The most disruptive architecture studio of its generation, with a multinational team of over 700 professionals, from Copenhagen to New York.
Awards
World Building of the Year
AIA Honor Award
Leone d’Oro – Biennale di Venezia
Crystal Award – World Economic Forum
Iconic Projects
CopenHill – Copenhagen
VIA 57 West – New York
8 House – Copenhagen
The Spiral — New York
Offices Worldwide
Copenhagen
New York
Londra
Barcellona
Shanghai
Los Angeles
Design Products
Lampade Stellar Nebula – Artemide
Sedia Shanghay – HAY
Alphabet of Light – Artemide
Founded
2005 – Bjarke Ingels
Oltre 700 collaboratori
About
BIG — Bjarke Ingels Group is an architecture, urban planning, engineering, landscape and product design studio founded in Copenhagen in 2005 by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels.
From a small team of designers, the studio has grown to include more than seven hundred architects, designers, builders and thinkers operating from its offices in Copenhagen, New York, London, Barcelona, Shanghai and Los Angeles. A deliberately multinational structure, where every project emerges from the intersection of different cultures, disciplines and geographies.
BIG’s architecture is born from a careful analysis of how contemporary life is constantly evolving—driven by multicultural exchange, global economic flows and emerging technologies. From this perspective emerge buildings that are both pragmatic and visionary: the waste-to-energy plant and ski slope CopenHill, the inhabited pyramid of VIA 57 West in Manhattan, the figure-eight block of 8 House, the sculpted tower of The Spiral, and the Gelephu Mindfulness City in Bhutan.
Bjarke Ingels (Copenhagen, 1974) studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and at the School of Architecture in Barcelona. He worked with Rem Koolhaas at OMA before founding PLOT and later establishing BIG. His method—diagrammatic, narrative and almost comic-book-like—has transformed architecture into an accessible language, capable of communicating complex ideas with remarkable clarity and immediacy.
Philosophy
Yes Is More. BIG seeks a third path between naïve avant-garde experimentation and conservative practice: an architecture that is both practical and capable of imagining new worlds, where constraints—economic, climatic or regulatory—become the very material of the project.
It is the idea of hedonistic sustainability: doing the right thing for the planet can also be, quite simply, more enjoyable. CopenHill is its manifesto—a waste-to-energy plant that features a year-round ski slope on its roof.
By mixing traditional ingredients—housing, retail, workplaces and public spaces—in unconventional ways, the studio creates added value, “if not gold.” Form is never arbitrary; it is the necessary consequence of an idea. “We shift the focus from the small details to the BIG picture.”
