in Ørestad, Denmark
1998–2005 From 1998 to 2001, Ingels worked for
Rem Koolhaas at the
Office for Metropolitan Architecture in
Rotterdam. In 2001, he returned to Copenhagen to set up the architectural practice PLOT together with Belgian OMA colleague
Julien de Smedt. The company received national and international attention for their inventive designs. They were awarded a
Golden Lion at the
Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2004 for a proposal for a new music house for
Stavanger, Norway. PLOT completed a series of five open-air swimming pools,
Islands Brygge Harbour Bath, on the
Copenhagen Harbour front with special facilities for children in 2003. They also completed
Maritime Youth House, a sailing club and a youth house at Sundby Harbour, Copenhagen. The first major achievement for PLOT was the award-winning
VM Houses in
Ørestad, Copenhagen, in 2005. Inspired by
Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation concept, they designed two residential blocks, in the shape of the letters V and M (as seen from the sky); the M House with 95 units, was completed in 2004, and the V House, with 114 units, in 2005. The design places strong emphasis on daylight, privacy and views. The building garnered Ingels and Smedt the
Forum AID Award for the best building in Scandinavia in 2006. Ingels lived in the complex until 2008 when he moved into the adjacent
Mountain Dwellings. In 2005, Ingels also completed the
Helsingør Psychiatric Hospital in
Helsingør, a hospital which is shaped like a
snowflake. Each room of the hospital was specially designed to have a view, with two groups of rooms facing the lake, and one group facing the surrounding hills. It grew to 400 employees by 2016. The apartments scale the diagonally sloping roof of the parking garage, from street level to 11th floor, creating an artificial, south facing 'mountainside' where each apartment has a terrace measuring around . The space has up to ceilings, and the underside of each level of apartments is covered in aluminium painted in a distinctive colour scheme of psychedelic hues which, as a tribute to Danish 1960s and '70s furniture designer
Verner Panton, are all exact matches of the colours he used in his designs. The colours move, symbolically, from green for the earth over yellow, orange, dark orange, hot pink, purple to bright blue for the sky. It is also Ingels' third housing development in Ørestad, following VM Houses and Mountain Dwellings. The sloping, bow-shaped 10-storey building consists of of three different types of residential housing and of retail premises and offices, providing views over the fields and marches of
Kalvebod Faelled to the south. The 476-unit apartment building forms a figure 8 around two courtyards. The building also won the Best Residential Building at the 2011
World Architecture Festival, and the
Huffington Post included 8 House as one of the "10 Best Architecture Moments of 2001–2010". In 2007, Ingels exhibited at the
Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City and was commissioned to design the
Danish Maritime Museum in Helsingør. The current museum is located on the
UNESCO World Heritage Site of nearby
Kronborg Castle. The concept of the building is 'invisible' space, a subterranean museum which is still able to incorporate dramatic use of daylight. In launching the $40 million project, BIG had to reinforce an abandoned concrete dry dock on the site, long, wide and deep, building the museum on the periphery of the reinforced dry dock walls which will form the facade of the new museum. The dry dock will also host exhibitions and cultural events throughout the year. In the centre, amid a pool of 1 million litres (264,172 gallons) of water, is the Copenhagen statue of
The Little Mermaid, paying homage to Danish author
Hans Christian Andersen. BIG and MAD designed the
Tilting Building in the
Huaxi district of
Guiyang, China, an innovative leaning tower with six facades. In 2010,
Fast Company magazine included Ingels in its list of the 100 most creative people in business, mentioning his design of the Danish pavilion. BIG projects became increasingly international, including hotels in Norway, a museum overlooking
Mexico City, and converting an oil industry wasteland into a
zero-emission resort on
Zira Island off the coast of
Baku,
Azerbaijan. The resort started construction in 2010, and represented the seven mountains of Azerbaijan. It was cited as "one of the world's largest eco-developments." The "mountains" were covered with solar panels and provide for residential and commercial space. According to BIG, "The mountains are conceived not only as metaphors, but engineered as entire ecosystems, a model for future sustainable urban development". The roof is put forward as another example of "hedonistic sustainability": designed from recycled synthetics, aiming to increase energy efficiency by up to 20 percent. In October 2011,
The Wall Street Journal named Ingels the Innovator of the Year for architecture, later saying he was "becoming one of the design world's rising stars" in light of his portfolio. In 2012, Ingels moved to New York to supervise work on a pyramid-like apartment building on
West 57th Street, BIG opened a permanent New York office, and became committed to further work in New York. By mid-2012 that office had a staff of 50, which they used to launch other projects in North America. In 2014 Ingels's design for an integrated flood protection system, the DryLine, was a winner of the
Rebuild By Design competition created by the
Department of Housing and Urban Development in the wake of
Hurricane Sandy. The DryLine will stretch Manhattan's shoreline on the Lower East Side, with a landscaped flood barrier in East River Park, enhanced pedestrian bridges over the
FDR drive, and permanent and deployable floodwalls north of East 14th Street. BIG designed the
Lego House that began construction in 2014 in
Billund, Denmark. Ingels said of it, "We felt that if BIG had been created with the single purpose of building only one building, it would be to design the house for
Lego." Designed as a village of interlocking and overlapping buildings and spaces, the house is conceived with identical proportions to the toy bricks, and can be constructed one-for-one in miniature. They also designed the
Danish Maritime Museum in Elsinore, and a master plan for the new
Smithsonian Institution south campus in Washington, D.C. This is part of a 20-year project that will begin in 2016. Ingels also designed two extensions for his former High School in
Hellerup, Denmark — a handball court, and a larger arts and sports extension. The handball court, in homage to the architect's former math teacher, sports a roof with curvature that traces the trajectory of a thrown handball. In 2015, Ingels began working on a new headquarters for
Google in
Mountain View, California with
Thomas Heatherwick, the British designer.
Bloomberg Businessweek hailed the design as "The most ambitious project unveiled by Google this year..." in a feature article on the design and its architects. Later in 2015, Ingels was chosen to design the
Two World Trade Center, the complement to the completed
One World Trade Center on the site of the former
Twin Towers. The developer,
Larry Silverstein, identified possible tenants
News Corporation and
21st Century Fox to create a joint headquarters, switching away from the original British design firm
Foster and Partners and signing BIG for a new design. However, this would have required changes to the foundation which was already in place, and Silverstein returned to Foster and Partners in 2020. After this, development stalled for several years. In February 2026, American Express announced an agreement with Silverstein, planning to relocate their headquarters as the sole owner of the tower with an estimated completion in 2031. The updated design from 2022 by Foster and Partners is different from both their original plan from 2006 and the BIG design, but includes a similar shape and terraces to those proposed by BIG in 2015. Ingels was considered for the Hudsons Yard project. In late 2016, the project became official. ==Other projects==