Big Ideas

BIG is an archi­tec­ture firm based in and prac­tic­ing mainly in Copenhagen that has been churn­ing out some pretty inno­v­a­tive ideas. One of our favorites is their VM Bjerget (VM stands for Vestamager, the neigh­bor­hood in which it’s located, and bjer­get means “moun­tain”). This apart­ment com­plex doesn’t hide its park­ing struc­ture under­ground or behind an ugly façade. Instead, the garage rises up sev­eral sto­ries, shrouded in per­fo­rated metal which, when you stand back, forms the image of a moun­tain range. The apart­ments sit on top of the stepped struc­ture, giv­ing each its own terrace.

But BIG wasn’t sat­is­fied just mak­ing the out­side of the build­ing attrac­tive. The metal façade hides a sur­pris­ing and inno­v­a­tive inte­rior. The hall­ways on each floor lead­ing to the apart­ments have walls of win­dows look­ing down into the park­ing, and each is painted a dif­fer­ent color. From inside the garage, these hall­ways form a rain­bow of light over­head. The walls of the garage have murals stained into them, and even the traf­fic mark­ings on the floor are dif­fer­ent from any­thing we’ve seen before.

Another of BIG’s recent projects is a tower designed for a site near the cen­ter of Copenhagen. The city is known for its exten­sive net­work of pedes­trian pub­lic spaces, and BIG used this to their advan­tage. They tem­pered the pos­si­ble neg­a­tive reac­tion of hav­ing a build­ing taller than its sur­round­ings by incor­po­rat­ing a pub­lic space that climbs up the façade of the building.

The build­ing starts out as a giant stair­way ris­ing out of the ground, lead­ing up to the var­i­ous facil­i­ties in the building—a store, a library, a hotel—gradually twist­ing and get­ting steeper. Eventually the stairs grace­fully turn into a ver­ti­cal tower ris­ing out of the pub­lic plaza they’ve created.

BIG also has an extremely infor­ma­tive web­site. Make sure to check it out and watch the ani­ma­tions explain­ing how they come up with the inven­tive forms of their buildings.

Michael Tyznik.HighStreet.Columbus