BIG's ship/office building docks at the Philadelphia Navy Yard

2016-11-03T12:40:00-04:00

What features an interior periscope, exterior stacked precast concrete panels in a basket-weave shape that mimic the curvature of a ship's hull, and 26,000 square feet of freshly occupied office space? Bjarke Ingels Group's newly completed "Intrepid," a four-story, LEED Gold certified office building for the Philadelphia Navy Yard which just welcomed its first tangible tenant, the Penn Capital Management Company, Inc., on its top floor.

The Intrepid's site context is closely tied to its design concept. As BIG partner Kai-Uwe Bergmann explains: “In many cases, architects design big, boxy buildings that could be placed anywhere and don’t connect directly to the site. You would really be hard-pressed to place 1200 Intrepid anywhere else, due to how it connects with its surroundings. Our commission involved creating a speculative office building, for which no tenants were committed. The key challenge here was to create a reason for tenants to be here with the constraint of a stringent bu...

Inga Saffron calls BIG's new Navy Yard building "mesmerizing", "reminiscent of a Richard Serra sculpture"

2016-06-24T17:39:00-04:00

A spec office is not how a superstar usually makes a debut. [...] Ingels hasn't reinvented the form with 1200 Intrepid, but he does manage to inject it with an impressive level of pizzazz, imagination, and even refinement. [...] The optical effects are mesmerizing. If you stand at the corner and look across the breadth of the facade, the front wall appears to be tumbling to the ground like a collapsing row of dominos. The curves are reminiscent of a Richard Serra sculpture.

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BIG's ship/office building docks at the Philadelphia Navy Yard

Inga Saffron calls BIG's new Navy Yard building "mesmerizing", "reminiscent of a Richard Serra sculpture"