Join our tour of BIG’s new studio in Copenhagen

Bjarke Ingels’ studio BIG has practised what it preaches with a visually sophisticated, low-energy office with playful architectural touches

By Jonathan Bell

The Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) doesn’t like to do things by halves. Two years after opening an impressive new studio in New York, the hugely busy award-winning firm has now given itself a vast HQ building in Copenhagen, set in the heart of the port to the north of the city centre – and addressing sustainable architecture principles too.

Tour the BIG studio in Copenhagen

A neo-brutalist lump that saves its architectural drama for the interior, the new BIG HQ replaces a car park and stands 27m tall above Copenhagen’s Nordhavn. Three hundred people (or ‘BIGsters’, in the company’s parlance) work here, just under half of BIG’s global workforce. As both designer and client, the studio offered the architects an opportunity to explore and experiment, as well as a chance to practice what they preached in terms of sustainable, low-energy construction and running costs.

Completed in spring 2024, the building has now had several months to bed in. Rising up at the tail end of the Sundmolen pier, with new landscaping starting to soften the hard edges of a curved concrete walkway, the seven-storey building is a reimagination of the classic studio archetype. The east façade has an array of tall windows, with a series of terraces, linked by a 140m-long external staircase, wrap themselves around the façade.

To build here, the architectural firm engaged all its various departments, Landscape, Engineering, Architecture, Planning, and Product Design. This approach is something the studio has dubbed LEAPP (from the deparments’ initials), combining as it does its different expertise. To ensure that a cross-disciplinary approach is fully integrated, elements like structural engineering, for example, are closely integrated with the spatial design.

Ultra-high environmental performance started with the structure itself, which is formed from the new Uni-Green concrete mix from Canadian supplier Unicon, a product with a lower CO2 consumption than traditional concrete thanks to its use of calcined clay and lime filler. Solar and geothermal energy systems are paired with natural ventilation; overall, 60 per cent of the building’s energy costs come from renewables.

All this was achieved without sacrificing the structural and spatial drama that has come to characterise BIG’s architectural approach. The central studio space soars all the way from the ground floor to the upper level, with interlocking staircases and walkways bisecting the space. It’s a deliberate reference to the dark but emotive architectural vision seen in the architectural etchings of Piranesi, as well as a way of giving each level its own sense of spatial independence and varied external views. Covering 4,880 sq m, the building offers space to grow without the danger of ever feeling like an empty hangar.

There is a little bit of showboating, as one would expect (and perhaps demand) of a structure built by and for architects, such as the single load-bearing column in the main space. This uses no fewer than six different rock types in order to ‘form a totem pole to [honour] gravity at the heart of the open space that rotates on each floor to align with the beam that it’s carrying’. As well as new external planting on the terraces and pier, the project incorporates a project by sculptor Benjamin Langholz, a spiral of 40 stones.

‘Every floor has access to an outdoor terrace that is connected to the outdoors terrace above and below,’ says Ingels, ‘… you can walk all the way from the roof to the ground floor. This creates incredibly framed views as you move through the building – sometimes you see a fragment of the Nordhavn community, sometimes you see a frame of the water, sometimes a framed view of the windmills at Middelgrunden.’

Ingels and Finn Nørkjær oversaw the project, which was managed by Ole Elkjær-Larsen. The design lead was Frederik Lyng and the project architect was Jesper Boye Andersen.