The sentiment is warm and fuzzy. The design, however, is radical: BIG has imagined a complex that would be unlike any other building in the city – or, indeed, North America. The scheme blends an unusual stack-of-blocks form, and adds a complex weave of public and private spaces underneath and within the heart of the building itself...the effect [Bjarke Ingels] is going for is akin to 'a Mediterranean mountain town.' — The Globe and Mail
More recent BIG projects:
BIG in Paris: Bjarke Ingels to design for Galeries Lafayette on Champs-Élysées
BIG's concept for a spiraling-landscape tower in NYC's Hudson Yards
66 Comments
put a tree on it
I think the right term is voxelated.
The obvious comparison is Habitat, to which it can't hold a candle.
Based on my own experiences with different firms, I would like to know exactly how much of this is figured out before the beauty renderings hit the press. It's easy to play "spot the Photoshop" similar to fashion shoots or whatnot, where we all point out the absurdly thin slabs and the apparent lack of circulation. I want to know how much BIG designs before they make the pretty pictures.
I'd also like to see one of their best projects broken down into its phases to see how much the process reinforces or breaks down the promise of the initial imagery.
Because I'd like to find out he's really, really, really good at the building part.
This is not Habitat and it is not in the spirit of expo67.
ill just leave this one alone...
remove the plants and repost the image
Easily put boxes over boxes and make it a highrise building and say it's a new design! and btw don't forget the trees in the top -_- !
SneakyPete there is a good chance they understand - besides us and other architects, most people will barely understand the image, let alone the possibilty of the architecture and if it even works. on more than one occasion in studio back in school i may have made a nice image just to fill space and sometimes you get away with it and sometimes you do not.
i'm pretty sure they start with the rendering and form before the space plan. i'm fairly certain they do not have an elevator lobby, restrooms, exiting, or anything else worked out in this building. same thing for the terraced skyscraper everyone got worked up over.
while this is not the only way to design a building, it is a common way to design a building. i'm pretty sure when schumacher makes a parametric building, he starts with a rendering and little concern for the program contained within the rendering (he would probably tell you different though). same for gehry and the swoopy buildings. those swoops don't really come from programmatic requirements. david childs' boring design process is probably not all that different. som just doesn't have the panache.
BIG has actually had a lot of built work haven't they? wikipedia says they have over 300 employees (though i don't know how much to trust that source, which is why i felt the need to put it out there in the open). they did the mountain residence in denmark, which was pretty big. you should be able to look back at how that went from concept to real building. as far as i know it's been a successful project.
The 70s called, it wants its failed urban stacking arch back.
Bob Ross lives!
don't hate the player. hate the game.
a housing project with more complexity than substance will not end well. for some reason, multiple corners and lots of giant glass panes are not friends with budget.
BIG probably forgot about the -40 degree temperatures and snow loads many Canadian cities have to deal with. Toronto is not that bad, but those 200mm thin cantilevered floors will be very nippy in February.
Looks almost exactly like OMA's Timmerhuis minus structure.
I like the other view better
There's such a lack of depth in these sci-fi projects. The massing is kind of cool, but the cube shapes repeated forever and drab feel just make it feel nightmarish and inhuman.
The top designers seem to be very limited by the computer programs they use.
Just showed this to a friend who told me, "this is why people don't like architects"
Wouldn't want to be the structural engineer that has to figure this out.
Mayne actually came out and said it: he designs for other architects. So does Zaha and most of the other starchitects, it's a small club. Renzo is an exception, I think. Safdie doesn't either, but he's not a member of that club, though he should be by virtue of Habitat alone. But apparently he rubbed some people the wrong way as a brash young architect.
LiMX, do you and your friend also dislike Brutalism? These recent BIG project definitely seem to have a bit of Brutalist influence in them.
Everything is a small club. The best films are films made according to a fairly esoteric set of values and refers to the history and theory of cinema. It doesn't mean that non-filmmakers can't appreciate what they do, obviously.
the best films are the films where lots of stuff gets blown up.
esoteric films building off some obscure history of film making are for cynical people who want to criticize good things to make them feel better about themselves, like the person who says 'that band's old work was good, but they've sold out.' (john green said that about his youth in a podcast/vblog/whateverthekidscallittoday i watched earlier today. i suppose it makes more sense in a context that isn't here). of course metallica is the exception. their old work was good, and they did start to suck after they sold out.
Film is big business largely dominated by a small group. Thus Hollywood turns out mega-marketed crap designed to sell. They have stringent barriers and an award system that guarantees huge financial success. Sound familiar?
I do notice a superficial connection to Brutalism, in these recent projects. But is like a Miley Cyrus cover of Sgt Pepper.. Missing the essense. Again, what is missing is a sense of craft and space--I.e. architecture. Look at the spatial quality of a Rudolph project compared to a kind of bland stacking. Love the drawing below...the difference in process is there. BIG have stated that they aren't really interested in details, and Bjarke said he admires architects that do, but that you have to sacrifice this if you want to build big and "make a difference." Or maybe it's that the failing middle class isn't educated enough to tell the difference anymore. That's great for developers, and very profitable, but the question is what kind of difference you are making and what the quality of space is.
http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/paulrudolph/images/d/de/Orange_County_Government_Center_-_Section_Perspective.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120715194733
It's also interesting how BIG works over local critics, or "best friends in disguise" as Koolhaas said:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/home-and-garden/architecture/a-ziggurat-for-king-west-take-a-peek-at-bjarke-ingelss-plan-for-toronto/article28812865/
I'm totally fine with small club architecture. Its probably always been that way. Even todays "small clubs" are bigger than populist genres through the ages. The population of ancient Greece is smaller than the number of people who liked Keyboard Cat in YouTube.
of course metallica is the exception. their old work was good, and they did start to suck after they sold out.
I think we finally agree on something curt lol
Everyone loved Keyboard cat, that's not suprising!
My issue is that big developments need more attention to detail than any building, that's where more people are going to live! Why is craft always lost to scale, and bigger developments thrown to the wolves/developers. It wasn't always this way! Art Deco skyscrapers were the bomb! The artistry of Rudolph or any good architect is making the large scale humane.
And that's why the lesser modernist housing projects failed in the past! It's just a question of architectural quality. History repeating itself.
davvid, that explains perfectly your Hollywood taste in architecture. Bring on Michael Bay!
people love mid-century modern houses.
the housing projects failed for lots of reasons that have little to do with the design of the details of the buildings.
There are actually 2 starchitect clubs. One includes great architects who are rightfully famous for their work like Siza, Zumthor, Piano, Ando, Ito, Ban, Wang Shu, Murcutt, Moneo, etc...The other club includes People who's work sucks but are still famous for whatever reason...
Zaha may not be your cup of tea, but I can at least appreciate the bravado of some of her work...
Or bring on J. C. Chandor or Benh Zeitlin or Mia Hansen-Love.
There are many small clubs out there.
I would also like to see better detailing by BIG. But I'd like to see better detailing across the board. Its not necessarily an essential aspect of architecture. I know its an uncomfortable fact, but its real.
The population of ancient Greece is smaller than the number of people who liked Keyboard Cat in YouTube.
True, but the question is would the ancient greeks like keyboard cat? I think the answer is yes!
Plenty of poorly detailed old buildings are being repurposed as luxury spaces. They just paid a crapped out brick wall white and sand the wood floor.
Buildings fail for a number of reasons. Though care of design plays a large part. Many failed buildings were serious and built by good architects and failed. Imagine what little chance a building has when designed by a high looking bro-douche who doesn't seem to give a damn about design?
Uh, just throw some trees on it. Let's go to the club!
The only tools in this office must be COPY and PASTE
It's a faux eco-brand.
I think I want to go see BIG stuff in Denmark, i have to imagine there they did the entire process from design to details to admin. its another thing to essentially be a foreign architect doing large projects vs a local
Weren't a lot of the denmark projects PLOT designs? Not sure how much can credit solely BiG
amazing project! BIG as always surprising in concept and innovative in form. Good job guys! Cant wait to see it
Thankfully, BIG projects seem to fizzle out and fast as they are being thrown up before anybody is harmed. Unfortunately the media seems to like propping them up more than, say, Mecanoo (who have a much more interesting design winner for the Tainan library hidden on this site), so it's only a matter of time before more people fall for the hype. At least with Trump the public will get to decide, but we will get more BIG shoved down our throats with no say on the matter.
It looks vaguely similar to a building called "the mountain". I can not remember who designed it. I think the company is trying to get some commissions here in the States.
I look at his proejct and the I look at some of the work being done in NY and I wonder how project teams are made. Comparatively speaking, the execution is sloppy. The renderings are not convincing, and reveal some of the thought put into the modeling- which was evidently not thorough.
It would seem to me that even the concept renderings would be more informed and accurate- like the NYC ziggurat. Instead his seems to be rushed, and not thoroughly vetted.
!!!
BIG's shtick isn't architecture, it's marketing. That's why the design and presentation are half-baked. It's just enough for laymen to imagine they understand and hey, it's got trees! Time spent actually working it out would be prohibitively expensive and interfere with the marketing program for dozens of other projects.
The collaborative effort necessary to pull this off adds complexity and becomes a layer that removes the 'artist' from the work (not that Bjarke is an artist in any design sense, but he is a hell of a salesman).
Think Nervi and the supporting cast at Our Lady of Maytag vs. Saarinen's solo effort at the TWA Terminal.
The projects in Copenhagen are convincing. Poppy, sure, but very good in terns of function and as realization of social intentions. As architecture they are relatively inexpensive, populist even. That is partially budget, partially Bjarke's taste, or Julien's, and maybe some could say it is evidence of inexperience (I'm not one to say so).
The construction is remarkably simple for such complex formal goings on, which is definitely an interesting twist on the normal approach to avant garde (ie, to build things the hard way). I would expect the haters here to be appreciative of that aspect of his work, simply because it is more in the vein of construction that most non-starchitects are using as well.
Which is to say, Bjarke's approach is to get more out of less. Its his thing. No need to like it if it makes you feel uncomfortable. The feeling is entirely understandable even. He is building palaces out of walmarts, and doing it so very well. How could anyone not be nervous by the prospect.
This project is a bit underwhelming exactly because of the recent examples from OMA and MVRDV, and also l'habitat of course. There seems to be a preoccupation with form in this case rather than a true intent or vision related to how to live in the city, and that feels a bit weak by comparison. Still, I expect it will be quite nice to live in, in a non-threatening way. In this respect Bjarke's populist leaning are a hard wave to ride. When he gets too close to the edge it tends to feel like decoration instead of a step forward - superficially radical. But really it will only be clear when its built. So I guess we should sit back and see.
The BIGness philosophy posited by Koolhaas is already somewhat dated, after a slew of silly and ugly buildings in China and Dubai (ironically CCTV is one of the few one with artistry, as with Holl's work). And there are many that use cheaper materials to great spatial effect, again like Koolhaas' masterful earlier work on IIT, Kusnthal, Seattle Library, etc.
Think this firm is at its marketing peak right as they are having a crisis of content and meaning. BIGness no longer works, and they don't have a clue about craft, so.... failed 1970s retro futurism, go!
Think we need to go and find a new better direction. Humane, techno-savvy, relevant to today. Something that values experience, materials, space, meaning. Architects, go! Form like voltron and defeat BIGness!
I wonder if BIG might actually transcend the "star"-obsessed period of architecture. Comparing him to Koolhaas is perhaps the wrong comparison to make. Koolhaas is much more interested in criticism and building-as-commentary. BIG isn't really doing that. Its much lighter than that. I could see his office working at twice or three times his offices current speed and scale. Its almost like he is cultivating a BIG vernacular, as opposed to creating individual art objects. When new renderings keep being launched monthly, you start to see them as more of a wave or a force than individual projects.
I wonder if all of this points to a shortcoming of his process.
BIG treats design process as curation of ideation, with OMA as a precedent (not to mention Peter Max and Julian Schnabel). And despite the innacuracies of his renderings, they tend to be "honest" in their representation of the project.
So I'm curious about how/when when does that process fail and what does it allude to? This Toronto project lacks any of the honesty exhibited in the Tishman Speyer/ Hudson Yards project, or some of the others NY project.
If you assume that his concept was to reference the Safdie's project (the Globe and Mail article is not clear as to whether or not that was his pitch), it exposes a casual approach to the project on his part by trying make two culturally and geographically different cities in Canada analogous. If you assume that those were not his words, there is little if any recognition of context- the Canadian Shield or the escarpment along the lake as generative strategies is lacking in the strategy of pixelation. Often he does trying to play off of some geography to generate form ("natural" or constructed), and there's little of that, if any (or perhaps when confronted by something he sees as placeless, he makes mountains). Added to the lack "context," the photoshops reveal a lack of attention to structure- which they are usually better at faking.
So in the context of BIG's practice, this seems to be a thin project with less oversight or curation on Bjarkes's part.
There's no sense of context, and the photoshops reveal a lack of attention to structure sSo in the context of BIG's practice, this seems to be a thin project with less oversight or curation on Bjarkes's part.
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