The culture at BIG is intense but in off-hours, blowing off steam dressed as your favorite comic book hero isn't uncommon. That's the boss armed with a gun full of tequila.
Bjarke Ingels: The way we work is maybe unlike certain architects that have a very particular style where it is the auteur. It has to be the design principal who makes the strokes of genius. I don't have to come up with the best idea. It is my job to make sure that it is always the best idea that wins.
— cbsnews.com
Looking for even BIGger news on Archinect? Here are a few recent stories to begin with:A closer look at BIG's West 57th Street "courtscraper"Serpentine unzips Bjarke Ingels' Pavilion and 4 Summer HousesBIG in Paris: Bjarke Ingels to design for Galeries Lafayette on Champs-Élysées View full entry
This week's One-to-One guest, the Los-Angeles based architect Michael Maltzan, may be best known for his multiple residential projects with the Skid Row Housing Trust, and the longer-than-the-empire-state-building-is-tall residential mixed user, One Santa Fe. But Maltzan’s office is also... View full entry
Glue is the future of architecture. At least that’s how architect Greg Lynn sees it. And he’s not alone. “Mechanical assembly is already waning in many industries,” Lynn says. “An airplane now is glued together. A car now is glued together. Even a lot of appliances are being glued together.” So why not skyscrapers? — New Scientist
Related stories in the Archinect news:Love Letter to Plywood. By Tom SachsMIT researchers have created a new material that stores and releases solar energyUCL researchers present a new kind of self-cleaning nano-engineered window View full entry
Central Park Summer Pavilion Competition was open for international architects. The CPSP was envisioned as a meeting point for different cultural and leisure circuits, with the goal of using the same space for a broad range of daytime and nocturnal activities in a sustainable fashion that... View full entry
Many local architects complain that these high-end follies are not serious architecture, but gimmicky flash. In many cases they are right. But that’s O.K. Form, as any architect will learn, follows function. In this case it’s selling a name and a mystique. — NYT
Sam Lubell visited Tokyo for some "architectural shopping", taking in the works of many architecture stars (including Herzog and De Meuron, Toyo Ito, Sanaa and MVRDV), for global luxury brands. Thus the requisite trips to sites in Omotesando and Ginza.If you were looking for "spectacular, game... View full entry
After Architecture for Humanity closed in 2015, affiliate Chapter Network took its place, appointing Garrett Jacobs as its leader (with whom Archinect had the opportunity to speak with on its podcast). Now, the Chapter Network organization is formally rebranding itself as the Open Architecture... View full entry
James Corner Field Operations is transforming the National Building Museum's Great Hall into a glacial landscape of ICEBERGS for the museum's annual Summer Block Party installation, following two wildly successful years with Snarkitecture's monochromatic BEACH and BIG's gigantic maze. Today... View full entry
Out of a shortlist of six firms, The Department of State's Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations has chosen Studio Gang Architects, run by MacArthur fellow and winner of 2016's Architect of the Year from the Women in Architecture Awards, Jeanne Gang, to design a multi-building campus for the... View full entry
The Architect of the Year award celebrates Studio Gang’s Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College, Michigan, which took a novel tri-axial form. The first building purposed for social justice, Gang’s democratic and participatory design process involved the organisation, students and public who now work from the Center. — architectural-review.com
Jeanne Gang was singled out over other finalists Kazuyo Sejima (SANAA) and Tatiana Bilbao, particularly for Studio Gang's Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. Other winners of The Architectural Review's 2016 Women in Architecture Awards include Odile Decq... View full entry
Architect and educator Tom Wiscombe has made major inroads as SCI-Arc's BArch chair to establish a stronger connection to the humanities and critical theory in architecture education, founding the school's Liberal Arts Program last year and bringing in contemporary philosophers and theorists to... View full entry
I desperately tell myself as I hear students anxiously comparing internship applications and grad school plans. It’s okay if at any point, now or in the future, you find that you are straying from the path of the building arts, because you’ve collected some pretty valuable tools along the way. An architecture education provides much deeper skills than just designing and presenting buildings. — SCAD Architecture
"The SCAD School of Building Arts includes the allied disciplines of architecture, urban design, historic preservation, interior design, architectural history and furniture design, engaging more than 1000 students. The distinct collaborative environment within the School of Building Arts... View full entry
Seventy-seven architecture sophomores in their second architectural design studio at Iowa State University spent the first month of spring semester developing an installation intended to redefine the College of Design atrium as a public space."Our interest was to challenge the conventional uses of... View full entry
With bold geometric references to cargo sailing masts and portholes, the primary function of Dorte Mandrup Arkitekter's Sailing Tower is to reference the considerable maritime history of the Danish harbor, which was founded in the 8th century and remains an active commercial port today. The... View full entry
Back in September, we told you about a competition to conceive a redesign of the MetLife Building. Earlier this week, the six finalists of the “Reimagine a New York City Icon” competition were announced. The competition, sponsored by Metals in Construction magazine and the Ornamental Metal Institute of New York, isn’t part of any actual process in the works to modify the Midtown office tower, but are fascinating ideas of what could be. Perhaps these ideas will be put into use at other buildings. — New York Yimby
SHoP Architects, AECOM, and Volley Studio are among the six finalists for the competition, which encouraged entrants to reimagine the MetLife Building “with a resource‐conserving, eco‐friendly enclosure – one that creates a highly efficient envelope with the lightness and transparency... View full entry
With over half of the world's population currently living in cities, and seventy percent of it predicted to be urban by 2050, Nissan and Foster + Partners have undertaken the design problem of creating a refuelling network that, among other things, allows electric cars to recharge wirelessly while... View full entry
