How a Great Architect Thinks, with Bjarke Ingels | Better in Person

Bjarke Ingels does not like to define things too early. “If you write things down, they almost die immediately,” he says. “If you overdefine things, there’s no wiggle room for life within it.” This is not a casual preference; it is the operating logic of one of the most prolific architects alive. Ingels runs BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), a firm of roughly 700 people across seven cities. His job title is not CEO but “creative direction,” and he insists that his primary role is not to have the brilliant ideas himself. It is to make sure that when a brilliant idea surfaces—from anyone—it becomes the idea the whole firm pursues.

The oxymoron as a creative engine

Ingels believes that the most powerful concepts are often oxymorons—combinations of things that seem mutually exclusive. He calls his own philosophy “utopian pragmatism”: the desire to build an ideal world while fully accepting the constraints of reality. “An oxymoron is the opposite of polarization,” he says. The trick is not to reject contradiction but to sit inside it. When designing a building, Ingels does not start by deciding what he is against. “The traditional idea of the revolutionary is someone who is defined by who or what they are against,” he says. “But if your definition is who or what you are against, then you are by definition a follower in reverse.” Instead, he looks for the surprise fit—the idea that wa