BIG ambitions

Wish Magazine, The Australian

6 September 2013

The hit Danish architecture firm, BIG, on the art of creating “adventurous,
fantastic and surprising” buildings.

At BIG, more than 100 architects and designers work in a converted bottling factory of muscular proportions, beneath a ceiling that vaults to cathedral height. Erupting from the casually dressed workforce, at various points, are scale models of projects completed, such as the famous 8-House on Copenhagen's fringe, or a pyramid-shaped apartment complex on Manhattan's West 57th Street, getting under way. Nor is there anything diminished about these three-dimensional models, assembled in the country that invented Lego - and in one case, actually built from Lego. They are, like everything from the firm's clever acronym to its public profile and ambition, big.

Some of these models are merely conjectural, such as a tower shaped like an inverted twister proposed for an instant city in southern China. What all seem to have in common, aside from a boundary-pushing approach to form is a deep and rigorously considered integration of building and landscape. Anyone familiar with the apartment blocks of Copenhagen, wrapped as they are around generous green courtyards, will recognise this as a typical feature of the Danish urban imagination. BIG, however, has taken it to new lengths. Over and above all these shared qualities there is one not to be found in any architectural textbook: BIG projects are fun.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when BIG, or Bjarke Ingels Group, was small. It began as a splinter of Danish avant-garde architecture firm PLOT, which the baby-faced Bjarke Ingels co-founded in 2001. In early 2004, as Ingels was about to shake himself free of PLOT and set up BIG, Andreas Klok Pedersen arrived on the scene. A slender blue-eyed and stubbled Dane, Pedersen has since risen to become a partner and design director. On the day we meet, Ingels the showman is in Manhattan, where the company has a new branch office tied by a visual umbilicus to the Copenhagen parent by means of a constant video stream. The secretary points to the screen rather proudly but, the earth's orbit being as it is, all I get is an image of an empty 6am Manhattan office.

Ingels is vividly present, though, in a comic book-cum-corporate manifesto at the entrance. It offers a cute opening riff on Mies van der Rohe's axiom of minimalism: "Less is more." From Mies we turn to Robert Venturi: "Less is a bore." From Venturi to Philip Johnson: "I am a whore." Next is Rem Koolhaas, with whom Ingels worked in the late 1980s: "More and more, more is more." Barack Obama: "Yes, we can." And finally, as the culmination of this chain of profundities, there is a photograph of a beaming Bjarke Ingels, feet up on his desk, with a speech balloon hovering above him containing the gnomic phrase which also happens to be the title of the book: "Yes is more."

Ingels' manifesto is built on what could be described as a false dichotomy. "Historically the field of architecture has been dominated by two opposing extremes," he argues. "On one side an avant garde of wild ideas, often so detached from reality that they fail to become something other than eccentric curiosities. On the other side there are well-organised corporate consultants that build predictable and boring boxes of high standard. Architecture seems entrenched between two equally unfertile fronts: either naively utopian or petrifyingly pragmatic. Rather than choosing one over the other, BIG operates in the fertile overlap between the two opposites. A pragmatic utopian architecture that takes on the creation of socially, economically and environmentally perfect places as a practical objective."

Pedersen is a refreshingly straightforward spokesman. Asked to distil BIG's modus operandi, he refers to the natural sciences. "Natural selection is a rational process, a way in which animals and plants adapt to survive in their different niches, and in the process it throws up surprising and fantastic results. That's what we want to do with our architecture - create adventurous, fantastic and surprising work that is really the by-product of a rational process."

Pedersen provides much of the cerebral horsepower for a practice that describes itself as an assembly "of architects, designers, builders and thinkers". He's the concept specialist who orchestrates many of BIG's submissions to international competitions. BIG is doing nicely on the international competition circuit and has projects under way on four continents. By Pedersen's reckoning, close to 80 per cent of its work is outside Copenhagen, which has helped insulate the firm from the vicissitudes of the global economy: "It means that we always have work to do; we always have a certain growth."

Closer to home, work has begun on a new BIG-designed waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen that will convert heat from burning rubbish into energy for a 500-metre man-made ski slope - a boon for a flat city whose proximity to the water means that even in winter it rarely receives heavy snow. Pedersen describes it as a landmark development that gives something "positive" to the city while retaining a carbon-neutral footprint. BIG has also recently won the tender for an "experience centre" at Lego's home town of Billund, Denmark, featuring rooftop gardens, a museum and a large public square in what it believes will be a homage to Lego as art, culture and creative tool that is also a Lego-like building.

But the project that seems to be pushing Pedersen's buttons is a large and long-term urban development on a one-million-square-metre greenfield site on the northern edge of Paris called Europa City. "It's a very big commercial and cultural facility, a whole new scale of development for us," Pedersen explains. "It will all happen over about 15 years and is set for completion in 2020." He describes it as "between an urban city centre and a planned commercial neighbourhood with a vast amount of retail, entertainment and exhibition facilities". The company's winning conception, in signature BIG style, includes indoor skiing hills, an aqua park, and a roofline of rolling green hills: a kind of Hobbiton design principle writ large. "The streets will be literally carved into these hills," says Pedersen, who adds that he is pushing the developers to include a residential component.

Invited to compete against two French and one Danish company, BIG was unveiled as the winner in April. The victory is clearly a point of pride for Pedersen, who confesses he is still a little surprised at the ambition of French developers in a European recession. The project represents unique possibilities and challenges. "If built the wrong way it would end up as a shopping mall or Disneyland," he says. "Rather than a large introverted box, we're actually trying to deal with the fact that it occupies a pristine landscape of agricultural fields, and we don't want a bland suburban development there. The idea is to combine a dense walkable city with a grand and open landscape.

"The scale of the project makes it possible to do more holistic things with the idea of sustainability - it's not just about reducing your energy bill." He hopes to use the carpet of grassed turf cladding the buildings for both insulation and water filtration, to develop geothermal and other sources of energy for use in heating, drying, cooling. BIG is not only building a city on the outskirts of Paris; it's inventing something akin to a closed ecological system that will create and utilise its own resources and energy.

BIG captured the architecture and design world's imagination in 2009 when a YouTube video surfaced of Bjarke Ingels, in the pose of an ultra-cool junior professor, explaining the ideas behind BIG's 61,000-square-metre 8-House: an entire neighbourhood conceived as one building. An imaginative integration of 500 dwellings and 400 workspaces in a planned suburb on Copenhagen's southern outskirts, it went on to win the mixed residential category at the 2011 World Architecture Festival.

In this video Ingels explains how to create a 10-storey "layer cake" with shops at the bottom and residences above. BIG distorts the Danish urban convention of enclosed courtyards: the rectangle is tied in the centre to create a figure eight. The bow-tie structure is then pierced at street level by a nine-metre alley leading from parks on one side to canals on the other, and is topped by a moss-covered - roof. The figure-eight form is modulated further by raising the northeast corner and lowering the southeast edge, providing views and sunlight to the residences and pressing the offices and shops into an engagement with the street.

BIG has certainly moved on from the 8-House and its setting on Copenhagen's windswept outskirts, though it remains a template for the firm's style of thinking big. Europa City is an upscaled version of the same idea of a green polis combining dense urbanity and open landscape, while the West 57th Street apartment in Manhattan also incorporates a green courtyard into a structure with that trademark BIG quality of surprise. "We definitely like shapes," Pedersen says. "But we like it when a shape emerges as a way of answering questions, as an outcome of our inquiries."

Asked to place BIG's architecture in the mainstream Danish design tradition, Pedersen stresses its affinity with a social rather than an aesthetic quality. He describes Denmark as a "consensus-driven" society with a strong sense of the common good, and hopes that BIG projects such as Europa City's fantastic landscape, the waste-to-energy ski slope in Copenhagen's centre, and the access afforded by the 8-House to parkland and waterways, all provide a degree of "added value" to the community. In truth, however, there is an aspect of BIG's modus operandi that lies outside the mainstream of Danish design. The dominant Nordic tradition favours the small, discreet, detailed, materially rich and modest over the gigantean, expressive and hugely hyped.

I put it to Pedersen that the greatest work of Danish architecture outside Copenhagen, Jorn Utzon's opera house, carries something of the BIG stamp. Despite his passion for striking shapes, Petersen admires not the urban silhouette of the building's roofline but the way Utzon solved a seemingly banal problem.

"I admire the way he has taken all the offices and stage works - all the backstage functions - and incorporated them into a plinth with steps. In doing so he has brought a private part of the opera house into the public realm, and he creates an opera house that is there not only for the ticket holders."

True to its name, BIG is really an architecture firm that is about more than architecture. It is in the process of reimagining city life in the ecological and organic imagery of the Zeitgeist. "It is clear that if we look at the changing life of cities they will no longer be mere consumers of energy," says Pedersen. "We will have to think about what to do with urban density when we no longer have coal and oil, and how to adapt our cities to their climates. Think of cities as ecosystems that will need over time to adapt to their own niches, like the rich world of plants and animals. What better way to create a more diverse and rich architecture?" What better way, indeed? *