DN: Both you and your practice have enjoyed remarkable success for an architect so young. How was this achieved?

BI: As an architect, it’s really hard to set out an agenda or a mission statement and then work towards some well-defined goals. What you end up doing is almost like a completely incidental series of opportunities that present themselves, and you must make the most out of each opportunity, then gradually make your ideas and your work evolve from that random series of events. What I am going to talk about tonight is the idea of evolution, rather than revolution. Traditionally, I think architects, but also the media, like to declare revolution – a big breakthrough that has come out of nowhere. In reality, things quite often evolve gradually and unexpectedly. One idea emerges in one context, which is then being pushed over by another opportunity. An office or practice is populated by these ideas and once in a while they actually find a means to become realised.

DN: Both you and Julien De Smedt (co-founder of PLOT, the precursor to BIG) worked at the Office of Metropolitan Architecture. Is that where you met?

BI: We met at the OMA on two separate occasions, first as students and then as architects – we overlapped both times. It was in the ‘dot com’ days and we were frustrated by the fact that as an architect it’s hard to really get good work until you’re over the age of 50. We were constantly reading about how some ‘dot com’ teenagers went public and became billionaires overnight with some new web browser, so we got this idea together of how to make a film a bit like the way you make architecture projects – this idea that you could take a lot of raw material, and then not through the way you produce the movie, but the way you edit material, make it come together as a feature film – much like it’s the way you tie the component pieces together that you craft architecture. Our application for a movie grant was actually rejected, but at the same time we had also decided to start doing some architectural competitions together, and won three of them in a row; we did five and won three.

DN: A pretty good ratio, that’s pretty overwhelming.

BI: And that’s how we got in business. It was this series of meetings, these chains of events. The first commission came from a chance meeting between one of our interns who was playing tennis with the son of the client’s friend. They started talking and eventually we got him to visit our office; we had just done a competition for cheaper housing, where we got the second prize. It was a concept of a house built extremely cheap, and the client was interested in knowing more about that process. That ended up not working for that particular project but in that way we actually got the first commission. So it was a series of different events, on many different levels that actually made things evolve.