Bjarke Ingels

Something like 'Abstract' can really give people access to the behind-the-scenes of how our physical surroundings take shape.

We can engineer a building and design a building with least reliance on active machinery to make it inhabitable.

Silicon Valley has been this global engine of innovation and economic growth over the last few decades, but a tidal wave of innovation that has been focused very much in the digital realm.

If you are not able to transmit what you're trying to achieve to your collaborators, you will only have minions - or morons.

I don't have to come up with the best idea. It is my job to make sure that it is always the best idea that wins.

I think if I would have started BIG in America, I would probably never have called it BIG. There was nothing but a little bit of local small country humor in the idea.

When I moved to America, everybody was asking, 'Why the hell are you going to America? It's over; you should be going east.' But it turned out our timing was miraculous.

I think the biggest backhanded criticism-compliment I get is that I'm 'good at communicating.' Which implies that you're bad at doing.

My drawing skills probably froze around when I was 18... Now I'm more interested in the story, how the drawings, the layout can help express the stories and communicate them.

I almost never listen to the radio.

All evidence shows that we are actually getting smarter. Roughly we are getting 10 IQ points smarter every decade. The speed of innovation is also faster.

New York is flat - it's ideal for bicycling.

You can say, like, planet Earth has an existing geology, and what we do as human beings and as architects is that we try to sort of alter and modify and expand the geology.

St. Petersburg is a wonderful city. You have wonderful parks, birds singing in the trees, manatees in the water, pelicans. So it's like this little paradise on Earth.

I think the avant-garde often hides itself in the highly incomprehensible because they are frustrated that the real world is so boring.

The one thing all humans share is that we all inhabit the same limited amount of real estate, which is Planet Earth.

Our cities are not polluted or congested because they have to be. They are what they are because that's how we made them.

The fact that something is actually understandable and relatable doesn't mean that it's unsophisticated or banal. It just means that it's crystal-clear. And if you can't explain it, that doesn't necessarily mean it's so brilliant that ordinary mortals can't fathom it. It might just mean that it makes no sense.

Instead of trying to change people, we could change the world.

All comic books take place in built environments, and I was very good at drawing people and animals, and stuff like that, but I hadn't spent much energy drawing buildings. So I thought, maybe I could, and then I became an architect.