By Kyle VanHemert
WIRED, October 1, 2014
Bjarke Ingels is an architect who isn’t afraid to think weird. When a competition solicited ideas for what to do with a huge trash-munching power plant soon to be built in his native Copenhagen, Ingels’ studio, BIG, submitted the sort of idea you’d expect from a precocious first-grader: They suggested turning it into an massive artificial ski slope. To the firm’s surprise, the proposal won, and by 2017 or so when the project’s complete, it will no longer seem odd to spend a day skiing on a mountain of trash.
To Ingels, this is architecture at its most exciting—when it brings the world we live in a little bit closer to the world of our dreams. Yesterday, at the morning session of the WIRED by Design conference, the architect broke down some of the big ideas that inform these sort of radical designs. Read more…