"Byar-kay Ingels is here," begins Charlie Rose in a segment that aired last Friday on the veteran reporter's PBS talk show, and boy was he. If you've been following along as the Danish architect's studio has taken the U.S. architecture scene by storm—with the "Dry Line," a meandering hybrid storm barrier-and-park on Manhattan's coast, with a proposal for Google's new California campus, a collaboration with Thomas Heatherwick, and with the recently unveiled 2 World Trade—the segment didn't exactly offer a smorgasbord of new insights. But there were some good morsels, even for the initiated. Below, 6 interesting, funny, and otherwise enlightening moments from the Bjarke Ingels's Charlie Rose interview.
1.
The young son of a friend of Ingels's saw BIG's Tower 2 design and said it looks like a "stairway to heaven." Someone's angling for an internship.
2.
For the relative of a 9/11 first responder, the tower evokes the brave upward stair climb of the women and men who were first to the scene.
3.
Ingels hopes for a top-floor screening room at 2 World Trade, so that movie previewers invited to the building by its tenants, 20th Century Fox and NewsCorp, will have "an even more epic scene" after the lights go up.
4.
Asked by Rose if he had a defining style, Ingels gave a deeply quotable answer: "A style is in some ways the sum of all your inhibitions." We'll take that as a "no."
5.
What influence did Rem Koolhaas have (Ingels's onetime mentor), asked Rose? Ingels seemed ever-so-slightly reluctant to engage with Koolhaas's potential impact on the BIG design ethos, but did say he admires Rem's privileging a building's function over a pre-determined aesthetic agenda.
6.
Ingels hope his "Dry Line" storm defense network of parks along the perimeter of Manhattan island, will be a "love child of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs." (Rose points out that the project may require some demolition and displacement).
∙ The Final World Trade Center Tower's New Design, Revealed! [Curbed NY]
∙ Exploring How the Dryline Could Transform Manhattan's Coast [Curbed NY]
∙ All Bjarke Ingels coverage [Curbed]
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