Bjarke Ingels and I meet at his headquarters in Copenhagen, a building that says a lot about him and his vision. First a Danish architecture prodigy, then a global one, Ingels has just arrived from New York, but he has the energy of a creative cyclone combined with the pragmatism of someone who has made material and form their field of action. Despite his youthful middle age (“I’m 50 now, almost mature,” he chuckles) his resumé is already an epic of planetary achievements ranging from the CopenHill ski slope and power plant (a sustainable, playful icon in Copenhagen) to the pyramidal skyscraper VIA 57 West (a new formation on the New York skyline) and the Lunar colonies imagined for NASA, where structures become an outpost of humanity in outer space. Ingels’ career is studded with awards and accolades that see him consecrated among the demigods of our times, those whose powerful ideas are fashioning our reality.

Let’s talk about visions and the materialisation of dreams. Why did you accept our invitation to be the guest editor of Domus for one year?
Domus is an iconic, unsurpassed and unsurpassable magazine that requires full-time work. I already have a full-time job, but still thought it was a proposal worth considering. Deliberately, I have been keeping away from excess communication for the past five or six years to concentrate on the right thing for me to do: organising and developing the firm. We built the headquarters where we are now; we focused on landscape architecture and engineering, and we invested much energy in our building practice all around the world. So when you contacted me, I really felt it was the perfect moment to look back and look ahead. I was in the process of metabolising my 50th birthday.

Was it happenstance or destiny?
Destiny. I once listened to a speech about life’s four quarters, which can last 100 years. In the first quarter you evolve and become who you are. In the second you pursue a trade or a vocation, you become part of a team, or you put one together. You are a creator, an organiser, and you discover your gift. In the third you attempt to offer this gift to the world. In the last quarter you come to terms with the inevitable. I have spent the last 25 years building, assembling the team, figuring out what we have to do, making observations and working out the values and ideology that are specific to our pragmatic utopian vision of the world. I see Domus as the third quarter of life that has just begun. I have the next 25 years to share my gift through our architectural practice. We see stimulating ways of working out there. They represent our contribution to shaping the future.

Bjarke Ingels, Domus guest editor for 2025

You have devised an editorial plan centred on materialism while aiming to free the word from its common meaning. Instead of being crass and banal, your noble interpretation refers to moulding reality, translating a vision into material, and concretising utopias in a realistic, audacious way.
Architecture is the materialisation of thought, a bridge between imagination and the physical world, between dream and the substance of living. It is not limited to representation, but constructs while interacting with people and nature. The way I see materialism, it is devoid of its historical negative connotation as empty materialism. You can look at the evolution of human history as a tale shaped by the materials we have known to harvest and process. As evidenced in how we name the various prehistoric eras – the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age – our capacity to manipulate matter is perhaps the greatest force driving the development of our culture. When Michelangelo explained that he looked at the block of marble and simply removed all that wasn’t David, you get the formula: marble +  elimination = David. Or if we put it in more general terms: material + form giving = reality. If form giving is what we have to say as designers, then material is the medium with which we communicate it. Paraphrasing the words of Marshall McLuhan, the motto for this year of Domus could be: the material is the message. I like to associate it with oxymoronic terms like “pragmatic utopia” and “sustainable hedonism”. Architecture has the unique capacity to hold together seemingly incompatible realms. In the mindset of Paul Virilio, you can look at cities as temporary decelerations at the intersections of the constant material flow of people and goods. The orchestration and constellation of that material flow is our art form. Society is made up of immaterial processes and social, political and economic structures, all immaterial, all intangible. The architect’s task is understanding the flow and relations of diverse parties. You have to comprehend education if you need to create a university, health care if you’re building a hospital, traffic if you’re designing a city square. If you’re doing your job well, you’ll end up substantiating the contours of invisible processes, which means that abstract concepts will be made material.

You seem to move around this field of opposed forces with lightness. You formulate ideals for a better future while being aware of the limits; have an ambition to change the world while metabolising reality. You’re like a tightrope walker, an embodiment of the oxymorons you coined. Is this how you approach places?
Every place has a soul, a genius loci that must be listened to, understood and interpreted. That’s my approach to design, whether it regards skyscrapers in Manhattan or the mountains of Bhutan. Architecture must not be despotic, but represent a dialogue with context, history and tradition. It should be an osmotic process of exchange and reciprocal enrichment.

Then there’s technology, a key element in your work.
Technology is an extraordinary tool that allows us to surpass the limits of the past and explore new frontiers, but it should not be an end unto itself. It must contribute to creating liveable, sustainable and people-oriented spaces. Technology, not technicism, uses innovation to improve our quality of life. We are living in times of great transformations where the world is changing at a dizzying pace. Architecture must be able to interpret these changes to give practical solutions to the contemporary era

Are you referring to climate change, population growth, dwindling natural resources and social tensions? Such epochal challenges require inventive solutions that combine ecology and new approaches.
Let me refer to the neo-rationalist architect Aldo Rossi. We all know that neo-rationalism degenerated into postmodernism. I think we are seeing something similar now. We are feeling anxiety about climate change and global warming. We are feeling guilty and responsible for the construction industry. This is making people look for comfort in traditional formulas, but unfortunately you cannot simply repeat the past, because the world is evolving constantly.

So you’re not nostalgic.
We must not forget what we have gained in several great solutions from the past, but we must face the present. When I think of how some materials end up being associated with certain errors committed a long time ago, it makes me depressed. For instance in Denmark, England and maybe in Italy, too, building with cement is linked to social housing projects from the 1970s, with all that entails in fantasy and reality. However, the ultra-modern glass-and-steel buildings you can see from our balcony here are also made from concrete, although you can’t tell. And the bricks we use for traditional construction in North Europe were not dried in the African sun, but in highly polluting kilns. In addition, they have an even larger ecological footprint because they are fired twice to make them look more rustic. This is the problem. As for climate change, we know that the built environment produces 40 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions. We also know that most of our life is spent inside buildings. So it is difficult to put that into reverse.

What advice would you give to Bjarke Ingels 25 years ago, when you were beginning the second quarter of your life?
My only advice is to take no advice. Jokes aside, things that are true now, were not so for me back then. On the one hand I have constantly needed to reconsider my hypotheses and sometimes reversed them. On the other, in hindsight I am amazed at how coherent we have remained, how we continue to be true to our fundamental tenets. Perhaps the questions we pose are coherent, but the responses we give take on new forms. When I was younger, I certainly held more dogmas than now. They were useful because they allowed me to not try to do everything. One probably needs strong convictions to carry ideals forward. In Bhutan I discovered local craftsmanship. Still today the country has 12 big schools that teach wood-engraving, painting and stone-cutting. When I was 25, it was practically impossible for me to comprehend the value in this, but now I do. When the Berlin Wall fell, I was 15, and to me it seemed as if peace and harmony would reign from then on. Instead, Sweden and Finland had to join the NATO and now they are positioning missiles close to the naval base in Copenhagen, which lies across from my house boat and was supposed to be decommissioned four years ago to make room for a new neighbourhood. Not only did it not shut down, but now there are four warships there because of Ukraine and Gaza. We saw the NASDAQ bubble burst in 2001, when we started PLOT. After we created BIG came the financial crisis of 2008, and Covid-19 in 2020. We have passed through such upendings over and over. The new awareness is a citation, an idea of acceleration in innovation and constant improvement. But you need to fight for the principles you believe in, because they will continually be undermined if you don’t. Even in the West we had to fight for the freedom of speech  and expression. Who would have thought that? To me, criticism of the world’s polarisation that can upset some of the clichés about north and south, left and right, is the root of democracy and the cornerstone of intellectual discourse. Criticism is everything, it is the core of conversation, reflection, the evolution of thought and creation of discourse. That is why I am happy to become a guest editor at Domus.

One last word. Criticism.
The only way we communicate in architecture is by criticising our work. The only way you can improve is by remaining faithful to yourself. A big danger is when political and cultural discourse are without critique. You can’t follow dogmas, because they are an attempt to come to conclusions beforehand and avoid critical thinking. Seeing how the world is in constant evolution, the dogma is destined to become obsolete. The only way forward is to accumulate wisdom and observations and remain open-minded. For the coming year Domus magazine, which has been featuring analysis for 96 years now, will be a place for inconvenient questions and pertinent answers regarding the mysteries of reality