A little more than 10 years ago, Bjarke Ingels won a coveted contract: to expand the headquarters of Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet in the bucolic village of Le Brassus. By 2020, his Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet, a coil of structural glass and meshed brass twisting out of the ground, was complete. Two years later, the watch brand opened the snow-dusted doors on neighbouring Hôtel des Horlogers, an ultramodern, zigzagging hotel in which every room was conceived to offer breathtaking views of the surrounding region – designed, again, by Ingels. The architect owns two Audemars Piguet watches. Why, then, dialling in from the Brooklyn-based office of his Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG, does Ingels have strapped to his wrist a Patek Philippe World Time?

“Ha, well, I turned 50 last year,” laughs the Danish architect, who is currently outlining his plans for a ‘Mindfulness City’ on the Indian-Bhutanese border. “I had to be in Bhutan for my birthday. The King [of Bhutan] felt so bad that he’d drawn me away from home that he invited me to the Royal Palace. I get there, and there’s a stage, a band, a bar. I was so confused – and then everyone starts cheering. I look around, and there’s a big banner: ‘Happy Birthday, Bjarke!’ They threw me a goddamn surprise party at the palace! The Queen gave me this beautiful Patek. It does feel a little like I’m cheating on AP, but it’s very dear to me – a great souvenir of a great collaboration.”

Audemars Piguet’s Hôtel des Horlogers, designed by Ingels

Inside Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet, also designed by Ingels

Mindfulness City is a project worth bending your horological allegiances for. Conceived as a new economic hub for Bhutan (itself the world’s first carbon-negative country), the city will feature an international airport, a hydroelectric dam and 11 ‘ribbonlike’ neighbourhoods that will wend and weave alongside the region’s waterways.

“The King actually came to Copenhagen on his way back from the coronation of King Charles,” says Ingels, of the project’s inception, explaining that many Bhutanese people had been leaving for Australia of late, seeking greater economic opportunity. The King’s vision was for a new type of city. Unlike Dubai or Singapore, it would be a walkable, community-minded place. “And it wouldn’t displace the nature around it,” says Ingels. “Rather, it would enhance it. And, of course, it would be rooted in the heritage and traditions of Bhutan.”

A keen cartoonist in his youth, it was only when Ingels decided to beef up the backgrounds of his comic strips – adding more detail and variation to his buildings – that he discovered his passion for architecture. After studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and then at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura in Barcelona, Ingels completed his first project, the Copenhagen Harbour Baths, in 2002. He founded BIG in 2005, and has spent the intervening years shaping countless continent-spanning cities and communities. In 2011, the Dane was named Innovator of the Year for architecture by The Wall Street Journal. In 2016, Time magazine named Ingels one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People.

Unlike other high-profile architectural firms, which often prescribe to a ‘house style’, no two BIG projects are the same, Ingels being conscious of local cultural idiosyncrasies that he hopes to capture. “We’re designing for people that, from our starting point, have professions and nationalities that we might not know much about,” he says. “But we always educate ourselves. We ask questions. We look, listen, learn. And then we poke things, to see if they could be done differently.”

In 2016, Ingels brought his probing process to London. When his Broadgate-based office opened, it had just over a dozen employees. By the beginning of 2025, that number had topped 200. “We opened in London to deliver the Google headquarters in King’s Cross,” says the architect. “It was a necessity, but it coincided with being invited to design the Serpentine Pavilion that year.”

The new Google campus, a ‘landscraper’ which is longer than the Shard is tall (330 metres to 310 metres), was a collaborative effort with Britain’s own Thomas Heatherwick. I liken the partnership to Spielberg and Scorsese co-directing. Ingels says he prefers to think of it more like Indiana Jones – “more Spielberg and George Lucas”.

The past decade has seen Ingels expand his footprint in the capital, projects like Bankside’s Red Lion Court and 120 Fleet Street masterminded out of his firm’s Broadgate base. “One of the great things about England is that your culture really assigns value to architecture and construction,” he says. “So the quality of construction is high, and architecture is kind of esteemed. It’s a culture where you turn your great architects into knights and lords.”

Ingels doesn’t talk like other architects I’ve interviewed. His words are cleaner, more succinct. They’re delivered with pin-point accuracy; targeted like a tech mogul’s. His look, too, of pushed-back hair, trim black overshirt and tinted, slightly-oversized glasses, belies a more future-facing creative than his classical training would have you expect. Even his mannerisms: this is a man with so many projects in the pipeline that I’m glad he found the time to talk, let alone put his feet up. Yet, here he is, all but alone in his firm’s expansive, glass-walled conference suite, feet firmly planted on the empty boardroom table.

It’s refreshing, but it can also be hard to keep up. Ingels flits from the broadly philosophical to the intricately mechanical in seconds, lavishing as much importance on the indefinable niceties of the human condition as he does on the technical terms of his trade. He speaks seven languages ranging, in his own humble words, from “basic” to “decent”. And, as if his worldly accomplishments weren’t towering enough, Ingels is about to leave Earth entirely.

“We’ve been working with NASA and SpaceX on various projects,” says the architect. Chief among them is a small data centre that landed on the Moon’s south pole in February. Solar-powered, the device is intended to prove that data can be securely stored off-world. “As of right now we’re setting the foundational stones. This is one of the first man-made artefacts ever made to be stationary on the Moon.”

With time, he says, NASA’s plan is to explore and populate the Moon’s lava tubes – a series of naturally formed passages below the lunar surface. BIG is also working with the space agency to send a solar-powered printer to the Moon, a device that will “melt moon dust into lunar obsidian,” a potential new building material.

“And if that passes all of the structural tests, the funding will be unleashed for the first permanent Moon base. Essentially, we’re now creating a lunar vernacular, and a Martian vernacular for architecture – the cornerstone of a human civilisation on other worlds. And I can imagine no more meaningful an architectural challenge than that.”

In 2016, Ingels was invited to design the Serpentine Pavilion

Ingels may be technically minded, but he’s also a romantic. He’s attuned to art. He’s built his fair share of galleries, of course, from the Greenland National Gallery to China’s upcoming Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, and firmly believes, unlike some of his contemporaries, he says, that architecture in itself is an artform. “The traditional Danish word for architecture is ‘byggekunsten’ or ‘the art of building’. You could say, unlike other artforms, however, that architecture is subject to regulation, legislation, logistics. So, in that sense, it is a conditioned or ruled artform.”

Ingel cites the famous Michelangelo quote – “the sculpture is already complete within the block” – when discussing his process. Michelangelo is one of several past masters who crop up during our conversation. When discussing the demands and opinions of his clients, Ingels nods to Da Vinci. “The client is the reason for the artwork. There is no Mona Lisa without the commission.” He even alludes to Vitruvius’ three architectural metrics: strength, utility and beauty. No structure, says Ingels, hits the trifecta like a good bridge. “The Rialto Bridge in Venice,” he offers, “or the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. It’s this idea that the city continues over the river."

Bridges have become a motif of Ingels’ work. Perhaps his most striking is The Twist, both a bridge and an art gallery in Norway’s Kistefos Sculpture Park. Its name neatly illustrates the blueprint of how most of Ingels’ projects get their monikers. “For every project we have a ‘fossil record’ of different attempts,” says the architect. “50 or so sketch models you can view as an evolutionary journey. Each will have a different name that represents what we’re looking at – ‘The Village’, ‘The Cloud’, ‘The Stack’, ‘The Bridge’ – and, as they come together, we whittle it down to a final preferred candidate.”

This isn’t always how it’s done, Ingels admits. Telosa, conceived by billionaire Marc Lore, is perhaps Ingels’ most ambitious project yet – a city of five million people set to rise in the west American desert by 2050. Lore chose the name – it means ‘highest purpose’ in ancient Greek – “but we designed all the buildings,” says Ingels. “You have just a handful of these moments, where the faith of a country and all of its aspirations are translated into building form. Then they’re going to become an everlasting monument. I actually introduced Marc Lore to His Royal Highness [of Bhutan] so he could become an advisor for Gelephu, and to see if we can realise some of the visions of Telosa in Mindfulness City.”

Which brings us back to Bhutan. Ingels may have shaped skylines, pioneered architectural processes, and is now even breaking ground on celestial bodies, but he keeps coming back to his work in the small South Asian country. Bhutan, he says, uses a Gross National Happiness Index (GNH) to measure the wellbeing of its population. Ingels fiercely admires the concept – it does, after all, sound very Scandinavian. “In many parts of the world there’s a tendency to itemise things into a spreadsheet,” he says.

A CGI of what Ingels plans to do at 120 Fleet Street

How the rooftop of 120 Fleet Street will look

“Think of the star classification system for hotels. For any real experience, I don’t think these checklists matter. When the Bhutanese came up with the GNH, they said maybe not everything is translatable into hard economic terms. Maybe those things aren’t actually making life better. So why don’t we start measuring things in happiness? And isn’t that right? Because, ultimately, that’s what we all want – for people to have good lives.”

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