BIG lecture

Last week I managed to fit into the packed Slocum auditorium at SU to see Bjarke Ingels present a lecture titled Hedonistic Sustainability. Bjarke Ingels is the founder of the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) based out of Copenhagen, Denmark.

It was a very refreshing and interesting presentation. I couldn't help but be absolutely amazed at the uniqueness and clearness of his work. Each project he presented had a clear large concept and was presented in such a way that you were convinced that it was the only possible solution to the issue at hand. Bjarke has a unique ability to bring humor to both his work and presentation; definitely something I have not seen from many of the other lectures at SU or ESF.

There were far too many projects presented for me to comment on any in particular, but they all were connected by there ability to begin to connect complex systems together, in a way forming an architectural ecosystem. I hope to be able to have my off campus study (more to come on this later) be related to this kind of large scale thinking.

Loop City

Loop City

I highly encourage anyone interested in learning more about BIG's work to explore their website. It has a great amount of images for each project. I particularly like how the website is organized the icons are a great representation of Bjarke's style. Also BIG has several books published on their work. I plan on ordering their monograph Yes is More, later this week.

Tomorrow, Walter Hood is presenting at SU. I hope to make over to see his presentation. It is great and rather fascinating to see that SU architecture has had a long list of landscape architects present in the past year.