At Washington's National Building Museum, models and multimedia tell the story of the trendsetting Danish firm.
On the heels of the unveiling of its plan to remake the Smithsonian's Castle grounds in Washington, the Bjarke Ingels Group has taken over the imposing atrium and second-floor arcade of the National Building Museum across town for a retrospective of a decade of daring design.
"Hot to Cold: an Odyssey of Architectural Adaptation" opened January 24 and runs through August 30, 2015. The multimedia exhibition traces the history of the firm, which the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels founded in 2005, and turned into an ideas laboratory for improving dense urban environments.
Highlighted projects include the Big U, the firm's ambitious plan to protect Manhattan from a Sandy-like hurricane by ringing the lower half of the island with 10-foot, sculptural berms; a waste-burning energy plant in Copenhagen topped with a ski slope; and a pyramid-shaped apartment building on Manhattan's West 57th Street. More than 60 architectural models are on display, some of which are suspended from the third level to make clever use of the atrium space.
"The city is an ongoing project of constant creation and recreation through refurbishment, modification, adaptation," Ingels said in a statement. "It is all part of a never-ending journey toward crafting the world of our dreams."
