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Few architecture firms have shaped the visual culture of contemporary architecture as much as BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group. Since the firm’s earliest days, BIG has treated communication not as an afterthought, but as a central part of everyday practice. Through diagrams, comics, exhibitions, books, renderings, films and built work, the firm has helped redefine how architects explain complex ideas to clients, collaborators and the wider public.
This commitment to clarity has become one of BIG’s defining contributions to the profession. From the graphic narratives of Yes Is More to the climate-driven structure of Hot to Cold and the future-facing propositions of Formgiving, the firm’s publications have consistently translated architectural ambition into accessible visual stories. Now, with the publication of BIG Atlas, the firm is taking stock of 25 years of built work, offering a record of ideas that have moved from proposition to reality.
That makes BIG an ideal voice in the context of Architizer’s Vision Awards, a global awards program dedicated to architectural storytelling, visual communication and concept-driven design. With BIG’s Daniel Sundlin set to serve on this year’s jury, Architizer Editor in Chief Paul Keskeys spoke with BIG Partner Kai-Uwe Bergmann about the firm’s publishing history, the role of representation in architecture, the impact of AI and what truly defines visionary architectural work.
Paul Keskeys: BIG has long been known for communicating ideas with exceptional clarity. How did the concept for BIG Atlas first emerge, and what do you hope it reveals about the firm that previous publications have not?
Kai-Uwe Bergmann: To understand what this book means to Bjarke and to BIG, you have to actually look at our whole publishing history. The first book that was ever published was Yes Is More. That was a comic, because Bjarke had this idea of becoming a comic artist, actually, and this was a lifelong dream.
Then the next two books, Hot to Cold and Formgiving, each done about five years after the other, map out 15 years of our production. These books were always published in association with exhibitions, so we really didn’t have what one could call a coffee table book — a hardcover book that would be a kind of testament to who we are.
I think what Bjarke came up with is really a celebration of 25 years. That’s how long PLOT and then BIG — the two companies that Bjarke has been a part of — have been around. So it is a reflection point, looking back on 25 years, in contrast to all the previous books, which tended to be about future concepts and ideas.
This book is about 60 projects and is completely dedicated to what is built. So it’s a testament to what all these years of working and designing have created, across all scales and typologies and about everything that BIG is. It also includes projects that are not only architecture, like the power plant CopenHill. It’s a celebration of looking back through built work — that is what BIG Atlas is all about.
Visual storytelling is one of BIG’s unique strengths, whether through diagrams, renderings, photography or built work. How does this book push BIG’s storytelling process forward compared to previous formats?
If you look at the previous books, Yes Is More, Hot to Cold and Formgiving, each tells the story in different ways.
In Yes Is More, Bjarke becomes a narrative guide that you follow through the book. The speech bubbles were ways for the storytelling to communicate a personal story of how a project came to be. That got a little more “de-humanfied” or “de-Bjarkefied” in Hot to Cold, where there was no longer a figure walking you through ideas, but the images framed a narrative, chronological approach about how projects came about. The book was organized from the hottest places that we work to the coldest. So Hot to Cold was also a narrative tool of climate responsiveness.
Then Formgiving: Giving Form to the Future lost the speech bubbles and became much more minimal; the texts were really considered in terms of how they worked with the visual story of each project.
With BIG Atlas, British architect, critic and editor Joseph Grima was asked to create a kind of textual storytelling, looking at a holistic body of work over 25 years. The first five years focus on PLOT. The next five years focus on what was done in Denmark before we came to New York in 2010.
Then, the next five to six years focus on how those ideas grew to an international scale, both through larger-scale projects and a very diverse geography. When one thinks of the world, a map, an atlas, you begin to realize that the firm’s footprints wrap around the entire globe. Joseph was the storyteller or narrator for this journey.
Then, Valentina Ciuffi, who is the book’s graphic artist, did the same through the selection of images and their composition on each page. The first three books were entirely designed and written by BIG and Bjarke. This book brings on two further editors [Grima and Ciuffi], one through words and the other through images, to explore what BIG’s work really means.
BIG is especially well known for its sequential diagrams. How much are those still part of the firm’s process, and how do you approach architectural representation at the beginning of a new project today?
Our methods are always changing, primarily because of the amount of data that one now works through. If you go back 25 years, when Bjarke first got started, there wasn’t as much climate data or building or site data. One worked with a lot less information, and there was a lot more gut instinct that came through the design process.
Those initial diagrams were really a way to take very complex information and edit it to form a very clear, communicative series of diagrams, which let you understand the urban moves or massing moves that were being implemented. Within six, seven or eight diagrams, very big ideas and complex issues were being communicated, not only to architects, but more importantly to the general public.
LEGO House by BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group, Billund, Denmark. Photo © Kim Christensen.
Those diagrams still exist, but now they’ve been added to by understanding the wind conditions on a site, understanding solar exposures and understanding the microclimatic issues of one façade versus another façade in a different orientation. There is much more layered information, and those diagrams can communicate very different things.
The drawings included in BIG Atlas are often just the technical drawings of a section or a plan. We paired these with the photographs so that when you are flipping through the book, you can see the clarity of a plan like the Panda House, and you begin to see how that actually becomes realized in the photograph of the realized project. You begin to understand that it is not just a simple plan or a yin-yang symbol. It is also how the pandas, the male and the female, see each other and then come to the middle, where they can actually get together and enjoy time together.
Panda House by BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group, Copenhagen, Denmark. Image courtesy BIG.
It is all about how one can communicate through [a combination of] drawings, words and images. I think BIG Atlas proves again that one can achieve a really high level of information communication through a minimal set of words and drawings.
As architecture takes on new forms of data and new design tools, what role do you see AI playing in the future of the profession, and is BIG currently experimenting with those tools?
Touching on the previous question of whether we use diagrams as a means of conceptualizing, AI is actually a big part of this: AI helps us iterate. BIG uses a process of Darwinian selection of a concept. AI empowers you to really test out a lot of iterations of an idea with minimal effort. We have found it to be a very important tool that we’ve been integrating and using over the past three to four years.
We have a group that is looking at the weekly AI additions within the industry, including things that we [as a firm] haven’t even considered yet. There are a lot of tools — visual and, increasingly, also technical — to help take something as an idea and actually fabricate it and get it built and executed.
This is a very important point for us. It’s not just about designing — BIG Atlas is a testament to the designs that we showed in Yes Is More, Hot to Cold and Formgiving actually getting built.
How do you take that kind of idea, many of which I think were quite challenging to people when we first brought them to daylight, and how do you execute? In a world that’s moving more and more into AI renderings that are very fanciful and future-forward, the question will remain: how do you execute? How do you make that real?
That is where architecture and architects are relevant, because many people can create visuals, but very few people are able to take it from an image into reality. Remember the time when Macintosh introduced desktop publishing, and every single person became a “graphic designer” overnight with 100 fonts? That was not a good thing, necessarily. Not everybody is cut out to be a graphic designer with an unlimited number of fonts.
So how do we, in this age of limitless visual creation, produce a curated set of ideas? And how do we act as a curator that can be contracted to execute? These are key questions for architects.
Are there any current or upcoming BIG projects that feel especially significant to you at this moment?
We are doing a lot of work in education. One project I’m excited about is for the Walton family — a new campus in Bentonville, Arkansas, that was just made public.
Looking back 100 years, you had a lot of industrialists like the Rockefellers or the Vanderbilts starting new campuses. This is similar to that period of time when I think industrialists really understood that education was something that was important to their future, and thus invested heavily in the education of the next generation.
STEM-Focused University by BIG, Bentonville, Arkansas; rendering courtesy of BIG.
The Waltons are in a similar kind of position. They would like to give back to the community of Bentonville and really think about the future of commerce. They are designing a STEM university, bringing science, technology, engineering and mathematics to a physical location.
One of the big questions for Vision Awards entrants is how they convince a client of their vision at the beginning of a project and persuade them to trust the process. How does BIG approach that challenge?
I’m here to say that it never gets easier. Even now, 25 years into it, we have to convince a client of doing it through our own experience or through our own testing and teasing. Even now, we have to go through that journey to help them understand.
I would say it’s also not a one-way exchange. There are clients who come along who also teach you tremendous amounts, if you are open and willing to listen. That, to me, is really helpful and beneficial. When you go into a relationship with a client, you should be open to their understanding and perspectives, while also being willing to challenge and offer a different approach than they may be used to.
The biggest challenge in that is that you need to have enough time to analyze and to come up with the argumentation or visualization of the path forward. What’s most often missing in these scenarios is that no time is given to trying out new things. Therefore, you fall back to the tried and true, the traditional. You have less ability to innovate and to grow.
STEM-Focused University by BIG, Bentonville, Arkansas; renderings courtesy of BIG.
So, one of the most important things is to learn how to talk about time. You must explain the time you might need to do what you need to do, and have the client or others understand that that is also in their interest.
I use the common term: measure twice, cut once; measure once, cut twice. As any contractor would tell you, to make changes in construction is 10 times the cost of making changes on a drawing board or in a computer. So it is much wiser to actually figure things out in the planning and designing of something than on a job site.
Finally, what would you look for in a visionary piece of architectural concept work?
Intelligence. That you can see within the architectural concept is that there is a thoughtful response.
I’m talking about human intelligence, or maybe it’s a combination of human and artificial intelligence. But I do think it’s important that we try to think and that we use our brains in any response, so that it doesn’t become something that’s just a reaction or a formula.
That also goes back to smartness. When you see something that’s smart and fresh, it’s because someone gave it some thought.
For architects, designers, visualizers and storytellers, BIG’s work offers a powerful reminder that architectural vision is not only about producing compelling images. It is about communicating ideas with intelligence, clarity and conviction, then carrying those ideas into the built world.
The Architizer Vision Awards program celebrates the people and studios advancing this vital part of architectural practice. Follow in the footsteps of BIG and define the next era of architectural storytelling by applying for a global accolade today:
Top image: STEM-Focused University by BIG, Bentonville, Arkansas; rendering courtesy of BIG.
