File:Bjarke ingels group, BIG, bighouse, copenhagen 2006-2010 (4315613408).jpg

bighouse or 8 house, housing and offices, ørestaden, copenhagen, denmark. architects: BIG, bjarke ingels group, 2006-2010.

at 62.000 squaremeter, this new development in ørestad, copenhagen, was first marketed as "big-house" but for the parallel to be perfect, bjarke ingels would have had to rename his office enormous. the house is a giant. this is its short side.

these years of bad acronyms in architecture, with every second office name a four letter word, ingels did well with BIG. it contains both his own initials and a reference to the genuinely collective nature of his company, as well as describing the level of ambition, a sly reference to a great namesake and a nod to rem koolhaas' hugely influential essay on bigness which today reads as something of a manifesto for the work of BIG.

but wheras koolhaas had described bigness as outside the architect's influence - a given to be exploited for its urban potential - the moment he had done so, it became a desireable condition for his followers. that may simply be the logic of the avantgarde, but in the case of bighouse, it proved significant:

the original plan for the ørestad neighbourhood, lousy and out-of-scale as it is, nevertheless insists that a block is divided between several architects and developers. in that sense bighouse is an object of desire, contrary to planning yet willed into existence by authorities, designers, and developers so as to dwarf anything built for the purpose of housing since the moral collapse of late modernism in the nineteen sixties.

the size of the thing does allow for a programmatic complexity of housing typologies, communal facilities, businesses, and engaging patterns of movement unpresidented in copenhagen. the architect explains it better than I can, but I cannot promise you it will be a succes. within the gross stupidity that is the ørestad plan, BIG's ambition to make each building a selfcontained piece of urbanism makes sense, albeit a quixotic kind of sense.

if anyone can pull it off, it is these guys. recently, they have been publishing one brilliant project after the other. the Danish pavillion for the shanghai expo 2010 stands out, its spatial poetry matched by the virtuosity of its steel constructions, calculated by arup. and that was matched if not surpassed by their proposal for the extension of asplund's woodland crematorium, the best by far in a competition where everyone else disappointed, sadly including the jurors who picked a lesser project by a local architect.

BIG's competition entry was a beautiful reminder of the playfulness and the seriousness, asplund could bring together in a single building. see it here but be warned, the PDF file is 14 Mb. significantly, these projects are traditional, discrete pieces of architecture far removed from the excesses of koolhaas' theories of bigness. and koolhaas is probably the right place to end:

"not only is bigness incapable of establishing relationships with the classical city - at most it coexists - but in the quantity and complexity of the facilities it offers, it is itself urban...it does not take its inspiration from givens too often squeezed for the last drop of meaning; it gravitates opportunistically to locations of maximum infrastructure; it is, finally, its own raison d'etre"

- I read this as koolhaas at his most hopeful rather than prophetic. the text is sixteen years old. where do you think the intellectual embrace of opportunism in the recently departed boom economy has left us? did the earth move for you?

south facade. autostitch of several.