Architect Bjarke Ingels, famed for projects like New York City’s VIA 57 West and The Spiral, has an even more ambitious project in the works.
The Bjarke Ingels Group, alongside 3D printing company ICON, is working with NASA on Project Olympus, an initiative to construct buildings on the moon.
The technology to create it "uses solar-powered lasers to essentially melt moon dust into a sort of lunar obsidian,” Ingels said Tuesday at the Fortune Global Forum in New York.
If all goes as planned, BIG will begin work on the first moon structure by 2032, which Ingels noted was "a schedule tighter than some of our terrestrial work."
NASA launched its new moon mission, titled “Project Artemis,” in 2017. The U.S. space agency plans to launch a crewed mission to the moon’s surface no earlier than late 2026.
On Tuesday, Ingels suggested his work with 3D printing on the moon will help with earthly projects as well. ICON, Ingels’ partner, has developed a process to help print multi-storey buildings as high as 27 feet. “You end up having these positive, Earth-bounded side effects of trying to solve a very hard piece of design and engineering on the moon," he said.
Ingels is tackling problems closer to home, too. In 2019, BIG finished Copenhill, a waste-to-energy plant, in Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital. But the building also allows for more frivolous activities: Its facade doubles as a climbing wall, and its sloping roof is also a ski slope.
“Denmark, depressingly, never gets any medals at the Winter Olympics,” Ingels joked on Tuesday. “We hope eventually this could change.”
The firm is also working with the Bhutanese government on the Gelephu Mindfulness City, a special administrative zone on the border with India. The Himalayan country officially launched the project in October, partly to provide domestic opportunities for Bhutan’s educated young workforce.
“We’re trying to imagine a city that doesn’t displace nature, but actually preserves it,” Ingels said.
Ingels also touched on how AI will be able to help—or perhaps replace—the work of trained designers. The Danish architect suggested that AI architects needed more data to be able to work effectively. “The second we start being able to harvest much higher bandwidth data from physical environments, then we will really have the power to threaten my livelihood in a serious way,” he said.
“We are attempting to use the data that we already have to see if we can teach the next generation of artificial architects,” he said. “If you can’t beat them, then at least we’re going to try to join them.”
Fortune’s Brainstorm Design conference is returning on Dec. 5 at the MGM Cotai in Macau. Panelists and attendees will debate and discuss “Experiments in Experience,” designs that blur the line between the physical and digital worlds to captivate users and foster lasting connections. Register here!
