MVRDV has teamed up with local architects Dewan Architects + Engineers to create Pixel, a 76,000-square-meter (818,000-square-foot) mixed-use residential development that will serve as a centerpiece of Abu Dhabi’s new Makers District.
Also featuring a landscape and public realm design by BIG, Pixel will become MVRDV’s first constructed project in the United Arab Emirates upon its scheduled completion in 2020.
“Beauty,” as Umberto Eco tells it, “has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country.” So how is beauty defined today in our increasingly globalized world? Perhaps a more interesting question to ask is whether arriving at such a conclusion remains relevant to our society.
Airbnb has teamed up with LEGO to offer fanatics the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend the night in the newly-opened LEGO House in Billund, Denmark. Contest winners will be able to enjoy the BIG-designed building all for themselves for one night, where they will be treated to a special program of events before retiring to the bedroom located beneath a 6-metre-tall LEGO waterfall and surrounded by a pool of bricks.
Check out the details below.
Can you even call yourself an architect if you don’t have an old box of LEGO that you can’t bare to throw out stored away in an attic somewhere?
LEGO has become a part of architecture’s collective conscience – an inspiration, a modeling tool, a nostalgic driver, a raison d'être for architects who grew up piecing worlds together and imagining alternative realities. With the completion of BIG’s LEGO House in Billund, LEGO is once again in the spotlight. But, as this short documentary explains, it never really left.
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Bjarke Ingels Group's (BIG) LEGO House, which opened to the public earlier this month in Billund, Denmark, has already entered the canon of the iconic. By reframing the "toy scale of the classic LEGO brick" to the architectural scale, a vibrant collection of exhibition spaces and public squares "embody the culture and values at the heart of all LEGO experiences." In other words, it's playful, bright, and almost exclusively rectilinear!
Photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu has turned his lens to the new LEGO House, providing insight into a building which delights and surprises in equal measure.
The 65-story, winding glass skyscraper designed by BIG for New York’s Hudson Yards neighborhood, "The Spiral," is one step closer to realization, as developer Tishman Speyer has secured the necessary air rights for the structure, The Real Deal reports.
The $157 million deal was made between the developer and the Hudson Yards Infrastructure Corporation and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for 669,000 square feet of development rights, equalling $235 per square foot. After adding in the square footage acquired in two separate deals in 2015 and last year, Tishman Speyer has now spent $265 million to gain more than 1.23 million additional square feet of buildable space for the 1,005-foot-tall tower.
The government of the United Arab Emirates has announced the launch of the Mars Science City project, a $140 Million USD (AED 500 million) research city that will serve as a “viable and realistic model” for the simulation of human occupation of the martian landscape. Designed by a team of Emirati scientists, engineers and designers from the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre in partnership with Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the 1.9 million-square-foot domed structure will become the largest space simulation city ever constructed.
From a pool of over fifty submissions, Resilient by Design have chosen ten winning teams to collaborate with engineers, climate change experts, designers, architects and community members to imagine a better future for The Bay Area in the face of potentially devastating climate change. The winning teams AECOM, BIG, Bionic, TLS, Field Operations, HASSELL, Mithun, Base Landscape, SCAPE and Gensler will spend the next year on a combination of collaborative research projects and site-specific conceptual design solutions.
In the latest in their Daily360 series, the New York Times takes us inside BIG's recently completed TIRPITZ museum, located within a former Nazi bunker on the west coast of Denmark. The video gives a panoramic tour of the museum's light-filled subterranean spaces, along with commentary from museum curator Anne Sofie Vemmelund Christensen, who notes the most transformative changes from the spectacular renovation.
LEGO has revealed the latest kit in their Architecture series, and it’s a bit meta: a 774-piece model of the nearly complete LEGO experience center in Billund, Denmark, designed by BIG to resemble a stack of LEGO blocks.
Last time we checked in on the progress of the upcoming BIG-designed LEGO House experience center in Billund, Denmark, the structure had just topped out, with all of the major structural elements in place. Now, in drone footage released earlier this summer by LEGO, many of the building’s final finishes, surfaces, and colors can be seen as it prepares for its grand opening next month.
A new project in central Copenhagen will see two Danish practices—Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Dorte Mandrup Architects—create a new urban IKEA store, a budget hotel, and housing linked together by green space. Set to open in 2019, the area—which sits adjacent to Kalvebod Brygge, close to the railway lines that pass through the city core—will be master-planned by Dorte Mandrup while two striking high-rise residential towers, dubbed "Cacti", will be designed by BIG.
In this video, drone Videographer Azeez Bakare takes us through BIG's recently-completed Grove at Grand Bay, a residential complex in South Miami featuring two twisting 20-story towers and a lush tropical landscape terrace designed by landscape architect Raymond Jungles.
Commissioned for the project by BIG, the video shows how the building transforms throughout the day: standing out as stark white sculptures during the day before turning an orange glow as the glass balconies reflect back the setting sun, and finally, lit up at night against the Miami skyline.
BIG is getting even bigger.
The firm’s ever expanding project load – since just last fall, 6 projects have been completed with 7 more under construction – has prompted some major changes and expansions, including the establishment of an in-house engineering department in March and the continued development of the think tank research group, BIG IDEAS.
In this profile for Building Design in Construction Network, BIG Managing Partner and Head of Global Business Development Kai-Uwe Bergmann discusses the upcoming move of the firm’s New York office into their new 52,000-square-foot offices in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Dumbo – a space more than double their current location in lower Manhattan – and the shifting role of the practice’s founder and charismatic front man, Bjarke Ingels.
Detailed visions of the concept designs from the seven shortlisted teams in the running for the new Ross Pavilion (named for William Henry Ross, the former chairman of the Distillers Company) have been released. Following the announcement of the competition earlier this year—in which the likes of Adjaye Associates, Bjarke Ingels Group, Sou Fujimoto Architects and Reiulf Ramstad Arkitekter were placed in the running alongside local practices, such as Page\Park—the sensitivity and level of restraint behind the majority of the proposals demonstrates the public and national significance of the site, which sits at the heart of the Scottish capital of Edinburgh.
Google has submitted the design for its new London office to Camden Council for planning approval. Designed by BIG and Heatherwick Studio, the 11-story "groundscraper" design will be located in King's Cross, and will combine with their existing office at 6 Pancras Square and a third, forthcoming building to create a campus for up to 7,000 Google employees.
The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) has announced the four projects shortlisted for the 2017 Moriyama RAIC International Prize. The prize was established in 2014 by Canadian architect Raymond Moriyama along with RAIC and the RAIC Foundation to recognise buildings that are judged to be " transformative within its societal context and reflect Moriyama's conviction that great architecture transforms society by promoting social justice and humanistic values of respect and inclusiveness."
"These projects celebrate human life and shape activity," commented RAIC President Ewa Bieniecka, FIRAC. "They embody innovation, contribute to how we experience space, and explore how spaces allow opportunities for freedom. The four shortlisted projects demonstrate how architecture is generous and gives back to the community. These works have a strong sense of place and connect to their surrounding landscape."
Awarded every two years, the winning project will receive a CAD $100,000 prize and a handcrafted sculpture by Canadian designer Wei Yew. The prize is open to all architects, irrespective of nationality and location. The inaugural prize was won by Chinese architect Li Xiaodong for his design of the Liyuan Library in Jiaojiehe, China.
See the shortlisted projects, after the break.
This year's Copenhagen Architecture Festival (CAFx) offered a wide range of activities, from film screenings to exhibitions on the future of social housing. The festival's fourth edition took place over 11 days and featured more than 150 architectural events in Copenhagen, Aarhus, and Aalborg.
Festival Director Josephine Michau explained that since its first edition, the intention behind CAFx was to bring many local agents together in order to build new dialogues around architecture. As a society, how do we identify with architecture? What values do we ascribe to it? These questions were part of this edition's overarching theme: "Architecture as identity."
.jpg?1507536239 "© Laurian Ghinitoiu")
.jpg?1507536366 "© Laurian Ghinitoiu")
.jpg?1507536738 "© Laurian Ghinitoiu")
.jpg?1507536401 "© Laurian Ghinitoiu")
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_Malcolm_Reading_Consultants_and_Bjarke_Ingels_Group_(BIG).jpg?1497963815 "Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) with JM Architects, WSP Parsons Brinckerho , GROSS.MAX., Charcoalblue, Speirs + Major, JLL, Alan Baxter and People Friendly. Image © Malcolm Reading Consultants / Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)")
_Malcolm_Reading_Consultants_and_Adjaye_Associates.jpg?1497963803 "Adjaye Associates with Morgan McDonnell, BuroHappold Engineering, Plan A Consultants, JLL, Turley, Arup, Sandy Brown, Charcoalblue, AOC Archaeology, Studio LR, FMDC, Interserve and Thomas & Adamson. Image © Malcolm Reading Consultants / Adjaye Associates")
_Malcolm_Reading_Consultans_and_Page_Park_Architects.jpg?1497963875 "Page \ Park Architects, West 8 Landscape Architects and BuroHappold Engineering with Charcoalblue and Muir Smith Evans. Image © Malcolm Reading Consultants / Page \ Park Architects")
_Malcolm_Reading_Consultants_and_lanagan_Lawrence.jpg?1497964129 "Flanagan Lawrence with Gillespies, Expedition Engineering, JLL, Arup and Alan Baxter. Image © Malcolm Reading Consultants / Flanagan Lawrence")
_Malcolm_Reading_Consultants__William_Matthews_Associates_and_Sou_Fujimoto.jpg?1497964107)
.jpg?1495744233 "Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia / John Wardle Architects and NADAAA. Image © Peter Bennetts")
