Exhibit Showcases 10 Years of the Bjarke Ingels Group's Architecture
On the heels of the unveiling of its plan to remake the Smithsonian’s Castle grounds in Washington, the Bjarke Ingels Group has taken over the imposing atrium and second-floor arcade of the National Building Museum across town for a retrospective of a decade of daring design.
Topped with a ski slope, the Amager Bakke waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen will double as a tourist attraction when it opens in 2017. The project is one of dozens by the Bjarke Ingels Group that is being featured "Hot to Cold: an Odyssey of Architectural Adaptation," a retrospective exhibit of the firm's work that runs through August 30 at the National Building Museum in Washington.
"Hot to Cold: an Odyssey of Architectural Adaptation" opened January 24 and runs through August 30, 2015. The multimedia exhibition traces the history of the firm, which the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels founded in 2005, and turned into an ideas laboratory for improving dense urban environments.
The Big U is the firm’s ambitious plan to protect Manhattan from a Sandy-like hurricane by ringing the lower half of the island with 10-foot, sculptural berms.
Highlighted projects include the Big U, the firm’s ambitious plan to protect Manhattan from a Sandy-like hurricane by ringing the lower half of the island with 10-foot, sculptural berms; a waste-burning energy plant in Copenhagen topped with a ski slope; and a pyramid-shaped apartment building on Manhattan’s West 57th Street. More than 60 architectural models are on display, some of which are suspended from the third level to make clever use of the atrium space.
The firm created the model for the Lego House in Billund, Denmark, with—what else?—Lego blocks. The building, conceived as a "hands-on, minds-on experience center," is scheduled to be completed in 2016.
"The city is an ongoing project of constant creation and recreation through refurbishment, modification, adaptation," Ingels said in a statement. "It is all part of a never-ending journey toward crafting the world of our dreams."
The firm's $2 billion plan to reconfigure the Smithsonian Castle grounds in Washington includes raised entryways for the Sackler Gallery and the National Museum of African Art that would slightly bend and contort the Haupt Garden, creating a sort of tabbed topography.
The Mountain Dwellings in Copenhagen consists of apartments arranged in the shape of an artificial mountainside atop a parking garage.
The twisting shape of the Vancouver House building, expected to be built in that city by 2018, was dictated by setback requirements.
The firm's design for Zootopia, a zoo in Givskud, Denmark, seeks to "integrate and hide" buildings in the landscape.
West 57th, a pyramid-shaped residential tower now taking place on the far west side of Midtown Manhattan, is the firm's first major project in New York City.
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