He has coined a punning term, BIGamy, to describe his own up-for-anything style. He rejects the idea that an architect must adhere to a single personal aesthetic, which enables him to be cheerfully flexible in meeting the demands of corporate clients. Ingels’ creative impulse to say yes to everything, even contradictions, often leads him into hybridism. — wired.com
Previously in the Archinect News:
68 Comments
It was a temporary building. Haven't you seen other temporary buildings up close before?
The concept of transporting the mermaid statue was quite original and poetic. It contrasted nicely with the building and highlighted the nature of global cultural exchange. And by offering bikes to the public it was also an expression of Denmark's progressive urban culture.
Did you see what the US pavilion was like that year? It was shit...complete shit, designed by a guy named Clive Grout (http://www.groutmctavish.com). He is exactly the kind of architect that you should be railing against.
davvid do you work fo BIG?.......now i have to look up Clive Grout, never heard of him............the article indicates the storage of the BIG models and drawings I saw at the former US Federal Government space leased at the Starret-LeHigh building coincide with - man I wish I had taken a photo of that - a BIG model for some school somewhere in a shipping box being used as a door stop. i was too busy asking management what they were doing with the "now you are entering US Fedral Gov't area etc....." signs. no i did not get a sign - thats federal property damnit.
appears Clive is Douglas Couplands architect for a few projects.....Bjarke has an essay on lego blocks in a recenr book on Douglas Coupland, will link shortly. Douglas Coupland made a modern house art piece etc...from lego blocks.......Bjarkes call to his father in the office to get his first requested purchase of a lego block castle is mentioned in that essay.....
http://archinect.com/forum/thread/113792898/art-atom-by-bjarke-ingels-on-douglas-coupland
and Davvid most of Grouts firm work looks like collaboration or AOR stuff, so not sure you are comparing apples to apples here........what bothers me is all his Canadian work and they give them a US Pavillion. the better work appears to be in Canada.
IMO saying good architecture can't be reduced to a diagram is actually saying that you're just no good at diagramming.
"Honest criticism of BIG requires an acknowledgement of the distinction of BIG architecture and BIG"
Agreed. Very hard to critique however.... Especially since the press is selling the same kool aid, very similar to the Trump addiction. This narrative design is the PR excrement of critical design. The editors of arch publications work in the marketing departments for BIG and the big firms, forming a synergy where no honest critique could possibly exist.
Same thing could be said for Zaha, Adayje, Gang, and all of the media darlings.... The press/pr forms a narrative of eureka, here is the diagram! When the process and result is much more complex. I just scared of the next generation of what comes from this.... Schools teaching PR courses rather than architecture.
Olaf. I don't work for BIG. It just irritates me that we continue to hear these same attacks on some of the very few firms in the US that are actually doing interesting work while so many hack firms create mediocre work in every city in the US.
And the attacks seem to be inspired partly by the fact that BIG and firms like it do interesting work that has broad appeal. Bjarke's polished explanations and diagrams never explain everything but they do allow the the public to understand some of logic behind the design. When I've shown images of contemporary buildings by top architects to non-architects, the non-architect tends to wonder about why certain design flourishes were made. They'll fixate on a sharp angle and wonder why its not a right angle, for example. Those flourishes can seem silly and unnecessary to a casual observer. Programmatic diagrams or energy diagrams provide a more practical justification to the non-architect audience. Those explanations tend to satisfy a non-architect audience more than any explanation about the experience or phenomenology, even though the experience of the building will be paramount if/when the non-architect is ever actually standing in the physical building.
Re: Clive Grout: How is his work any more collaborative than any other firm?
I was thinking if BIG ever would be able to do that in his home country?
I mean ever would be allowed to?
You have to at least admit anxiety when the metaphor for 2WTC is being two faced. Maybe he is using arch cred to sell SOM lite? Or is he engaging corporate developers to be more design friendly? Whichever it is we will be operating in this new climate....
davvid, it "aggravates" you that some people critique BIG and the overall state of contemporary architecture? Your entire argument is based on your opinion that BIG does "interesting" work. I disagree. Their work is boring IMO. If architecture is both science and art then BIG fails science, because their work is not technically innovative, and it fails art, because it is not distinguishable from the the better 20% of arch competition entries, or grad studios...At least FG and Zaha have balls. His "value" is being inflated by his fame and persona. That is why I compare him to Katy Perry, Justin Beiber, etc...Unless you believe that Katy Perry is one of the best singers around? If so, you watch too much TV.
Its the critique and its lack of lack of merit that aggravates me, not the fact that people are critiquing. Its also the fact that so many other firms get a pass because they aren't even interesting enough to get noticed. It has nothing to do with pop-singers. This is the juvenile kind of nonsense that poisons the conversation.
what I find "interesting" in BIG's propositions is his ability to sell the "parti" as the complete product, which plays for and against them simultaneously. It would be great to see an analysis of their finished buildings from the users perspective.
2WTC is a good example of "selling" the parti. Even though the design is clearly about more than the parti, this is the outward facing idea behind the project.
BIG explains in this video: https://vimeo.com/130206124
And its a politically/urbanistically strategic parti concept that makes an effort (or claims to) to link the scale of a blocky Tribeca building with the scale of the skyscraper. This is sort of what some people thought Renzo Piano was also doing with his jumble of shapes for the Whitney in the Meatpacking district. Basically taking inspiration from patterns or jumbles of forms in the existing fabric and making it more vertical. Its probably also trying to counter the standard Gizmodo-style criticism about context-ignoring-starchitect-egomaniac-object-buildings.
^absolutely, and then, most of his un-built ideas work in the same vein, appealing to a single or a couple of collective imagery concepts and simplifying it to a very strong form; like the rejected museum in park city, an old log cabin expanded and twisted to meet the programmatic requirements.
I don't know how other architects sell their ideas, personally I work in a bubble where you don't need to even advertise, but in the world of architectural competitions where BIG has cut their teeth, I think marketing and pr are a huge part of the process, you can see him giving interviews left and right, speaking, making videos and trying to engage the public. That isn't to say BIG is yet a recognized brand like piano or gehry, they still need to have more built evidence to get to that point. And I still would love to see an interview to the users, like that Mountain of apartments....
right, but the downside is they tend to ignore more subtle relationships to context, propose limited material palettes and pay little attention to local cultural habits. How many New Yorkers do you see looking up the buildings facades? Or how many people will see the exact moment a smokestack puffs a ring?
"how many people will see the exact moment a smokestack puffs a ring" I stood with a large crowd of people in the beating hot sun in the center of Prague's Old Town square waiting for the Astronomical clock to reach the hour, so there may be more people than you think who would get excited about a seeing a ring of smoke.
^ Actually, I Really like the smoke ring project...too bad BIG didnt design it...It was designed by an interactive/public art studio called Realities United.
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