bjarke ingels. big.
patrick di rito | February 22nd, 2011
As he prepared his lecture, a glimpse of his computer revealed the emblazoned logotype of ‘Yes Is More,’ the mantra from his archi-comic monograph and a silent premonition of the evening’s refrain. He traced the etymology of this phrase through Mies, Venturi, Philip Johnson, and Barack Obama, recognizing them while slyly situating himself in their company. This playful, yet absolute confidence in his work swayed the talk imperceptibly from cynicism to sincerity, leaving the audience to question when, if ever, the shift had occurred.
In a suit and tennis shoes, he explained ideas of pragmatic utopianism, architectural alchemy, and hedonistic sustainability. Ideas of contradiction and resolution, they involve the interface of opposites and drive his firm’s stated existence ‘at the fertile overlap of the pragmatic and avant-garde.’ By reconciling the ‘boring boxes of high standard’ with experimental promiscuity and creativity, he spoke of arriving at a sustainability without puritanism, and ultimately an architecture that doesn’t exist as a contradiction to its past. ‘We’re not interested in revolution,’ he said, ‘but evolution’.
With reference to a number of his recent projects, he concretized these ideas with his firm’s characteristically impeccable diagrams, renderings, and animations. He talked about an angled mirror on the ceiling of a town hall, forming a ‘democratic periscope,’ and uniting the politicians with their constituents. He mentioned a library in Kazakhstan that resolved its program into a mobius strip, an apartment building that creates its own mountain views, and a recycling plant whose roof doubles as a ski resort. In such simple, yet grand gestures, his architecture rationally composes the program and responds to its requirements, while simultaneously invoking a spark of something ingenious and playful.
The iconic nature of his designs, to some degree an artifact of his design process, and in some cases a political statement, betray an optimistic ambition in the face of economic and creative pessimism. This optimism was a rare, and welcome, mood for the Georgia Tech audience.
-Shota Vashakmadze
[photos courtesy Patrick Di Rito]
[ architecture, atlanta, big, bjarke ingels, lecture ]
I like BIG, I don’t think they’re radically innovative, but they are really good at what they do. Its a move back to an earlier OMA with much better graphic design. I am curious to see how the company itself evolves. They’ve created a narrative, and placed themselves in an evolution from less is more – less is a bore- and then yes is more. Whats next ? Yes = more of the same ? The firm is too young not to undergo changes, hopefully for the better.
yes = buildings as icons. duh! i think we all get the game, but we aren’t as charismatic as bjarke to make it happen ourselves. the astonishing things is that he is 36 and recasting architecture as a young person’s profession. hooray!
i think the next big shift that you will see with the firm is coalescing ideas about the iconic form of the building and the internal programing and spaces of the building.
bjarke keeps on going back to the mountain homes project because it is probably their best success at working with the dualistic ideas of a strong form language and a strong internal [if repetitive] ideas of domesticity. the 8 house attempts to implement the same ideas, but was constrained by a more difficult program.
the project proposed in ny is interesting because formally it is very interesting but how will it operate. the idea of the core going at the end that pokes out the most makes a certain logical sense, but that is the only internal logistic we know of the thing.
if you see the interior photographs of the spaces it is not as if he has forgotten them, they are generally not as much a focal point or a driving force in his diagrams. how do you diagram internal spaces? maybe he will figure out a convincing way to do this. until then all you will see is icons.