Day 11 - Bjarke Ingels Group
Copenhagen, Denmark
Kristoffer Negendahl | Simulation Specialist at BIG IDEAS Lab / Bjarke Ingels Group
-
It’s here. Day eleven. An eager day of personal pent-up anticipation. I’m in Copenhagen! And it’s the day I happily landed the opportunity to meet with Bjarke Ingels Group and witness the internal workings of this pragmatic and utopian architectural factory. No seriously, the office is located within an old factory, facade clad with authentic aged masonry in a quiet neighbourhood near Ny Ellebjerg station in Copenhagen.
During my time at university the work and lectures of Bjarke Ingels inspired and opened my eyes to the profound possibilities that architectural thought and theory can contribute to buildings, cities, and human happiness. The idea and execution of buildings and urban frameworks that benefit the lifestyles of those around and within. Buildings and cities that take on the responsibility of operating sustainably and ‘hedonistically’ to further promote those values into societies.
A personal favourite - and soon to be witnessed with my own eye balls - is the Amager Bakke Waste-to-Energy power station.
I met with Kristoffer Negendahkl - the first engineer employed by BIG who heads up a squad of internal engineering disciplines. The positive impact this team is able to contribute to the studio’s architectural concepts arrives early in projects. It is a unique value-add approach. The team can engaged early in projects to help challenge and dispel responses of ‘no’, instead allowing collaborative in house pow-wowing to make crazy fun ideas realistic!
-
Post-occupancy evaluation of buildings is a method of identifying how designs are performing once built and occupied, however it continues to be a challenging activity to carry-out despite the potential benefits for the architectural process - and this is even the case for BIG. So to learn of the performance of the buildings proposed and built BIG IDEAS lead the charge by focusing on analysis of design proposals as they develop. This allows an in depth analysis and fine-tuning of comfort and performance prior to the building even being complete. Water, acoustics, thermal - all of the tools are at the designers’ disposal. In a sense this is a pre-post-occupancy evaluation.
For BIG, their in-house supercomputer ‘Beowulf’ is transforming the way the company can get ahead of the curve. CFD analysis can be carried out efficiently and readily as per individual project needs. It’s a powerful digital approach to interrogating design decisions and ensuring that built outcomes perform as conceived.
-
I was busy absorbing the studio - including prototypes of tesla coils and smoke-ring-chimneys - with my eyeballs to take photos , but if you like you can glimpse into the model-filled space via Dezeen’s studio visit here.
