bjarke-ingels-group-vm-mountain

An Insight Into Global Danish Architecture

Lifestyle
8 years ago
2 minutes

A danish design-guru is lighting up Manhattan's architecture, and is setting the bar for future designs.

Bjarke Ingels, who now has his own design company, Bjarke Ingels Group, uses nature, such as rain, mountains or snowflakes to help him conceptualise his designs.

Named the Innovator of The Year in 2011 by The Wall Street Journal, his work, as stated by the New York Real Estate Weekly, is like "something that landed here from outer space".

His latest work, in Manhattan is impressive to even those unassociated or unfamiliar with conceptual architecture. 

Located at W57th St, lodged right in the middle of 11th and 12th Avenue, is a pyramid type building that is due to house luxury apartments, for those in search of luxury living.

“[The pyramid] is a cone that has been subtracted from a cube,” said Ingels. “It’s this weird combination of something that is actually straight lines that then describes these curving geometries. Maybe we do have certain obsessions we can’t escape no matter what we do.”

Oliver Wainwright, of The Guardian, was amazed at the concept and the eventual execution.

“The architects can barely believe they found someone brave (or mad) enough to pay for it,” he said. “Yet once again the cartoonish diagram, of the wilful form generated by the forces acting on the site, has come true.”

“Its design makes 625 West 57th Street an outlier among Manhattan’s many new residential developments. As new luxury condo towers are sprouting up across the island, they are becoming increasingly hard to distinguish. Midtown’s skyline will soon be dominated by half a dozen luxury condo towers that all have more or less the same height and shape – that of a giant matchstick.”

“Silicon Valley has been an engine of innovation driving technological evolution and global economy. So far the majority of these vast intellectual and economical resources have been confined to the digital realm – Google North Bayshore expands this innovative spirit into the physical realm,” Ingels said.

“Together with Heatherwick Studio and Google we have set out to imagine the work environments of future Googlers to be as adaptable, flexible and intelligent as the rest of Google’s wide spanning portfolio – rather than an insular corporate headquarter, Google North Bayshore will be a vibrant new neighborhood of Mountain View.”