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Through the scorching heat of the Arabian Desert to the unforgiving chills of the Finnish tundra, HOT TO COLD: an odyssey of architectural adaptation took the visitors of National Building Museum in D.C on a journey across the globe to explore the forces that shape our cities and buildings.
Running from January 2015 through August 2015, Hot to Cold marked BIG’s first major North-American exhibition offering a behind-the-scenes look at BIG’s creative process and how the studio’s designs are shaped by cultural and climatic contexts. More than 60 architectural models, mock-ups and prototypes were suspended at the second-floor balconies of the museum’s historic Great Hall, turning the architecture of the National Building Museum into the architecture of the exhibition.
The Building Becomes the Design
— The vast atrium of the National Building Museum framed by its double-story arcade is an urban room of epic proportions. Rather than cramming all the work into the three galleries, BIG turns the entire second-floor arcade into the exhibition design.
Around the World in 800 Feet
— Organized like a journey around the world in 800 feet, the exhibition takes visitors through BIG's body of work - traveling from the warmest to the coldest climate to explore the conditions that have influenced BIG's projects.
Fiction to Fact
— The atrium explains the conditions that shape the buildings throughout the design process, while three traditional gallery spaces are devoted to depicting the afterlife of the built work. The galleries show how life adapts to its context and climate, and the architecture that was designed to accommodate it.
Arches Becomes Frames
— Each of the 76 arches serve as the frame for the story of how 60 projects were shaped by their contextual conditions including their culture, geography, program, economy, regulations, politics, legislation, and climate.
Suspension
— Evidence of the work process in the form of models, mock-ups, and prototypes are suspended like exhibits in the atrium.
"Architecture never happens in the clinical conditions of a lab. It is always responding to a series of existing conditions - the context, the culture, the landscape, the climate. Our climate is the one thing we can't escape - the one condition we always have to respond to. HOT TO COLD is conceived as a colorful exploration of how architecture evolves in response to its context and climate and as an artistic contemplation of how life in return reacts to the framework created by the architecture. I can't imagine a greater venue than the National Building Museum for this journey, looking back at our work and massive transformation over the last six years from both sides of the Atlantic."
As visitors moved through the exhibition, they learned about the harsh demands of climatic extremes, where architecture becomes more about shading from the heat or sheltering from the cold. The milder or more temperate environments often leave more room for other factors, such as culture, program, politics and legislation to shape the buildings.
A gallery on the museum’s second floor featured films that describe life as it occurs within and around BIG’s buildings. Films by Ila Beka and Louise Lemoine, Kaspar Astrup Schroder, WAAITT and Squint/Opera documented and showed the life that emerges once the cranes have left and the buildings are complete.
The exhibition was accompanied by a 700-page catalogue designed in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning graphic artist Stefan Sagmeister, published by Taschen. The book is available for purchase via Amazon.
Bjarke Ingels Kai-Uwe Bergmann Thomas Christoffersen Martin Voelkle Jakob Lange Alana Goldweit Alvaro Velosa Haochen Yu Otilia Pupezeanu Everett Hollander Adam Busko Ahsan Akbar Aiden Bowman Armen Menendian Christopher Wilson Daeho Lee Daniel Kidd Daria P. Stark David Spittler Dimitrie Grigorescu Emily Watts Eva Maria Mikkelsen Iben Falconer Iannis Kandyliaris Joanna Anna Jakubowska John Hilmes Juan David Ramirez Julien Beauchamp-Roy Julieta Muzzillo Karen Shiue Kenneth Matthews Mateusz Rek Maureen Rahman Natalie Kwee Ming Yie Nicholas Coffee Sarah Habib Sarkis Sarkisyan Terrence Lallak Tore Banke Wells Barber Wojciech Swarowski Anna Lockwood Agnieszka Filipowicz Aino Aho Alberte Danvig Ali Chen Chi Chi Lin Edmond Lakatos George Abraham Katarina Mácková Leonardo Miranda Maximiliano Rieutord Paddy Fernandez Perle van de Wyngaert Sida Zhang Tammy Teng Timothy Burwell Toni Mateu Andrea Scalco Julia Boromissza
