18 October 2018

Blueprint Awards 2018 Winners Announced!

Blueprint Award for Architecture 2018

Winner: Bjarke Ingels

Image Credit:Johnny Tucker

Nominated by our Judges, voted for by Blueprint readers

Danish architect Bjarke Ingels is the founder and creative partner of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), a practice he started up in Denmark in 2005. The practice now employs more than 400 people and also has offices in London and New York.

At the end of the last millennium Ingels worked for OMA for three years (1998-2001), before leaving to set up PLOT in Copenhagen, with fellow OMA colleague Julien de Smedt. PLOT was awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2004 for a proposal for a new music house for Stavanger, Norway.

The following year saw the completion of the VM Houses in Copenhagen — two residential blocks with a V and M plan shape. The development received a number of awards and Ingels himself moved into it and that year formed BIG.

BIG currently has a raft of very high-profile projects under construction all over the world. Major completions include the recent scaled up Lego brick construction of the Lego Visitors’ Centre in Billund, Denmark. Also in his home country, are the Danish National Maritime Museum in Helsingor, and Copenhagen’s 8 House residential development and Superkilen Park. In the UK his first project was the 2016 Serpentine Pavilion in London, which was the first Serpentine Pavilion to go on a ‘tour’, stopping off in Toronto, Canada, before being permanently installed on Vancouver’s waterfront (the same city that BIG’s 150m-tall Vancouver House development will open next year).

Ingels has a much-publicised interest in technology, and technologically driven development and the practice is linked with projects including building on the planet Mars and Elon Musk’s Hyperloop. Here in the UK he is working with Heatherwick Studio on the Google headquarters in London King’s Cross as well as the tech giant’s Mountain View, California, facility.