BIG

West 57th street, NY

Amagerforbraendingen Waste to Energy plant

Danish pavilion at Shanghai World Expo

8 house Copenhagen 

V house Copenhagen

Last night I went to an amazing conference by David Zahle from BIG architects, one of the most up and coming architectural firms on the international scene. It was fascinating, he presented us about 10 projects, most of them residential, and proceeded to explain the whole thought process behind the concept and the realization of each completed project.

What made the conference so captivation was Zahle, he was so energetic and charismatic, you could really sense how passionate he is about his work. BIG is pretty much takes a project and explodes it into something that is useful for society as well as visually striking, their motto being "Yes is More". Take for example the Amagerforbraendingen Waste to Energy plant, the contest brief was to simply create an envelope for the plant, but they decided to turn it into something for the people. Hence they created an urban ski hill, with vertical gardens and a smoke stack releasing ironic smoke rings. 

The slide presentation was also super fun, he really went from A to Z for each project, showing easy to understand but very well thought of diagrams as well as video presentations for some of them. Just to show how fun they are, they used Empire State of Mind as a soundtrack for their first American project, West 57th street. 

In a couple of weeks I have a conference by an architect from SOM, on of the world leaders in architecture, somehow I have a feeling that exposé will be a little less dynamic...