“Big is more”: Bjarke Ingels´ new architecture project in New York

by Editorial Team | Feb 21, 2011 in Experimentation & Innovation | Leave A Comment

The great names in architecture didn’t have a lot of luck in New York City, recently. Not that they didn’t try. For a tiny lot on the East river, Santiago Calatrava designed a giant cantilevered step ladder in the sky. It was supposed to be the highest apartment building in the city, but nobody dared to buy one of the “residential cubes”. Then the recession hit. Herzog & de Meuron’s idea wasn’t so different: 56 floors stacked irregularly for their Tribeca residential tower. In 2009 the project was shelved. Jean Nouvel’s slender 330 meter Tower Verre next to the Museum of Modern Art hit a similar fate. But not before New York’s notoriously conservative preservationists successfully lobbied to have the height reduced by sixty meters. Nobody knows when construction will start, if ever.

Now Bjarke Ingels, the 36 year old shooting star from Denmark, mostly unknown in the US, will break this trend. His firm is called Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG. It was founded in Copenhagen in 2005 and just opened an office in New York. BIG really thinks big: to explain his radical approach to architecture he published the 400-page manifesto “Yes Is More” in the format of a comic book. Jumping from various famous architects’ mottos – “Less Is More” (Mies van der Rohe), “Less Is a Bore” (Robert Venturi), “I’m a Whore” (Philip Johnson), “More Is More” (Rem Koolhaas, in whose office Ingels worked for three years), to Obama’s “Yes, We Can!”, we end up with Ingels’ smiling “Yes Is More.”

The site is an empty lot in the no mans’ land on the Western edge of Midtown, where 57th Street meets the West Side Highway. The project is big by any standard. It will have more than 600 apartments of different scale located on a platform with shops and cultural spaces. It will be more than 40 stories or 140 meters tall. But it is not a skyscraper, not even a revisited one. It seems to be an entirely new genre, something in between two opposites: the typical European city block with its enclosed courtyard and a traditional New York high-rise building. From the fusion of the two, Ingels obtains what he calls “a new urban hybrid”. “Essentially we keep it as flat as possible toward the waterfront, to open up to the river and the views, and the roof scape tilts, becoming increasingly vertical, until it reaches the height of the tower”, says Ingels. “That also means that the courtyard, normally this secret thing which is only visible for the residents, is going to become the main facade, facing the West Side waterfront and the Hudson River Park, revealing that the rejuvenation of the city is continuing within the city’s fabric”.

The building seems to mutate continuously as the point of view changes. It is half of a pyramid from the North, a tall glass spire from the East, a frame-shaped rectangular from above, a sloping parabola from the West, and if seen from the river it looks like a complex figure that resembles a mountain peak – the latter being one of the new archetypes of BIG’s architecture. All the apartments are slightly tilted to give them the best possible views, causing the dematerialization of the blank facade. Using a contemporary take of the bay window he creates a cubist 3D pattern which offsets the sloping roof-facade.

Many aspects of the building’s shape are designed to improve its energy efficiency and livability. It aims in fact to meet the criteria of the LEED Gold Certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), a rating system set by the US Green Building Council. The debate about sustainability and innovation in architecture was actually what brought together Ingels and the developer Douglas Durst. Ingels impressed Durst, who was giving a talk in Copenhagen on green high rises, when he asked him: “Why do all your buildings look like buildings?” When Durst, after various failed attempts to develop the site, looked for an architect who “could make a place where there isn’t one”, Ingels with his irreverent ideas was the perfect fit.

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