Brooklyn bound: BIG has expanded into a new Dumbo-based building in NYC. The new office at 45 Main Street occupies an open plan floor stretching the full footprint of the building, complete with 360 degree views to Manhattan, Brooklyn and beyond. It’s the new studio for over 250 employees with a private rooftop and cafeteria, which has been designed by the in-house interiors team.
Brooklyn bound: Beneath high ceilings, the studio in Dumbo has a material and model library, and a larger room with high ceilings and skylights fits BIG’s large scale models and mock-ups. The workshop space has quadrupled in size and now has two large fabrication and assembly spaces for wood working and digital fabrication.
Winning friends and influencing people: for W*229, Wallpaper* visited Bjarke Ingels in his Copenhagen studio to find out more about his design for the new Noma – the award-winning Copenhagen restaurant that frequently graces the ‘World’s 50 Best Restaurants’ list. Ingels became friendly with Noma owners René Redzepi and Peter Kreiner after he organised the first board meeting of his practice, BIG, at the original Noma, so it’s no wonder he was the first architect to come to mind for this project. Two other practices were brought on to offer competing proposals, but it was BIG’s plan – a cluster of seven small buildings forming a village that ‘breathes and lives’ – that emerged as the clear choice. Find out more about the new Noma here. Photography: Jan Søndergaard
On turning architecture inside-out: for the boat-shaped, underground Danish Maritime Museum, Bjarke Ingels turned the principles of building upside-down. Instead of covering an industrial dock space with the museum – which he considered ‘architectural suicide’, he decided fashion a solution that would leave it open, wrapping the galleries around the empty dock, mimicking the shape of a life-sized boat.
‘We weren’t allowed to build as much as a metre above ground, so as not to obstruct the view of the Kronborg Castle,’ explains Ingels. ‘Instead, we placed the museum below water level and turned the museum inside out, creating a giant loop of galleries that protect the courtyard in the middle.’ Photography: Jan Søndergaard
No end to experimentation: BIG’s design for the 2016 Serpentine Pavilion, a sinuous wave of jagged blocks, plays games with scale, creating a miniature realisation of the megastructural ziggurats the Danish studio is so adeptly building around the world.
