Company Founders

"[W]e could only place buildings in the footprints of where there had been buildings in the past... a very limited repertoire."

"Pine can't be outside untreated so René and his chefs, we were so behind on opening day... the chefs with their torches treating the outside against the elements... [T]he torched wood makes it capable of being outdoors."

"Starting with the smallest project that we have created... but maybe also one of the most complex. This is ... he pioneered the... regionalistic cuisine with his restaurant Noma... in Copenhagen...Noma is short for Nordic food, "Nordic smell" in Danish. He... rediscovered the Nordic landscapes, the flora and fauna of Nordic nature... to see how those plants and... animals could... be seen as ... a cuisine that's been dominated by French and Asian cuisine. ...[W]here we ...aligned with him was ...this idea that healthy could also be incredibly delicious. We have this notion... hedonistic sustainability, that sustainable can... be more enjoyable. Sustainable cities, sustainable buildings can be more enjoyable, not just good for the environment, but also great for the people living there. He's... done that to food."

"Architecture is most appealing with simple lines and clear ideas. A city... becomes alive when it is rich with experiences and surprises. So the paradoxical challenge is to... create simplicity and variety, difference and coherence... a city in the building."

"He came to us because he wanted to move his restaurant... to... Christiania, this kind of hippie commune in Copenhagen. It's part of the old fortification... a historical landmark... The hippies invaded in 1969 and never left. You can buy mild drugs openly... The main part of the building is an old... mine storage. ...We thought the city was going to give us a medal for trying to make it nice, but the city had this attitude that as long as it was only deteriorating organically, everything was fine... [A]s soon as we started trying to repair it, everything was incredibly restricted."

"What if we could focus on examples where sustainability... increases the quality of life? Where a sustainable life isn't pain—but pleasure!"

"René... was not only going to be regionalistic. It was also going to be seasonal, so... New Year to April, everything from the sea, because everything else is dead... so... seaweed and seafood and anything that can be fermented or pickled. May to September, vegetable season... the October to January, game and forest, so... venison, berries and roots. ...His idea is ...rediscovering traditional Nordic elements. ...[T]he context ...this ...self-built hippie commune in the old Navy yards. This is... what... traditional Nordic villages look like... Even though Scandinavians like to dress in black they like to paint their houses in bright colors... [W]here the southern Europeans push them together to create urbanity, in the Arctics, in the Nordics, they're... spread apart... [O]ur... inspiration came from this... typical Nordic farm... an accumulation of individual houses, each... built for its own purpose... for the main family, for the children as the family and the generations grow... for the potatoes, for the animals, for the workshop..."

"The lounge... fireplace... is... traditional Danish red brick, and to make it bright on the inside... a white clay brick..."

"What if we didn't have to adapt our lifestyle to sustainability, but adjusted our sustainable designs to the way we want to live? Instead of trying to change people, we could change the world."

"Architecture is never triggered by a single event... conceived by a single mind... shaped by a single hand."

"Event though we come to each project with a... consistent attitude... so much is discovered in the process... conditions are always so different... What you have to respond to is so different that it ends up creating... different vocabularies."

"It is through improvisation and adaptation to unanticipated obstacles that we make our biggest breakthroughs."

"The grill, the barbecue is... a cross-ventilated chimney so... chefs can stand... as cold as possible with the fire..."

"Sustainable ideas crystallize through an immensity of wasted efforts. ...Good ideas are sometimes resurrected from fossils of past evolutions."

"We are preparing to start phase one of our most significant project... the first carbon neutral island in Central Asia. ...BIG has become a sort of urban laboratory where we develop prototypes, breed species and evolve ideas that will... add to the topography of Zira... [and] the ecosystem of Azerbaijan."

"We need a new for hedonistic sustainability!"

"The work an architect gets to realize... is the result of random opportunities and chance. ...We have to respond to accidental challenges, through opportunistic , and migration of ideas. ...Often the story we tell is ...post-rationalization or hindsight."

"This is , the capitol of Albania... [W]e were invited to imagine their National Theatre. ...It is pinched to perform a gateway between the Plaza... and... City Hall on the other side, and that... wrinkled opening creates a covered plaza that is the entrance into the theatre. ...[A] very simple ...public gesture that becomes an invitation... shading from the Mediterranean sun, made out of... red upcycled concrete. ...The national color of Albania is red. We found this beautiful red stone ...locally sourced. ...The main hall is faceted out of hot-rolled steel ...a mixture of perforated and reflective surfaces creates the perfectly calibrated acoustics, almost like an of black steel. ...The second auditorium can ...open its backstage out to the roof, and the ...roof becomes a ...starlit, open-air performance space. ...[W]e've tried to squeeze as much creative energy and performance possibility into the smallest possible volume. It's currently under construction. ...[I]t's going to be a building that looks different because it performs differently."

"An almost invisible building is... a bunker museum on the west coast of Denmark. It's... a giant nature reserve... The only exception is this old German bunker... from the Second World War, a , a gun was delivered from in Germany and was supposed to be installed on September 9, 1945... and next to it inside the dunes, we were asked to make a museum telling the story... {B]ecause it's an entirely listed landscape, our proposal became to make these... precise incisions and almost imagine the opposite of the bunker. If the bunker is a heavy artifact in the dunes, the museum this... light absence as you slice through the sand, the sand becomes concrete and you have this square, entirely transparent, bringing daylight deep into this... underground museum. You descend into this narrative of the Second World War, the occupation of Denmark, using only materials that are already found in the bunker, so the concrete, the raw iron, the raw wood solving all of the... technical installations for the museography in the tectonics of the concrete work so that all technique: all sprinkling, all lighting, all hanging is done within the tectonics of the formwork. Daylight being sucked in so that even though you are underground it feels... light and airy, almost the opposite of the bunker... [F]rom here an umbilical cord takes you deep into a bunker where you can... explore what's left as this... giant artifact from the Second World War. So you can say, almost like a disappearing act, and the discretion becomes... the most characteristic of what makes the building stand out and... also makes it disappear."

"Historically the field of architecture has been dominated by two opposing extremes. ...[A]n avant-garde of wild ideas, often so detached from reality that they fail to become... other than eccentric curiosities. On the other side... well-organized corporate consultants that build... boring boxes of high standard. Architecture seems entrenched between two... unfertile fronts: either naively utopian or petrifyingly pragmatic. ...BIG operates in the fertile overlap between ...opposites. A pragmatic utopian architecture... creation of socially, economically and environmentally perfect places as a practical objective."

"Ideas migrate, structures grow and concepts develop in a form of architectural evolution."

"The messy slow path is actually faster."

"This was a train wreck that derailed into the ocean where it was attacked by a shark and electrocuted before being hit by an asteroid."

"Parents scared of losing their child will always outspend, outwork, and outvote gun rights extremists scared of losing their guns."

"Greta Gerwig: Made a critically acclaimed, culturally profound, feminist movie about Barbie and the patriarchy that made a billion dollars at the box office. Oscar nomination goes to … Ken."

"It is never a good idea to underestimate a mob of angry moms."

"Britain will never have a woman Prime Minister because women are frightened to take on supreme power."

"What I’ve always tried to do is attach the idea of ethics and safety to AGI. I wrote our business plan in 2010, and the front page had the mission ‘to build artificial general intelligence, safely and ethically for the benefit of everyone’. I think it has really shaped how a lot of the other AI labs formed. OpenAI [the creator of ChatGPT] started as a nonprofit largely because of a reaction to us having set that standard."

"I think this idea that we need to dismantle the state, we need to have maximum freedom – that’s really dangerous. On the other hand, I’m obviously very aware of the danger of centralised authoritarianism and, you know, even in its minuscule forms like nimbyism. That’s why, in the book, we talk about a narrow corridor between the danger of dystopian authoritarianism and this catastrophe caused by openness. That is the big governance challenge of the next century: how to strike that balance."

"I can't get on with men [...] or perhaps it might be truer to say that they can't get on with me. They were not very friendly in the Commons, I suppose it was because I was a bit brash; in fact I know I was. I was impatient with the slow archaic procedure."

"Organisms will soon be designed and produced with the precision and scale of today’s computer chips."

"I’ve always been interested in the nature of the universe, nature of reality, consciousness, the meaning of life, all of these big questions. That’s what I wanted to spend my life working on."

"I think that we are obsessed with whether you’re an optimist or whether you’re a pessimist. This is a completely biased way of looking at things. I don’t want to be either. I want to coldly stare in the face of the benefits and the threats. And from where I stand, we can very clearly see that with every step up in the scale of these large language models, they get more controllable."

"I tried having male assistants at first [...] But it didn't work. They tend to be too independent; men like to have individuality. Women can become an extension of the boss. They don't mind working overtime, they are more loyal and they can take criticism better. [...] Women are also more efficient than men. I want perfection, and I do my best to get it—so I have trained them myself."

"I think we’re at a moment with the development of AI where we have ways to provide support, encouragement, affirmation, coaching and advice. We’ve basically taken emotional intelligence and distilled it. And I think that is going to unlock the creativity of millions and millions of people for whom that wasn’t available."

"I think in the long-term — over many decades — we have to think very hard about how we integrate these tools, because left completely to the market and to their own devices, these are fundamentally labor-replacing tools. They will augment us and make us smarter and more productive, for the next couple decades, but in the longer term that's an open question. They allow us to do new things that software has never been able to do before. These tools are creative, they're empathetic, and they actually act much more like humans than a traditional relational database where you only get out what you put in."

"After DeepMind I never had to work again. I certainly didn’t have to write a book or anything like that. Money has never ever been the motivation. It’s always, you know, just been a side effect. For me, the goal has never been anything but how to do good in the world and how to move the world forward in a healthy, satisfying way. Even back in 2009, when I started looking at getting into technology, I could see that AI represented a fair and accurate way to deliver services in the world."

"You can watch the funniest, most popular meme and it has just come from an individual."

"Aisha Salaudeen: A series of buy-low acquisitions have turned him into a behind-the-scenes media mogul."

"You can't compare yourself to other families, because you do not know what is going on in their homes. It's about knowing what you want so a balance can be created."

"One is the ability to organise− you are managing people, so you must know how to organise. You must be diplomatic. Pay attention to detail. Interpersonal skills are skills you must learn. There are also attributes such as knowing how to manage a crisis, being result-oriented, being very resourceful, being creative, and having the ability to manage a team. There are so many character traits that an event planner must have, but at the same time, there are non-negotiable skills. You must learn how to negotiate, have good communication skills, and have good relationship skills."

"One of the things I’d say is lacking is the lack of standard, in the sense that everybody is working to a standard where nobody understands what is expected."

"We cannot be everything, every time in our lives. You have to determine how you want to make it work."

"Be creative, think out of the box. Identify your unique selling point and always make a concious effort to improve on yourself."

"First it takes believing in yourself to be a pioneer in an industry that no one was sure of what the future held."

"it’s always also good to surround yourself with good people. People that are like your mentors, that will guide you. People that have also gone through what you went through."

"All around us, there are opportunities to create moonshots. What is the purpose of education if not to help you 10X the quality of your life with the opportunities available to you, helping you go beyond limits?"

"I believe the magnificence of creation is enough inspiration for faith."

"Self-evaluation is key on an ongoing basis to ensure that you are making intended progress."

"Little is essentially a pocket money card. It comes with a personalised debit card with a security pin, for children aged nine and above to use and a mobile app for the parents to send money, monitor and set boundaries."