November Editor's Letter

Danish starchitect Bjarke Ingels is famed for his mind-blowingly innovative buildings: a ski slope cheekily set atop the Copenhill waste-to-energy plant; a joyful pile of primary-color blocks for the Danish LEGO museum; NYC’s new the XI, two towers that gracefully lean toward each other in an unlikely spiral; Urban Rigger, a 2016 floating Copenhagen complex designed to address a student-housing shortage.

Architect Bjarke Ingels and son Darwin in the hull of their Copenhagen houseboat.

Given Ingels’s vivid imagination, I was intrigued when my colleague Sam Cochran, AD ’s Features Director and resident architect whisperer, informed me that Ingels and his Spanish life partner, Rut Otero (also an architect), and their son, Darwin, live in the Copenhagen harbor on a houseboat. But no conventional life aquatic: The couple’s sleek, futuristic home base is a decommissioned ferryboat that Ingels has completely tricked out with sliding window walls, a glass-enclosed pavilion for the main bedroom and its Japanese-inspired bath, and a gleaming white hull (seen above) that resembles a spaceship.

Ingels has long been a booster of floating housing, calling it “the most resilient architecture. As sea levels rise, so will houseboats.” The ship he and Otero call home gave him the chance to fully practice what he preaches, and although it looks picture-perfect in AD ’s shoot, transforming the hulking vessel into an actual family home was, reveals Cochran in his fascinating story, a renovation feat involving grueling months without heat or running water. “People had warned me that living on a houseboat was simultaneously the best and worst thing,” Ingels recalls. All aboard!

—AMY ASTLEY, Editor in Chief

Instagram: @amyastley

A pretty bath in Luke Edward Hall and Duncan Campbell’s Gloucestershire home.