The escalating complexity of the world and the accelerating speed of change exceed any individual’s capacity to comprehend. For architects operating today, the Golden Ratio is no longer the standard - rather, the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals are. From a single elegant equation, architects are now held to multidimensional success criteria with almost infinite variables.
Since sustainability is inherently a question of complex systems, circular design, and holistic thinking, no single person holds the solution. As architects and urbanists, we must team with scientists, engineers with biologists, politicians with entrepreneurs, to combine skill sets and perspectives, knowledge and sensibility, to match the complexity of the challenges we face. As future formgivers, we aren't defined by our individual talents or singular skill sets - but rather by our capacity to pool the skills of the many to give our future form. BIG has grown organically over the last two decades from a founder, to a family, to a force of 700. Our latest transformation is the BIG LEAP: Bjarke Ingels Group of Landscape, Engineering, Architecture, Planning, and Products. A plethora of in-house perspectives allows us to see what none of us would be able to see on our own. The sum of our individual talents becomes our collective creative genius. A small step for each of us becomes a BIG LEAP for all of us.
Bjarke Ingels
Founder & Creative Director
LANDSCAPE
As public space and biodiversity are subtracted in urban spaces, BIG Landscape works with architects and other disciplines to integrate the built and natural worlds, connecting people to people, and people to nature. With every project, we go beyond the brief to give the gift of public space to the communities in which we work, creating equitable and accessible public spaces for all.
Our work not only responds to challenges today, it mitigates challenges of the future: we approach every project as an opportunity to use nature-based solutions for social and technological integration, community building, ecology preservation, biophilia, and biodiversity enhancement to design sustainable, smarter, and safer cities.
ARCHITECTURE
We take on the creation of socially, economically and environmentally perfect places as a practical objective. Traditionally, architecture is dominated by two extremes: one that is very wild and expressive, but also expensive and unrealistic, and the other – that is practical and rational, but may also be un-ambitious and uninspiring. We try to occupy the overlap between the two extremes, a place where we use all the different forces that flow through society – the cultural and economic structures, infrastructure itself – as the driving force of the design. Our “pragmatic utopian” designs include powerplants where you can ski on the roof, flood protection that doubles like playgrounds or parks - parking structures that become mountains of houses with gardens – or a three-dimensional urban block where people can walk and bicycle along townhouses all the way to the 10th story penthouse. All seem and sound utopian in their ambition or radical combination of seemingly incompatible elements – but once realized they form an integrated part of our everyday lives.
PRODUCTS
Our BIG Product team makes product design a literal extension of our efforts in architecture. Architects rarely have the possibility to specify a building component from scratch, limiting our imagination to what is already on the shelves. Our work in furniture, lighting, transportation, and IoT ensures that we connect the big picture to the small details, increasing our overall influence on the built environment.
PLANNING
BIG Planning takes a comprehensive view on the built environment, supporting our teams and clients in thinking in the long-term and across multiple scales and systems. We engage with clients early in their process – before a building is built, or a landscape is designed, to help answer fundamental questions: what, where, why, and for whom should we be building? We engage deeply with communities, institutions, and governments to help answer these questions, and build consensus amongst complex stakeholder groups in the process. We add value to projects by constantly returning to the big picture - in an age of climate change, aging infrastructure, heavy population growth, and rapid urbanization, built investments must work overtime to achieve social, economic, and environmental success. BIG Planning pursues these goals relentlessly, with results ranging from resilient urban design to regional visioning, and from campus masterplans to planetary strategy.
VISION
BIG Vision brings focus and form to your ideas. As your thought-partner, we translate ideas at any stage into physical space, bringing them one step closer to reality- in the form of an experience, product, building or city.
We unlock potential through analysis, experimentation and methodical design. We provoke, test the limits, explore new perspectives and ask the right questions during a series of bespoke engagements. This design approach defines project ambitions, explores its value, and gives clients the tools to make decisions and realize it.
We believe in the power of unexpected findings when great thinkers, open dialogue and iterative design come together to drive consensus and solve global and human problems.
