Bjarke Ingels Group’s new waterside Copenhagen HQ represents a gratifying act of defiance, in the home city upon whose architecture the practice has had such an impact
When BIG appeared in the mid-2000s, it catalysed what has been called a ‘new wave’ in Danish architecture. Large parts of the field were still dominated by earnest men, steadily exhausting their beloved Danish modernism. With a conceptually driven approach, cultured at OMA in Rotterdam, founder Bjarke Ingels brought a more playful attitude.
Colourful and geometrically compelling models seduced an entire generation of architects. Meanwhile, Ingels’ open-minded and cartoon-like building concepts instituted a new enthusiasm for architecture among Copenhageners, paving the way for numerous now well-established architectural offices.
Having successfully turned its view abroad for a good decade, Bjarke Ingels Group has now reconsolidated in Copenhagen with a notable office building for itself – a ‘headquarters’ as it is called, with a hint of megalomania.
BIG HQ: finding its place on a historic waterfront
The building sits at the tip of a broad pier in the North Harbour. Apart from water, it is surrounded by warehouses reused by creative businesses, and an extensive recent housing development. North of the pier is the Copenhagen shipping terminal, with its stacked containers and crane constructions. These function as a backdrop for the prominent structure in long views from the harbour’s historic heart.
Conceptually, the building starts as a 40m2 plan. For the external walls, deep concrete beams around 20m long are stacked with slight overlaps, leaving half the facade as openings and generating a bold chequerboard pattern.
Geometric order is further disturbed by the tapering pier, which produces an irregular plot and a chamfer in the plan. This results in an odd number of beams, with just a single one on the shortest side.
Ingels’ eyes light up when explaining how the introduction of one triangular beam on each level solved this problem, preserving the concrete-always-meets-glass system. These triangular beams are extruded to form a 140m-long external fire stair winding all around the building, offering balcony spaces on all floors.
The internal organisation eschews the standard office building’s central core, pushing all servant functions to the northern facade and leaving a giant internal volume. To create a single work environment, workspace is arranged over six open decks spanning this void, arranged at half-storey intervals so that the overall height of the building is just 27m.
These decks are supported from the external walls and a single central column. Placed at diverse angles, they produce a great spatial variety and a thoroughly dynamic office-scape.
The decks are connected by a black steel staircase that acts as a bold sculptural element. While its flights appear straight, meeting the angled decks called for a sophisticated geometry.
It culminates in the flight connecting level 5 with levels 6 and 7, where the steps wind to allow for a triangular platform halfway without disturbing the appearance of a straight run. This is the energising geometric play on which BIG was founded.
Windows onto Copenhagen's sky, water, city and industry
If BIG was once accused of lacking interest in materials and details, its new building proves otherwise. Exposed concrete is neatly cast in-situ. Slender profiles of raw aluminium frame the outlooks to sky, water, city and industry. The northern interior wall is clad in luxurious pine planks, also adapted to make cupboard doors, perforated HVAC inlets, and shelves for innumerable small, white diagrammatic models.
A minimalistic yet characterful balustrade in different finishes edges the many balconies. On a small, pleasing pine mezzanine by the entrance, it has a brassy-looking chromate conversion coating; elsewhere it is blackened or galvanised steel.
Felt panels are suspended between downstand beams to regulate acoustics and hide services, and perfectly match the colour of the concrete slabs. Beige rather than grey curtains match the softer tone of concrete with reduced lime content. The central column is given a classical symbolic weight by the use of natural stone from various quarries, with the softest Italian Carrara on top, over Swedish marble and landing on the strongest Norwegian granite carrying the heaviest load on the ground floor.
I am drawn by the sculptural and aesthetic qualities of the volume and the materials. The overall figure is plain, but destabilised by the diagonals and winding balconies, setting it in motion. It is a welcome antidote to the neoclassical movement presently haunting the Nordic countries. It refuses aesthetic compromise and thereby stands out from the vast majority of urban development in Copenhagen.
Nevertheless, a statement this bold isn’t made with impunity. With its distinct, straightforward architectural approach, BIG has become a pet aversion for many. For these critics, there was great joy when the HQ proposal was initially rejected by city authorities with the comment that ‘the parties do not find the building aesthetically satisfactory and wish furthermore a more climate-friendly choice of materials’.
Following a discussion on the role of architectural representations in the planning process and politicians’ authority as aesthetic judges, however, the plan passed. Unusually, the final building appears much like the first renders, and the municipality has subsequently awarded it an official prize.
Where are the BIG ideas on sustainability?
While measures have been taken to improve energy consumption in use – including solar and geothermal systems – and the structure uses new UniGreen concrete that gives a 25 per cent reduction in embodied carbon, it is fair to say that this is not an architecture primarily conceived to counter the crises of our time.
For an architectural practice, building its own office is an artistic and ideological manifesto. In that light it is remarkable – alarming, even – that BIG has not used the opportunity to make a clear statement on architecture’s relevance in a green transition.
As Ingels reasonably points out, though, all buildings on the harbour piers – including high-profile recent additions – are concrete constructions in disguise. The office blocks are generally wrapped in some thin metal, while the more reserved housing blocks are clad in brick in ‘50 shades of brown’, as he once teasingly characterised them. Revealing the concrete in the facade of the BIG HQ may come with aggravated aesthetic connotations, but it is no worse for the climate.
In a more local environmental improvement, the building is surrounded by a pocket park with lyme grass and pine trees, which grow well in the tough climate and sandy soil. In the centre of the park, a work by Californian sculptor Benjamin Langholz comprises stones organised in a logarithmic spiral, rising inwards on steel poles.
One is drawn to climb the stones, which become increasingly unstable the higher one ascends: a delicate balance between play and gravity. By finishing the pier tip with this little public garden, the BIG HQ has made it a destination of great value for joggers and for creative workers’ strolls.
Despite the material and tectonic gravity that BIG has picked up with this project, playfulness and humour have not been obliterated. They are subtler and sometimes more sophisticated here, though, than in many previous projects.
The entrance door would fit unnoticed in The Fifth Element. Adjacent exhausts are sculpted as the morse code for BIG. It’s a cute, geeky touch, but when an architect has such global impact, playing comes with an obligation to engage in pressing problems. It is harder to identify evidence of that.
In other ways, BIG has nonetheless taken on an unusually large responsibility. Reflecting each initial letter of the firm’s multi-disciplinary offer, dubbed LEAP, it has handled landscape, engineering, architecture and product design in-house.
A self-confident monument on Copenhagen's harbour
As a work of architecture, the HQ is correspondingly consistent, uncompromising and sharp-edged, from details to the overall volume. It is something like a gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, so reconnecting the practice to the modern Danish architectural culture it has revolutionised.
The potential of the gesamtkunstwerk as an architectural strategy is limited in today’s world. But for this particular project it seems justified, and it is certainly gratifying to experience.
It is furthermore an honourable act of defiance in a field whose influence is increasingly marginalised in the processes of building. Engaging so unambiguously in that battle demonstrates the drive and power that BIG possesses.
The building’s top floor was originally thought of as Ingels’ private residence, but was later integrated into the office, with access to a large roof terrace. From up here, ‘BIGsters’ can now overlook the city whose architecture they have transformed.
The BIG HQ lives up to this status by adding one of the most self-confident and successful monuments in the Copenhagen harbour.
In numbers
GIA £4,880m2
Reliance on renewable energy 60%
Pocket park 1,500m2
Number of employees in Copenhagen 300
Internal staircase 140m
Collaborators
Pihl & Søn, LM Byg, Aalborg Portland, Centrum Pæle, Connex, El-team Vest, Energy Machines, Skel.dk, Paschal Stillads, Kjellerup VVS, HB Trapper, Eiler Thomsen, Deko, Brønnum, Primatag, Optimus, Krak Bau, Alt om Fugning ApS, YOUR PARTNER, Kvadrat Acoustics, GOTESSONS, Akustik Miljø, Dansk Belægningsenterprise, NO.BA Studio, Ceramica Cielo, TONI Copenhagen, Dinesen Floors A/S, Influit, Helden, Artelia Group, DTU, Popl, Rambøll, EcoBeton Danmark ApS, PD Elevator, Fritz Hansen, Muller van Severen, Aluflam, Artemide, Funktionen, Windowmaster, Byggeweb, Viasol, Schüco, Anker & Co., E. Nielsens Mekaniske Stenhuggeri A/S, Allremove, Miele, SHURE, Shack Trapper, BoConcept