From “Building a Better Future,” a WSJ profile by Richard D. Woodward of 37-year-old Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, who dreams large-scale urban dreams:

“The youthful face of Ingels, when framed and magnified by the tiny windows in this bold project or when talking in his video lectures on the Web, offers one of the most optimistic pictures of what the future of architecture might be. At the tender age of 37 he has gained a world-wide reputation for daring to think grandly about cities in the visionary manner of Le Corbusier, and for translating his hopeful philosophy of “pragmatic utopianism” into a thriving practice that has even caught the eye of bottom-line New York real-estate developers.

Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale architecture school, describes Ingels and his ‘big-picture view,’ which he first encountered at a 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, as ‘back to the future.’ The startling scale of some of BIG’s ideas ‘flies in the face of current thinking,’ which favors small-scale urbanism rather than remaking the planet.”

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Ingels holds forth at  TED, 2009: