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This week, we devote the majority of our show to a discussion with Patrik Schumacher, about celebrity and the insularity of critical discourse in architecture. The idea of the "starchitect" is onerous to pretty much everybody in architecture, but that hasn't stopped us from using it. It's a... View full entry
Taken out of its high-profile context, the BIG design for Two World Trade Center initially appears to be a graduate school placeholder: here are the initial seven blocks of program, with a light dusting of foliage on the exposed step-backs. The internet's critical reaction to the renderings... View full entry
“The architecture becomes a solution to an almost unsolvable puzzle,” Ingels told me one recent morning. — WIRED Magazine
Last week Archinect broke the news that Bjarke Ingels' BIG had taken over the design of Two World Trade Center from Foster + Partners, and today BIG has released its first renderings of its proposed new design. Foster's slanted quadruple diamond crown has been nixed in favor of a stepped-back... View full entry
“This isn’t your grandfather’s Wall Street.” — Bloomberg Business
According to a statement issued on Tuesday, the design of Two World Trade Center, which was formerly the province of Foster + Partners, is now being handled by Bjarke Ingels' firm BIG and will likely house employees of both 21st Century Fox and News Corp. The media organizations inked a... View full entry
In a blow to Google’s expansion plans, on Tuesday the Mountain View City Council voted to give the search giant roughly a quarter of the office space it had requested for the project, and instead awarded the lion’s share of the city’s future office development –- 1.5 million square feet –- to LinkedIn.
Google received about 500,000 square feet, or about enough to build one of the four buildings it had proposed.
— bits.blogs.nytimes.com
How this news will affect BIG and Heatherwick's design for the Googleplex expansion is as of yet undetermined. Earlier today, we learned that Google planned on constructing its new HQ using "crabots", so clearly sights were set on the Mountain View City Council giving the go-ahead. David... View full entry
Google’s choice of BIG and Heatherwick Studios to design their Mountain View campus expansion is true to form: big, brash, debatably realistic, with a dash of techno-utopianism. The critical response to the proposal – a series of webbed glass shells covering reconfigurable utility spaces... View full entry
There aren’t many architects you would believe could hold back seas and save the world from being drowned by Biblical floods. But when you meet Bjarke Ingels, anything seems eminently possible. [...]
If New York has to build 10 miles of flood defences to protect the city from another Hurricane Sandy, why not conceive the barrier as a brand new waterfront park? Climate security as leisure amenity. You can almost hear the standing ovation and all-American whooping in the background.
— theguardian.com
Previously: A closer look into “The BIG U”, BIG’s winning proposal for Rebuild By Design View full entry
This week Amelia, Paul, Donna and Ken discuss the somewhat controversial Google Headquarters design by BIG and Heatherwick. On a completely different note, we also discuss the new, and the nation's first, slavery museum, Whitney Plantation, in Louisiana. As always, you can send us your... View full entry
“Silicon Valley has been the cradle of a series of innovations that, over the last decades, have propelled technology and [the] world economy, but all of the resources, all of the intelligence, has been invested into the immaterial, the digital realm, the internet,” asserts Bjarke Ingels of... View full entry
BIG and Dialog's TELUS Sky Tower recently broke ground along 7th Avenue block in the heart of Calgary, Canada, a city full of corporate towers surrounded by low-density suburban neighborhoods. Unveiled in 2013, the 761,235 sq.ft commercial tower integrates both working and living environments into... View full entry
From inside the National Building Museum’s cavernous atrium, gaze upwards and you’ll see a series of white icons, suspended from the ceiling. Printed on square boards, the symbols loop around the museum’s 800-foot arcade, their background shifting from red to green to blue. This iconic... View full entry
Is Bjarke Ingels building an amusement park? The architect created a promotional film with Squint/Opera that presents his proposed design for Europa City, a leisure and recreational destination that will be built north of Paris by the year 2020. Construction is currently scheduled to start in... View full entry
We live in the anthropogenic age, where humans don’t adapt to life, but life adapts to human needs, Ingels explains, which makes his advice to young architects designing tomorrow’s world simple and clear. The key for young architects is to acquire the tools and language to comprehend the human needs outside of the architectural bubble, and understand that they are here to accommodate - and not to be accommodated. — vimeo.com
BIG is returning to the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. with a new exhibition titled "HOT TO COLD: an odyssey of architectural adaptation", just a few months after their successful giant indoor maze this past summer that brought in more than 50,000 visitors -- and a marriage proposal. Opening on January 24, the exhibition will showcase BIG's latest projects and more than 60 3-D models will be suspended at the second-floor balconies of the Museum's Great Hall. — bustler.net
↑ BIG is coming back to the National Building Museum just a few months after their popular Maze installation this past summer.Learn more about the exhibition on Bustler. View full entry
The first images of Bjarke Ingels Group's public square [officially titled Malaysia Square] for the £8 billion Battersea Power Station redevelopment in London have been revealed just a few weeks after BIG was appointed as the competition-winning designer. The public square, which will be BIG's first U.K. project, is only a part of the Battersea Power Station's redevelopment plan. — bustler.net
Head over to Bustler for more details. View full entry
