Page 113 - The Book For Men Spring/Summer 2024

me] that architecture could be incredibly fascinating and rich with stories and alternative environments that were much more different from the ordinary that I had imagined.”
In 2002, BIG’s first project tasked Ingels with redesigning the Copenhagen Harbour Baths, an industrial port turned social hub on the city’s waterfront. Seeing sustainability efforts become opportunities for leisure was revelatory for the architect. As he watched citizens of Copenhagen jumping into the Harbour Baths to swim, he says, “it became clear to us that this was a bigger idea: the idea that the clean port was not only nice for the fish, it’s also much more enjoyable for the people that inhabit it.” This sparked a concept that he calls hedonistic sustainability, explained as “the idea that a sustainable city or building not only is better for the environment, but also so much more enjoyable for the people that inhabit it.”
Ingels’s most imaginative manifestation of this concept is the Danish capital’s CopenHill, a waste-to-energy plant topped with a hiking trail, climbing wall, and ski slope. Like the Copenhagen Harbour Baths, the plant became a social destination when it was completed in 2019. “I like this idea that we’ve elevated the norm in Copenhagen to the heights where kids think it’s normal to ski on the roof of power plants that turn trash into electricity,” Ingels says with a laugh.
Over the years, Ingels and his colleagues have developed an air of aesthetic prescience — often leaning toward or predicting trends and styles to come. But King Toronto harks back to an emblem of contemporary Canadian archi- tecture. The downtown mid-rise, which is being developed with Westbank, is inspired by Habitat 67, the innovative Montreal housing complex designed by Israeli-Canadian architect Moishe Safdie in 1967. Ingels visited Safdie’s own apartment at the iconic address before the unit was sold. “We thought it could be interesting, 50 years later, to pick up where Moishe Safdie left off and create an urban-integrated continuation of the ideas that he initiated back in the day,”
he explains. King Toronto sits on top of historic buildings at King Street West and Spadina Avenue, which will be left intact. The design creates the illusion that the units are seamlessly sprouting from these structures. Together, Ingels says, the buildings “create a symbiosis between the old and the new.” Plus, the abundance of greenery promised by the project’s renderings give the look of an urban oasis.
King Toronto is one of BIG’s many, many projects still underway across the globe, one of which includes developing a Mindfulness City in Bhutan. But, this year, Ingels is keeping a special project top of mind: his 50th birthday. The architect has been working on transforming a space in Brooklyn Heights for over five years, and he hopes to ring in his 50th birthday there — though he worries it may not be ready in time. Ahead of the milestone, he’s clinging to advice from the King of Bhutan, His Royal Highness Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck. “He was talking about the four quarters of your life,” Ingels explains. “In the first 25 years, you evolve, grow, learn and become the person that you are. The next 25 years, you hone your craft, you acquire skills, you build your team or you become part of a team. In the third quarter, you take all the gifts that you’ve acquired and you give the world what you have to give.”
One of the gifts Ingels hopes to offer is an “oxymoronic manifesto,” which will expand on some of his more treasured, firmly held beliefs. “I think it’s something the world needs now more than ever,” he says. Ingels is attracted to oxymorons because the tension between opposing ideas, like a building that fuses old and new architecture, or a unit that highlights both natural and man- made elements, can be a seed for something transformative. “In everything we do,” Ingels explains, “the fundamental agenda is to reconcile what seems at the surface to be polarized opposites and show that they can perfectly and harmoniously thrive together,” he explains. Ingels simply intends to prove both things can be true, and celebrated, at once.
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