Time November 2/November 9, 2020Ingels poses at
Via 57 West, an
apartment building
he designed in
New York City, in
2016; his firm
currently has 21
buildings under
construction
around the worldTHE GREAT RESET
a climate issue within their remit,
and see how to borrow from and add
to global efforts.
Formulating a plan to fix cli
mate change during your spare time
may smack of hubris, if not megalo
mania. Climatejustice activists,
who argue that climate action needs
to address not only emissions but
also systemic inequalities, question
Ingels’ right to draft a plan for the
entire planet, as well as his ability.
Meanwhile, his fellow architects say
the industry’s focus needs to be on
tasks like improving the energy ef
ficiency of buildings, not on flashy
planetary vision boards. And even
in a world where the COVID19 pan
demic has transformed our under
standing of what is possible in terms
of collective responses to a global
challenge, it’s all but impossible
to imagine any single climate plan
achieving meaningful uptake from
industries, governments and com
munities around the world.
For Ingels, though, none of that
is a reason not to start one. Even
when you’re making a master plan
for a neighborhood, he says, it’s
so large, it’s impossible to grasp at
first. “But you go through iterations
where you show it, you get a lot of
feedback, and then you change it,
until you tick all the boxes,” he says. “So even if in the beginning it
seems so complex and so vast, eventually you get there.”
the architecture world has been called slow to respond to cli
mate change. But over the past few years, architects, builders and de
signers have increasingly recognized the responsibility they bear: the
construction and operation of buildings accounted for 39% of global
energy related CO₂ emissions in 2018, according to a U.N. report.
Prominent architects in the U.S. and the U.K. have signed a pledge
declaring a climate emergency. Activist groups like the Europewide
Architects Climate Action Network, launched last year, are pressur
ing architecture schools to make sustainability and resilience more
central to curriculums and firms to implement best practices in the
face of resistance from clients. In September, European Commission
president Ursula von der Leyen announced the creation of a “new
European Bauhaus”—evoking the influential 1920s design school—
where architects and others will work on design solutions for climate
problems “to give our systemic change its own distinct aesthetic.”
For architects, it won’t come as a surprise that Ingels has de
cided to strike out with his own bold climate plan. His buildings
are famous for centering a single big headline grabbing idea—
a characteristic that led the Guardian’s architecture critic Oliver
Wainwright to dub him “the undisputed king of the architectural
oneliner” in a 2016 review of his
installation—a curved wall made up
of steps—at the Serpentine Gallery.
The structure, Wainwright found,
“provided gawp factor by the buck
etload, but with some hiccups on
closer inspection.”
That “gawp factor” has helped
make Ingels’ buildings exceedingly
popular. His most famous proj
ect may be CopenHill: a 279ft.
tall power plant in the Danish
capital, where trash is burned to
generate lowcarbon energy in a
process so clean that BIG could
place a ski slope on top. The build
ing finally opened to the public in
October 2019, with a positive re
ception from users and reviewers.
Acknowledging the critique of In
gels’ work as “a bit flashy and a bit
trashy,” the Observer’s Rowan Moore
said the project lived up to the hype.