Bjarke Ingels

The space has up to 16 m ceilings, and the underside of each level of apartments is covered in aluminium painted in a distinctive colour scheme of psychedelic hues which, as a tribute to Danish 1960s and '70s furniture designer Verner Panton, are all exact matches of the colours he used in his designs.

The colours move, symbolically, from green for the earth over yellow, orange, dark orange, hot pink, purple to bright blue for the sky.

The northern and western facades of the parking garage depict a 3000 m2 photorealistic mural of Himalayan peaks.

The parking garage is protected from wind and rain by huge shiny aluminium plates, perforated to let in light and allow for natural ventilation.

By controlling the size of the holes, the sheeting was transformed into the giant rasterized image of Mount Everest.

Bjarke Bundgaard Ingels (born 2 October 1974) is a Danish architect, founder and creative partner of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).

In Denmark, Ingels became well known after designing two housing complexes in Ørestad: VM Houses and Mountain Dwellings.

Ingels was born in Copenhagen in 1974.

His father is an engineer and his mother is a dentist.

Hoping to become a cartoonist, he began studying architecture in 1993 at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, thinking it would help him improve his drawing skills.

After several years, he began an earnest interest in architecture.

From 1998 to 2001, Ingels worked for Rem Koolhaas at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam.

He continued his studies at the Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura in Barcelona, and returned to Copenhagen to receive his diploma in 1999.

As a third-year student in Barcelona, he set up his first practice and won his first competition.

Alongside his architectural practice, Ingels has been a visiting professor at the Rice University School of Architecture, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and most recently, the Yale School of Architecture.

In 2001, he returned to Copenhagen to set up the architectural practice PLOT together with Belgian OMA colleague Julien De Smedt.

The company received national and international attention for their inventive designs.

They were awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2004 for a proposal for a new music house for Stavanger, Norway.

PLOT completed a 2500 m2 series of five open-air swimming pools, Islands Brygge Harbour Bath, on the Copenhagen Harbour front with special facilities for children in 2003.

They also completed Maritime Youth House, a sailing club and a youth house at Sundby Harbour, Copenhagen.

Inspired by Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation concept, they designed two residential blocks, in the shape of the letters V and M (as seen from the sky); the M House with 95 units, was completed in 2004, and the V House, with 114 units, in 2005.

The design places strong emphasis on daylight, privacy and views.

Rather than looking over the neighboring building, all of the apartments have diagonal views of the surrounding fields.

Corridors are short and bright, rather like open bullet holes through the building.

There are some 80 different types of apartment in the complex, adaptable to individual needs.

The first major achievement for PLOT was the award-winning VM Houses in Ørestad, Copenhagen, in 2005.

In 2005, Ingels also completed the Helsingør Psychiatric Hospital in Helsingør, a hospital which is shaped like a snowflake.

Each room of the hospital was specially designed to have a view, with two groups of rooms facing the lake, and one group facing the surrounding hills.

After PLOT was disbanded at the end of 2005, in January 2006 Ingels made Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) its own company.

In 2006 he founded Bjarke Ingels Group, which grew to a staff of 400 by 2015, with noted projects including the 8 House housing complex, VIA 57 West in Manhattan, the Google North Bayshore headquarters (co-designed with Thomas Heatherwick), the Superkilen park, and the Amager Resource Center (ARC) waste-to-energy plant – the latter which incorporates both a ski slope and climbing wall on the building exterior.

The building garnered Ingels and Smedt the Forum AID Award for the best building in Scandinavia in 2006.

Ingels lived in the complex until 2008 when he moved into the adjacent Mountain Dwellings.

Completed in October 2008, it received the World Architecture Festival Housing Award (2008), Forum AID Award (2009) and the MIPIM Residential Development Award at Cannes (2009).

Since 2009, Ingels has won numerous architectural competitions.

In 2011, The Wall Street Journal named Ingels Innovator of the Year for architecture, and in 2016 Time named him one of the 100 Most Influential People.

The apartments scale the diagonally sloping roof of the parking garage, from street level to 11th floor, creating an artificial, south facing 'mountainside' where each apartment has a terrace measuring around 93 m2.

The parking garage contains spots for 480 cars.

He moved to New York City in 2012, where in addition to the VIA 57 West, BIG won a design contest after Hurricane Sandy for improving Manhattan's flood resistance.

It grew to 400 employees by 2016.

BIG began working on the 25 m Mountain Dwellings on the VM houses site in the Ørestad district of Copenhagen, combining 10000 m2 of housing with 20000 m2 of parking and parking space, with a mountain theme throughout the building.