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"View Slideshow\n\nBjarke Ingels has already endowed the landscape of his native Copenhagen with letter-shaped apartment complexes and a residential structure that forms a mountainlike wedge against the Nordic sky. In progress is a waste-to-energy plant that will be topped by an artificial ski slope of more than 300,000 square feet and outfitted with a smokestack that puffs 100-foot-diameter exhaust rings into the air. \u201CWhen you count ten rings, you know you\u2019ve emitted one ton of carbon dioxide,\u201D he says. \u201CIt\u2019s fun, but it\u2019s also there for the sake of accountability.\u201D\n\nFun and accountability. These are bywords for a young talent who has become one of the most talked-about and in-demand architects today. Ingels\u2019s multiplying global projects\u2014a planned library in Kazakhstan, an art museum in Greenland, a pyramidal residential building on New York\u2019s far west side\u2014combine environmentalism with a nearly impish sense of play. \u201CThe term I use is hedonistic sustainability,\u201D he says. \u201CInstead of sacrificing something, the special demands for the building might actually lead you to build the place to be more enjoyable.\u201D\n\nIn other words, feel-good architecture, or, in Ingels\u2019s own formulation, \u201Cpragmatic utopianism.\u201D This comes from Yes Is More, his 2009 \u201Carchicomic\u201D (a monograph styled as a graphic novel), in which Ingels declares his interest in imaginative problem-solving. Just one real-world example: His 45-story office tower in Shenzhen, China, currently under construction, folds open at the midsection, a feature he likens to an Issey Miyake pleat. This will serve as a solar shield, with outside-facing thermal panels that reduce the entire building\u2019s energy consumption by more than 60 percent.\n\nGreen architecture, for all its cultural currency, is not a movement known for its sense of humor, which is why Ingels\u2019s irrepressible designs feel new. He calls them part of an evolution and is more than happy to be leading the way. \u201CLet\u2019s face it,\u201D he says, \u201Cthe old model for green architecture\u2014nostalgia and guilt\u2014wasn\u2019t all that interesting.\u201D\n\nClick here to see Bjarke Ingels\u2019s cutting-edge designs."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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