BIG together with West 8, Fentress, JPA and developers Portman CMC proposes Miami Beach Square as the centerpiece of their 52 acre Convention Center.

Miami Beach is a unique city in so many ways. It is one of the youngest cities in America – and perhaps right now one of the most vibrant and dynamic. Its streetscape is characterized by a lively walkable urban fabric with a friendly human scaled environment under the cool shade of tropical trees and art deco canopies - except at the convention center. It is a dead black hole of asphalt in the heart of one the most beautiful and lively cities in America. Our mission is to bring Miami Beach back to the Convention Center – and to imagine an architecture and an urban space unique to the climate and culture of Miami Beach.

We propose to roll out an urban fabric of paths and plazas, parks and gardens that forms an archipelago of urban oases throughout the site. At the heart of it – we introduce a central square to become the pivoting point of the entire neighborhood. Becoming the front door to the convention center, and the convention hotel, a front lawn to the revitalized Jackie Gleason Theatre, a town square for the city hall, an outdoor arena for the Latin American Cultural Museum, and the red carpet for the big botanical ball room.

When the team were invited to propose a project for a kilometre of urban space wedging through outer Norrebro, in the tracks of the former rail yards, they realised that they had to do more than just urban design. The neighborhood is the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in all of Denmark, comprising more than 60 nationalities into a small footprint, and is also the most socially challenged community containing the closest thing to a ghetto in Copenhagen, Mjølnerparken. This project had to become a vehicle for integration, rather than an aesthetic exercise in Danish design.

Superkilen has one overarching idea that it is a giant exhibition of urban best practice – a sort of collection of global found objects that come from 60 different nationalities of the people inhabiting the area surrounding it. Ranging from exercise gear from muscle beach LA to sewage drains from Israel, palm trees from China and neon signs from Qatar and Russia. Each object is accompanied by a small stainless plate inlaid in the ground describing the object, what it is and where it is from – in Danish and in the language(s) of its origin. A sort of surrealist collection of global urban diversity that in fact reflects the true nature of the local neighborhood – rather than perpetuating a petrified image of homogenous Denmark.

BIG and Berlin-based artist group realities:united envision the city of Copenhagen by 2016 in a new animation which shows a completed Amager Bakke waste-to-energy plant, consolidating Denmark as a world leader in waste-to-energy conversion, allowing Copenhageners to ski near downtown Copenhagen while blowing giant smoke rings for each quarter ton C02 the facility produces to serve as a gentle reminder of the impact of consumption - turning the smokestack traditionally the symbol of the industrial era into a symbol for the future.

2/3 of the Superkilen team, including BIG's Bjarke Ingels and Bjornstjerne Christiansen from Superflex take a walk around the park for a talk on the process and final design.

Superflex follows Palestinian Hiba and Alaa to their home country to bring back a piece of Palestine to Superkilen in Denmark.

8-House is located in Ørestad on the edge of Copenhagen. 8-House offers homes for people in all of life’s stages: the young and the old, singles, families that grow and families that become smaller. Instead of dividing the different functions of the building - for both habitation and retail - into separate blocks, the various functions have been spread out horizontally. The apartments are placed at the top while the commercial program unfolds at the base of the building. As a result, the different horizontal layers have achieved a quality of their own: the apartments benefit from the view, sunlight and fresh air, while the commercial merges with life on the street.

A BIG red heart pulses with glowing light in a grove of glass rods. A single person can activate the beating heart but joining hands with others will make the heart beat even faster to create a brighter burning heart.

The 10-foot tall glowing sculpture consists of 400 transparent, LED lit, acrylic tubes that form a cube around a suspended heart. The hovering heart pulsates faster reflecting the vibrant human energy in the heart of Times Square.

BIG + Kollision + Schmidhuber & Partner team up to bring BIG’s vision of future urban mobility to life for AUDI at Design Miami/ 2011, running from November 30th through December 4th adjacent to Art Basel Miami Beach. BIG originally presented the concept as an entry for the 2010 AUDI Urban Future Award introducing a future city paved with a digital surface that liberates the streets from existing boundaries and allows for a new flexibility of public use. The 190 m2 three-dimensional LED installation provides a glimpse of the future city where the public space is shared between pedestrians and driverless cars. The entire surface would be infused with a continuous flow of information allowing for real-time interaction between vehicles and their environment. Mounted above the Design Miami installation, 3D cameras track the movement of passers-by processing the data into a generative artwork that feeds back into the LED panels. The installation sets the stage for Audi’s showcar, Audi A2 concept, which has its U.S debut at the design fair and is dedicated to future urban mobility, capable of communicating with its environment. The exhibition car continuously emits arrows showing its driving path, navigating real-time between visitors at the stand. "Our pavilion for AUDI renders visible the invisible forces that flow through our city – the driverless car is relying on sophisticated sensory and computational technology that constantly observes and calculates the dynamic space that the living city constitutes. The result is an architecture of movement whose forms have not been predetermined by the architect but are constantly being recomposed by the people populating the pavilion.” BIG

As a form of urban experiment the Paris PARC is the imprint of the pressures of its urban context. Wedged into a super dense context – in terms of space, public flows and architectural history – the PARC is conceived as a chain of reactions to the various external and internal forces acting upon it. Inflated to allow daylight and air to enter into the heart of the facility, compressed to ensure daylight and views for the neighboring classrooms and dormitories, lifted and decompressed to allow the public to enter from both plaza and park and finally tilted to reflect the spectacular view of the Paris skyline and the Notre Dame to the Parisians.

Durst Fetner Residential selects BIG to design a 600-unit residential building. The project entitled West 57th introduces an entirely new residential typology to New York City that will add an inviting twist to the Manhattan Skyline. The building is a hybrid between the European perimeter block and a traditional Manhattan high-rise. West 57th has a unique shape which combines the advantages of both: the compactness and efficiency of a courtyard building providing density, a sense of inti¬macy and security, with the airiness and the expansive views of a skyscraper.

The industrial areas in the Copenhagen suburbs are next in line for urban development. A new light rail is planned to interconnect 20 development zones with a total area of 11 Km2, the size of the entire inner city. We are proposing to turn the light rail line into a spine of dense urbanity with a series of peaks at the stations. By combing the rail with strategies for energy exchange, waste management, water treatment and electric car stations, the infrastructure could become the base for a new sustainable ring of development around Copenhagen, and an artery of true urbanity pumping life into the heart of the suburbs. At certain points the rail becomes a building itself almost like a Roman aqueduct passing through the suburbs, at other points it forms small pockets of urbanity around the stations.

We propose to upgrade the planned light rail by extending it to form a regional ring around Oresund connecting similar development areas, and creating a new 50 year development perspective for a cross border region between Sweden and Denmark. Where the Finger Plan from 1947 was about connectivity from suburb to center the Loop City is linking a string of highly differentiated urban nodes, universities and working spaces in a center-less metropolitan region around a blue void. This ring, comparable in size to the San Francisco Bay area, has enough development areas to contain the growth of the region the next 50 years, and could become a model for a both sustainable, dense and super recreational development of the region.

We imagine that inner cities that are currently banning cars through taxation or tolls to relieve congestion will simply become driverless rather than car-less. Driverless cars will combine individual mobility outside city limits with collective mobility within, as self driven cars move in coordinated concert with their fellow commuters they occupy a quarter of the space human-driven cars require. As the new generation of cars will additionally be noiseless and pollutionless it will mean the end of the apartheid that currently separates cars from pedestrians and bicyclists for comfort, health or safety reasons. The result is an elastic urban space that can expand and contract to accommodate peak traffic hours or allow a park or plaza to invade the car lanes to fit the demands and desires of its citizens.

The main concept of MUSEO TAMAYO EX-TENSION ATIZAPAN is an “OPENED BOX” that unfolds, opens and invites the visitors inside. Package, restoration and storage will serve as additional cultural spaces for visitors to understand the stages that an art piece goes through in order to get to its specific destination. This is a very direct, strong and symbolic project. Where the shape derives from the client’s preliminary studies that defined the optimal functionality and was then enhanced by taking advantage of the best views from above, making the best of the steep terrain and shading the more social program below, exterior and interior spaces overlap to provide the best environment possible for each function, and optimal climatic performance.

We reintroduce the bicycle in Shanghai as a symbol of modern lifestyle and sustainable urban development. The Danish Pavilion and the entire exhibition can be experienced on Danish designed city bikes that are free for the guests to use. The building is designed as a double spiral with pedestrian and cycle lanes taking you from the ground and through curves up to a level of 12 meters and down again. In this way you can experience the Danish exhibition both inside and outside at two speeds – as calm stroll with time to absorb the surroundings or as a bicycle trip, where the city and city life drift past.

The site is laid out as a grid of 3,6 x 3,6 meter squares, creating one continuous pixelated surface, shaped to form a terraced landscape of towers, accommodating housing, hotel, offices and retail. The project becomes an accumulation of individual niches and outdoor spaces forming a collective organic architecture. A Scandinavian high-rise typology incorporating the rationality and modularity of the Danish building tradition.

BIG, 2+1 and ARUP relaunch the bike as a modern and sustainable urban alternative to the increasing car traffic in Shanghai.The pavilion’s 1500 city bikes are offered for general use to the visitors during EXPO 2010. After the World Expo, it can be moved and relocated for example in People’s Park - as a transferium for the bikes of Shanghai. The building is a loop, housing the exhibition “wellfairytales” in a linear sequence.

Bjarke Ingels Group was asked by TDIC in Abu Dhabi to design a 15.000 m2 exhibition hall within a 375.000m2 park. Partnering with realities:United and AKT the design of the exhibition hall turned into reconfiguring the entire park. By building a perimeter building that defines Khalifa Park into a more manageable 250.000m2 BIG anticipates Abu Dhabi's rapid growth and protects an open space for future generations. The perimeter building is capped by a thrill ride that allows its riders to catch glimpses of the park and the Gulf beyond.

A teaser for an upcoming documentary, MY PLAYGROUND by Kaspar Astrup Schröder. It is a film about movement, tricking, freerunning and parkour in the urban space as well as featuring The Mountain by BIG Architects in Copenhagen, Denmark . It will also feature interviews with urban planners, local politicians, architects and philosophers. The film will feature parkour, freerunning and tricking by freerunners: TEAM JIYO, teamjiyo.com. Shot, edited and directed by Kaspar Astrup Schröder, kasparworks.com. Keep a look out for more clips released during the winter and a premiere of the film in summer 2009.

In a city scared of heights, in a country scared of the foreign, can we imagine a multicultural neighbourhood of extreme urban density?

The battery is a project about integration. It seeks to facilitate the cultural integration of Islamic and Danish culture, by incorporating the first mosque ever built in Denmark, in the centre of a complex consisting of housing, shopping, leisure, and sports facilities. It seeks to bring together the three disjoined quarters of Islands Brygge, Amagerbro and Ørestad in one overlapping urban activity centre. And finally it seeks to fuse landscape and architecture, the built and the “unbuilt” environment, into a unified urban topography of man made peaks, valleys, cliffs and caves. Architecture free from the stylistic straightjacket - free to create new associations from the architectonic spectrum. The Tower of Babel collapsed because of confusion between the different languages. The new peaks of the Battery will stand precisely because of the multicultural diversity of religion, activity and architecture.

The RÉN building is a proposal for a hotel, sports and conference centre for the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai. The building is conceived as two buildings merging into one. The first building, emerging from the water, is devoted to the activities of the body, and houses the sports and water culture centre. The second building, emerging from land, is devoted to the spirit and enlightenment and houses the conference centre and meeting facilities. The two buildings meet in a 1,000 room hotel and form the Chinese character for the word “People”, becoming a recognizable landmark for the World Expo in China.

Together the two buildings become a tower and an arch at once. The arch creates a square for gatherings and activities, exactly on the main axis of the Expo site overlooking the Huang Pu River. The square is sheltered from the rain but allows the sunlight through, from east in the morning and from west in the evening.

Large curved plazas cover the pool and conference buildings, creating a continuous recreational public space along the river. Round openings and roof lights bring light to the auditoriums and pools and become gradually denser as they rise from the river, eventually becoming glittering windows and terraces for the hotel rooms.