BIG Groundbreaking on Faroe Islands
Marknagil Education Center (Courtesy BIG)
The renderings just keep coming. And, after a recent groundbreaking, a building will too. With projects on their way in New York, Phoenix, Washington, D.C., Miami, Paris, Copenhagen,and Tianjin, China, Bjarke Ingels has just broken ground again, this time on the Faroe Islands off the coast of Denmark, where, in typical BIG fashion, he will lay down the largest building on the small, self-governing archipelago. Located on a hillside outside the capital-town of Torshavn, the new Marknagil Education Center will gather three of the country’s educational institutions under one roof.
Unveiled> Bjarke Ingels Designs an Entire City Covered in Green Roofs Near Paris
EuropaCity (Courtesy BIG)
The Bjarke Ingels Group, along with Tess, Transsolar, Base, Transitec, and Michel Forgue, have revealed their winning design for EuropaCity, a 200-acre urban cultural and commercial destination located between Paris and Roissy. Combining the forms of a dense European city with an open landscape, EuropaCity is set to be a retail, cultural, and leisure city of unprecedented scale. Modeled on the European urban experience and equipped with cutting edge green technologies, the development will serve as a retail and cultural hub for the region as well as a laboratory and showcase for sustainable design.
Fourteen architecture students will be thinking BIG this spring as the NewSchool of Architecture and Design (NSAD) in San Diego teams up with Bjarke Ingels Group to offer a design studio led by Kai-Uwe Bergmann (pictured), partner and director of business development at the world-conquering firm. Starting in April, students will explore the impact of freeways along key sections of the coast, with San Diego acting as an urban laboratory. They’ll also be asked to propose uses to make freeways like the I-5 more community-friendly. Working directly with Bergmann, the budding architects will also get an immersion in the firm’s “Yes is More” and “Hedonistic Sustainability” philosophies. “When we explored themes with BIG for this NSAD studio, from the start their interest was in something that would have an impact, such as dealing with large urban systems, patterns or infrastructure,” Kurt Hunker, NSAD director of graduate programs said in a statement.
Groundbreaking Pushes Bjarke Ingels’ Hedonistic Sustainability Into Spotlight
Amager Bakke Waste-to-Energy Plant. (Courtesy BIG)
Against all odds, BIG-founder Bjarke Ingels is actually building a mountain-slash-ski-slope-slash-waste-to-energy-power-plant in his hometown of Copenhagen. Announced in 2011, the project nearly stalled during the approval process, but officials in the Danish capital broke ground on the facility on Monday. Called the Amager Bakke Waste-to-Energy Plant, the structure represents Ingels’ concept of Hedonistic Sustainability, the notion that a sustainable building shouldn’t only be green, but should also be fun.
Smithsonian Taps Bjarke Ingels For DC Campus Master Plan
In the courtyard at the Hirshhorn Museum with Bjarke Ingels. (Holley St. Germain / Flickr; Montage by AN)
Since announcing his first North American project in New York and opening an office in the Big Apple, BIG-founder Bjarke Ingels has been moving fast. His meteoric ascent into a Danish-American icon is happening so quickly, that the starchitect has landed himself in the Smithsonian, in a manner of speaking. The venerable institution has just hired Ingels to prepare a master plan for the museum’s Washington, D.C. campus, and we’re left wondering if that might mean a new mountain range rising off the National Mall.
New York City Council Gives Bjarke Ingels’ “Courtscraper” the Green Light
West 57th (Courtesy of BIG)
It took some negotiating, but New York City Council has approved Durst Fetner’s plans to build West 57th, a 750-unit residential development designed by Danish architect, Bjarke Ingels. Crain’s reported that the 32-story pyramidal “courtscraper,” sandwiched between 11th Avenue and the Hudson River, will consist of 750 rental apartments, with an additional 100 units in a converted industrial building.
An early point of contention stemmed from what city council viewed as an inadequate plan for income-restricted housing, which will only be affordable for 35 years. While Durst Fetner didn’t budge on this issue, they did agree to donate $1 million to an affordable housing fund.
Bjarke Ingels Has Phoenix Pinned, Plants Giant Observation Tower Downtown
BIG’s proposed observation tower in Phoenix. (Courtesy BIG)
Phoenix-based developer Novawest wanted a new signature project for the city’s downtown, an observation tower from which to admire the far-off mountain ranges and dramatic Southwestern sunsets, so Bjarke Ingels proposed to scoop out the spiraled negative-space of New York’s Guggenheim Museum rotunda and plant it 420 feet above downtown Phoenix. Ingels’ “Pin,” a 70,000 square foot observation tower is elegant in its simple form, a ball on a stick, indeed evoking some far away Gulliver on a real-life version of Google maps finding his way to the Sun Belt. In another light, Phoenicians could ostensibly see a larger-than-life Chupa Chup or an upended mascara brush, but that’s the beauty of pure form, right?
Bjarke Ingels Designs a Park as a Museum, Curated by the People
The Red Square, The Black Square – Superkilen, Copenhagen. (Torbin Eskerod, Courtesy Superfex)
An inventive new park in Copenhagen’s Norrebro district, “Superkilen,” designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), Superflex, and Topotek 1 serves as a sort of cultural collage of artifacts sourced from 60+ nationalities. Superkilen slices its way through the center of the city, soaking up and flaunting its inhabitants’ diverse cultural backgrounds along the way. The kilometer-long wedge of urban space, completed this summer, is divided according to use into three distinct color-coded zones and sports bike paths linking directly to Copenhagen’s cycling highways.
Durst’s BIG Composting Scheme Biggest in New York
BIG’s W57 tower. (Courtesy Durst Organization)
The Durst Organization is launching a composting pilot program for the 600-unit Helena apartment building on Manhattan’s West 57th Street. The program will start in the next few months and, if successful, will be implemented in Durst’s planned 32-story W57 tower designed by Bjarke Ingels and expected to finish in 2015. This composting scheme, potentially serving 1,350 apartments, will be the largest residential composting project in the New York City.
Unveiled> BIG Joins the Supertall Ranks in China with Rockefeller Center-Inspired Tower
Many details of BIG's supertall tower in Tianjin are still shrouded in mystery. (Courtesy BIG)
Bjarke Ingels, architect of mountains, now has set his eyes on Everest. The New York and Copenhagen-based architect’s firm BIG has been tapped by the Rockefellers to design one of the world’s tallest buildings at 1,929 feet for a new commercial development in Tianjin, China, a city of nearly 13 million people. Ingels revealed a cryptic, fog-shrouded rendering of the tower on his web site—indicative of the scarcity of detail yet released on the tower—but this being the information age, AN found more information and views of the tower on a clear day.
Unveiled> Bjarke Ingels Builds an Arch Filled With Culture for Bordeaux, France
Rendering of MÉCA as seen from Bordeaux. (Courtesy BIG)
Bjarke Ingels has again thrown us for a loop, this time in Bordeaux, France. Ingels’ firm BIG has revealed its latest competition-winner called the Maison de l’Économie Créative et de la Culture en Aquitaine, or, for the rest of us, MÉCA. As AN noted in April, BIG won the commission working with Paris-based FREAKS freearchitects, beating out the likes of SANAA and Toulouse-based W-Architectures, but the renderings have been kept under wraps until now. Ingels’ explained the design using his signature diagram-based narrative as an array of three visual and performing arts agencies arranged around a 120-foot-tall arch-shaped building.
On April 14 the Regional Council of Bordeaux, France announced that BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) was selected to design the new Maison de l’économie créative et de la culture en Aquitaine, a.k.a. “la Méca.” The new building on the riverfront site will house three regional visual and performing arts agencies. The website of France’s SudOuest newspaper reports that BIG beat out SANAA and the Toulouse-based firm W-Architectures with a design for a 120-foot-tall arch-shaped building featuring a 14,000-square-foot roof terrace. The 52-million-euro scheme awaits final approval at a May 21 council meeting…stay tuned for the renderings!
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