimmelman makes an appearance, touting Ingels's "youthful notion of the old starchitect model," as does Larry Silverstein, the developer of 2WTC.
There's also a reveal of Ingels's design for the Washington D.C. football team's new stadium, which will have—in typical zany Ingels style—a moat.
- "Starchitect" Bjarke Ingel's Billion-Dollar Designs [60 Minutes]
Loading comments...