BIG

Background

Bjarke Ingels Group, known as BIG, is an architecture and design group founded by Bjarke Ingels, who remains its Founder and Creative Director. It has grown, in its own words, from a founder to a family to a force of 700, and its latest structure is the BIG LEAP: Landscape, Engineering, Architecture, Planning and Products. The group's headquarters is in Copenhagen.

Signature Style

BIG describes its approach as pragmatic utopia: occupying the overlap between wild, expressive architecture and practical, rational building, so that cultural, economic and infrastructural forces drive the design. Built examples include a waste-to-energy plant with a skiable roof, parking structures that become mountains of houses, and a courtyard fused with a skyscraper at VIA 57 West.

Product Design

The BIG Product team treats product design as an extension of its architecture, across furniture, lighting, consumer products, mobility and installations. Lighting includes Alphabet of Light, Alphabet and Vine and Stellar Nebula for Artemide; furniture includes the Brick sofa series for Jot.Jot; consumer products include the HAV Porcelain collection for Royal Copenhagen.

Notable Works

• CopenHill, Copenhagen, a waste-to-energy plant with a climbable facade and skiable slopes
• VIA 57 West, New York, a mixed-use building nicknamed a court-scraper
• LEGO House, Billund, Denmark, opened in 2017
• Serpentine Summer Pavilion 2016, London

Legacy

BIG has completed more than 60 projects across the world. Its books and exhibitions include Yes Is More (2009), Hot to Cold (2013) and Formgiving (exhibition 2018, book 2020).