BIG | Bjarke Ingels Group

About BIG | Bjarke Ingels Group

BIG, or Bjarke Ingels Group, is an architecture, design and planning practice founded by Bjarke Ingels, who remains Founder and Creative Director. Over roughly two decades the studio has grown from a single founder into an organisation of around 700 people, with its head office in Nordhavn, Copenhagen and additional studios in New York, London, Barcelona, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Zurich and Riyadh.

The practice frames its purpose around complexity. Its own argument is that architects are no longer judged against a single aesthetic standard but against the United Nations' seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, a set of criteria with almost infinite variables. Because sustainability is a question of complex systems and circular design, BIG holds that no individual can hold the answer, and that architects must team with scientists, engineers with biologists, and politicians with entrepreneurs.

The BIG LEAP: Five Integrated Disciplines

BIG describes its structure as the BIG LEAP, an acronym for the disciplines it has brought in house:

• Landscape – public realm, parks, gardens and terraces, with an emphasis on nature-based solutions, biodiversity and biophilia.
• Engineering – technical capability integrated alongside design rather than procured separately.
• Architecture – the core practice across cultural, civic, residential, workplace, education, hospitality, health, retail, sports and infrastructure buildings.
• Planning – campus, city and regional scale strategy, engaging communities, institutions and governments before a building is designed.
• Products – furniture, lighting, mobility, consumer products and installations.

A sixth strand, BIG Vision, works with clients at the idea stage, using analysis, experimentation and iterative design to define ambitions and test limits before a project takes shape.

Design Philosophy

BIG positions itself between two conventional extremes: architecture that is expressive but impractical, and architecture that is rational but uninspiring. The studio calls the overlap pragmatic utopianism, using the cultural, economic and infrastructural forces already flowing through society as the generator of the design rather than as constraints on it.

Related to this is the idea of hedonistic sustainability: the argument that a sustainable city should also be a more enjoyable one. CopenHill, a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen, is the clearest demonstration, with a climbable facade, a hikeable roof and a skiable slope layered onto working industrial infrastructure.

Notable Projects

Cultural and Civic

The Twist at Kistefos sculpture park in Norway operates simultaneously as museum, bridge and inhabitable sculpture. The Panda House at Copenhagen Zoo is organised as a yin and yang plan accessible from all sides. Noma in Copenhagen was reassembled as a cluster of connected buildings around a central kitchen.

Workplace and Commercial

Google Bay View, developed with Gradient Canopy, uses dragonscale solar canopies, geothermal energy piles and rootzone gardens that filter building water; the campus achieved LEED-NC v4 Platinum and Living Building Challenge Water Petal certification. The Spiral in New York rises 1,005 feet with a continuous green pathway winding past workspaces on every level. Galeries Lafayette on the Champs-Elysees reworked a 1932 Art Deco bank into a retail space organised around a glass cupola.

Residential, Sport and Health

VIA 57 West in Manhattan fuses the courtyard and the skyscraper into what BIG calls a courtscraper. The Athletics ballpark on the Las Vegas Strip seats 33,000 under five overlapping shells shaped like baseball pennants. Elsinore Psychiatric Hospital replaces clinical finishes with natural wood, glass and colour.

Planning and Frontier Work

At city and regional scale, BIG has designed Toyota Woven City, a 170-acre living laboratory for mobility at the foot of Mount Fuji, and BiodiverCity, a vision for the Penang region built around waterways, rail and personal mobility. Oceanix City, developed with UN-Habitat, proposes a floating community for 10,000 residents anchored in the Sustainable Development Goals. The NASA Olympus habitats explore robotic construction using only in-situ resources with zero waste.

Products and Collaborations

BIG's product work spans lighting with Artemide, Louis Poulsen and Fritz Hansen, furniture including the Brick sofa for Jot.Jot and the VIA chair, the HAV porcelain collection for Royal Copenhagen, the DUO smart lock, reusable TURN cups, hyperloop pods designed with Virgin Hyperloop One, and bicycles with Biomega.

Why BIG Matters to the AEC Industry

BIG is one of the clearest contemporary examples of a design practice absorbing adjacent disciplines rather than coordinating them externally. Bringing landscape, engineering, planning and product design under one roof changes how early design decisions are made, and the studio's project record shows the result: infrastructure that doubles as public amenity, workplaces designed around measured environmental performance, and masterplans developed as testbeds for mobility and energy systems. For architects and developers, BIG offers a well-documented body of work on how sustainability ambitions can be expressed as form rather than added as compliance.