When architect Bjarke Ingels was growing up in a Danish suburb, his parents had to scold their kids for climbing up on their house's flat roof. Young Bjarke was offended: There was so much space up there, and such great views. "I thought it was a huge waste to have this amazing roof," Ingels recalls in the new documentary Big Time. "Why not put it to use?"
It's a telling detail in the film, which follows Ingels – now a global superstar in the field of architecture – through a period of growth, a move to New York and the struggle to construct two showpiece projects: a power plant with a ski slope on top, and a knotty Manhattan apartment building. But while the architecture is engaging, the heart of the film is Ingels: a dreamer, a showman, a wannabe comic artist and a designer whose brain never shuts off.
"Architects tend to be very dry, very serious men wearing black," says Big Time director Kaspar Astrup Schröder in an interview. "But when I heard Bjarke talk about architecture, I wanted to listen."
Schröder's bet, a good one, is that viewers will want to hear Ingels, too. Ingels's firm – which is working in Vancouver and Toronto – is named BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), which suggests his skill at coining a phrase and also the size of his ambition. He is an incredibly skilled communicator, and Schröder employs that talent in the film: Ingels sits for a series of interviews with a marker in hand, sketching out the concepts behind his building in elegant sketches and spinning a narrative for each.
"With Bjarke, it's not so much about the aesthetics, but about the way the buildings are used," Schröder says, "and the story they will tell."
Schröder's film is funny and tight, exceptionally well written and well edited, as befits a subject so skilled with storytelling. Narrative, as the film suggests, is powerful: it's the device that gets clients to hire BIG and then buy into their unorthodox visions, together with a whiz-bang optimism. If that Danish power plant needs to be so tall, why not put a ski slope on top, and give flat Denmark a new amenity? And if it generates steam, why not have the stack blow smoke rings?
Great ideas – but then Ingels and his colleagues have to make all those ideas work, and the grind of turning sketch into reality.
"I wasn't interested in making a commercial for BIG," says Schröder, a Dane who has made eight previous documentaries on subjects ranging from parkour to China's human-rights record. "It was very important for there to be a real drama at the centre, and here that was Bjarke's move to America – whether it succeeded or failed, I was sure there was a story."
There is. Ingels's move to New York brings a fancy Brooklyn apartment and exciting work, including a major project for a local developer: an apartment building that he dubs a "courtscraper," blending Manhattan and Copenhagen forms into an unusual, and beautiful, prismatic form. Celebrating his 40th birthday, Ingels seems to have it all.
And yet.
At 40, he's single and childless; halfway through his life, he's thinking about how little time he has left to make a mark on history. Then there are those headaches, the result of a baseball-bat mishap; he's struck mid-meeting by splitting pain, which Schröder dramatizes with a high-pitched whine. Time to get some brain scans.
"There is a more universal story here," Schröder says, " about a modern man who tries to conquer the world and perhaps does not take care of his health, and his family, things that we take for granted."
During the six years Schröder worked on the film, he clearly developed a rapport with Ingels, aided no doubt by his status as a fellow Dane; many of Ingels's most revealing remarks are in (subtitled) Danish. The rather American showmanship that helps him build his career fades away a bit in favour of a Scandinavian frankness. The two scenes with his family, in which he slows down his patter and his mother embarrasses him by revealing his youthful flightiness, are priceless.
Finally, the creative and personal struggles each find a happy ending – or at least the film chooses an apt place to cut it off. "The success of the company, there is no question that will keep going," Schröder says. It's clear that nothing will stop Ingels from trying to go bigger.
Big Time opens Dec. 1 in Toronto and Vancouver.
Alex Bozikovic