BIG Launches New Exhibition (And Yes, There is Lego)

Written by Niall Patrick Walsh
Published on July 08, 2019

Bjarke Ingels Group has launched an exhibition at the Danish Architecture Center, reflecting on the firm’s extensive history in design. “Formgiving – An Architectural Future History from Big Bang to Singularity” explores how the world around us has taken shape with 71 BIG projects.

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The 1350-square-meter exhibition will transform the center into a chronological passage from the past to the present and future. The exhibition traverses the stairway of the BLOX building to lead visitors into the main gallery, where the projects that currently fill BIG’s drawing boards, model workshops, and databases are laid out to offer a glimpse into the future.

At the core of BLOX, 71 projects decorate the main gallery, arranged according to the gifts they each give to their users, neighborhood, city, landscape, and environment in the form of ten strategies: adapt, show, respond, marry, host, lift, bond, productize, grow, and pool. Reflecting on the exhibition, Ingels says that “by giving a Gift to the future with every project we do, each groundbreaking becomes a concrete step towards a world that is more like our dreams: Pragmatic Utopia.”

The Danish word for ‘design’ is ‘formgivning’ – which literally means, to give form to that which has not yet been given form. In other words: to give form to the future. And more specifically: to give form to the world that we would like to find ourselves living in – in the future. To create the sense of how the world around us has taken shape – and has been given form – from the past to the present – we have transformed the stairs of the Danish Architecture Center into a timeline counting down from the Big Bang to the present. Our projects provide glimpses of specific fragments of our future five, ten, and fifty years into the future. Rather than attempting to predict the future, we have the power to propose our future
-Bjarke Ingels

The “Golden Gallery” dedicated to LEGO allows children to imagine, co-create, and co-habit the world they want to see. Here, 25 BIG-design buildings are recreated as LEGO bricks, each paired with the building’s three-dimensional digital information model that embodies all technical aspects of the project. This “digital twin” of the built reality allows visitors to see the complexity behind LEGO’s playful simplicity.

The timeline continues as visitors descend the stairs from the present to the Singularity: the furthest hypothetical point in time predicted by futurist Ray Kurzweil. Each stair landing expands on how we are currently giving form to the future of Thinking, Sensing, Making, and Moving. Where “Thinking” dives into the emergence of artificial and collective intelligence, “Sensing” dives into the virtual reality behind the Hyperform platform, developed in collaboration with Squint/Opera and UNStudio. “Making” spans manual construction to robotic manufacturing, while “Moving” takes us from the movement of life forms across the planet to the future of interplanetary migration.