Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) have been revealed as the winners of a competition to conceptualize and design a new headquarters and bottling plant for San Pellegrino, located in the terme of the same name in the Alps of northern Italy. Finalists included MVRDV, Snøhetta, and aMDL, each of whom presented their proposals in October last year.
With two weeks of nominations and voting now complete, we are happy to present the winners of the 2017 ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards. As a peer-based, crowdsourced architecture award, these winners were chosen by the collective intelligence of over 75,000 votes from ArchDaily readers around the world, filtering over 3,000 projects down to the 16 best works featured on ArchDaily in 2016.
The winners, as always, include a diversity of architectural output from around the globe. Alongside high-profile, perhaps even predictable winners—who would have bet against BIG's first completed project in New York or Herzog & de Meuron's long-awaited philharmonic hall in Hamburg?—are more niche and surprise winners, from Nicolás Campodonico's off-grid chapel in Argentina to ARCHSTUDIO's organic food factory in China. The list also features some returning favorites such as spaceworkers, whose Casa Cabo de Vila brings them their second win in the housing category, repeating their success from 2015.
In being published on ArchDaily, these 16 exemplary buildings have helped us to continue our mission, bringing inspiration, knowledge, and tools to architects around the world. This award wouldn't be possible without the hundreds of firms that choose to publish their projects with ArchDaily every year, or without those who take part in the voting process to become part of our thousands-strong awards jury. To everyone who took part—either by submitting a project in the past year, or by nominating and voting for candidates in the past weeks—thank you for giving strength to this award. And of course, congratulations to all the winners!
Read on to see the full list of winning projects.
On February 10 2017, Netflix will launch a new documentary series—Abstract: The Art of Design—which will present "the most creative designers" from various fields in the design word, with the aim of demonstrating how design influences all aspects of our lives. One of the eight protagonists in the spotlight will be Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, of BIG, who will present his vision of architecture alongside professionals in interior design, graphic design, automotive design, illustration, and set design.
Check out the series feature designers after the break:
BIG are known for unconventional buildings that often raise the question “how were they able to do that?” Such is the case for BIG’s Honeycomb, a luxury eight-story condominium currently under construction in the Bahamas. The project’s hallmark is its hexagonal façade made up of private balconies, each with its own glass-fronted outdoor pool. The façade was also the project’s greatest engineering challenge, with each balcony (including pool water) weighing between 108,000 and 269,000 pounds (48,000-122,000 kilograms) while cantilevering up to 17.5 feet (5.3 meters) from the structure. Tasked with this challenging brief were DeSimone Consulting Engineers, who previously worked with BIG on The Grove. Read on for more detail on the Honeycomb’s innovative engineering.
“The good news is that if we have the power to radically transform our planet by accident, imagine what we can do if we are actually trying to do it. Once you’ve accepted that there is no way we can be here without having a very, very significant influence on our planet, you just have to take it as a positive.”
BIG has revealed plans for a 2.6 million square foot (242,000 square meter) mixed-use complex in LA’s burgeoning Arts District. Called 670 Mesquit, the project will take the form of a series of stepped boxes containing 800,000 square feet of office space, 250 residential units and two hotels. The development will mark BIG’s first project in Los Angeles.
Update: following the screening period The Infinite Happiness is no longer available to watch on ArchDaily. The full collection of Bêka and Lemoine's films can be viewed on demand, here.
For two days only—between Friday, December 2 and Sunday, December 4—you can watch The Infinite Happiness, part of Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine's Living Architectures series, exclusively on ArchDaily. The film, shot entirely in Copenhagen's "8 House" designed by BIG, follows a group of residents (and passers-by) as they experience life in a contemporary housing block widely considered to embody new models of living.
BIG and Barcode Architects have been selected as the winning team in a competition to design a new mixed-use building in the emerging district of IJburg Steigereiland in Amsterdam. To be known as Sluishuis (Lock House), the building will serve as a new icon connecting the neighborhood to Amsterdam’s historic center while providing 380 zero-energy residences, 4,000 square meters of commercial and public space, and a marina with space for up to 30 houseboats.
Filmmakers Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, creators of the Living Architectures seminal collection of films on architecture, will screen The Infinite Happiness—shot entirely in Copenhagen's "8 House" designed by BIG—exclusively on ArchDaily from Friday, December 2 until Sunday, December 4.
Marking the forthcoming release of two DVD box-sets of their entire œuvre (which was acquired by New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2016) Bêka and Lemoine have, over the course of the Living Architectures project, developed films about and in collaboration with the likes of the Barbican in London, the Fondazione Prada, La Biennale di Venezia, Frank Gehry, Bjarke Ingels, the City of Bordeaux, the Arc en Rêve centre d’architecture, and more. Their goal in this has always been to "democratize the highbrow language of architectural criticism. [...] Free speech on the topic of architecture," Bêka has said, "is not the exclusive property of experts." Their first film, Koolhaas Houselife (2008), has come to embody this unique approach.
Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Public Design Commission have announced the winners of their 2016 Awards for Excellence in Design. Established in 1983, the award has been bestowed annually to projects from the city’s five boroughs that “exemplify how innovative and thoughtful design can provide New Yorkers with the best possible public spaces and services and engender a sense of civic pride.” Both built and unbuilt projects are considered for the award. Previous winners have included Studio Gang’s Fire Rescue 2 (2015), the Louis Kahn-designed Four Freedoms Park (2014), and Steven Holl’s Hunters Point Library (2011).
BIG and Heatherwick Studio have been selected as the architects for the new Google Headquarters at their King’s Cross campus in London. The ten story, 650,000 square foot building will be the first wholly owned and designed Google facility to built outside of the United States, and is part of a campus expansion plan that will eventually contain offices for 7,000 employees.
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In this latest photoset, photographer Laurian Ghinitiou gives us a first look at BIG’s Transitlager, a new mixed-use arts complex located within and around an existing warehouse building in Basel, Switzerland. Now nearing completion, the renovation and expansion is characterized by its reaction to the existing geometries of the nearby industrial infrastructure, taking the form of two distinct buildings, one placed on top of the other. The complex will contain a series of multifunctional floors for art, commerce, working and living in becoming the center of the new arts district of Dreispitz.
Check out the full series, below.
Earlier this year, Hyperloop One announced a list of design partners that included Aecom, Arup, and Bjarke Ingels Group. Now, RB Systems—which was a finalist in the SpaceX Hyperloop One Pod Competition—has released a speculative design vision for a Hyperloop station and passenger pod. The spatial and programmatic concepts are largely experimental, as there are no precedents for this futuristic building typology.
Want to know how BIG's VIA 57 West was designed? Let Bjarke Ingels explain it you himself in this new 360 degree video from creative production house Squint/Opera.
Shot in incredible 4K video, the video uses motion graphics and CGI overlays to take you through the building's construction while Ingels provides commentary on the design of the"courtscraper," winner of the 2016 International Highrise Award.
And for the full immersive experience, the video can be viewed through a VR headset using the youtube app on your smartphone.
BIG and French studio Silvio d'Ascia have been selected to design the new Pont de Bondy metro station in Paris. The station is the latest design to be announced as part of the Société du Grand París’ Grand Paris Express project, which is seeking to modernize the existing transport network through the addition of nearly 200 kilometers of rail lines and a series of architect-designed stations throughout the city.
Of a total of 68 new stations, nine have been labeled as “emblematic,” meaning that they are expected to serve as significant neighborhood nodes within the larger masterplan. The Pont de Bondy station will constitute one of these emblematic projects, joining designs from Kengo Kuma & Associates, Dominique Perrault, Enric Miralles Benedetta Tagliabue (EMBT) and Bordas+Peiro, Agence Duthilleul, and Elizabeth de Portzamparc.
Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Hyperloop One have unveiled joint designs for an autonomous transportation system and the world’s first Hyperloop pods and portals in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The designs are being presented as Hyperloop One signs a deal with the Dubai Roads and Transport Authority (RTA), bringing the project one step closer to reality.
Today, at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Bjarke Ingels and BIG were presented with the International Highrise Award for Via 57 West, their "courtscraper" building in Manhattan. The following speech, which has been translated from the original German by Clara Jaschke, was delivered by architecture critic and curator Bart Lootsma at the event.
I was truly delighted when Peter Cachola Schmal called me to ask whether I would deliver the citation for Bjarke Ingels and BIG at this year’s edition of the International Highrise Award.
Just the weekend before I had been thinking that I should write something about BIG. For weeks, one spectacular and interesting project after another had been popping up on Bjarke’s, Kai-Uwe Bergmann’s and a couple of others’ Facebook pages.
BIG has completed their second building on U.S. soil, a 92,000-square-foot office building at 1200 Intrepid Avenue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that also marks the firm’s first realized office building design. Located within the revitalized Philadelphia Navy Yard master plan (designed by Robert Stern), the four-story building features a bowing, double-curved facade and a supersized “periscope” inspired by the historic battleships docked a few blocks away.
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