Copenhagen, the mid-2000s.

The practice now known as BIG grew out of an earlier partnership. Wikipedia says the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and the Belgian architect Julien De Smedt established a company called PLOT in Copenhagen in January 2001 as the vehicle for their work together. Wikipedia lists several Copenhagen projects credited to the two of them, including the Copenhagen Harbour Baths, completed in 2002, and the VM Houses in Ørestad, completed in 2006.

The pair then went separate ways. Wikipedia says Ingels set up Bjarke Ingels Group in late 2006 after he and De Smedt closed PLOT. The Indian architecture and design magazine STIR, in a feature published on 2 November 2019, dates the practice’s inception to 2005. Among the projects that passed from one office to the other was a housing scheme in Ørestad that Wikipedia calls the Mountain Dwellings, completed in 2008; Wikipedia says it had been started under PLOT.

The name of the new office is a set of initials. BIG stands for Bjarke Ingels Group, and the practice uses the full name and the three capitals side by side, often joined as “BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group”. The acronym also forms an ordinary English word. Wikipedia says BIG launched its book and exhibition Yes Is More, an “archicomic” about architectural evolution published by Taschen, in 2009.

The office also became a partnership. Wikipedia says that in December 2009 the partnership was widened to include Thomas Christoffersen, Jakob Lange, Finn Nørkjær, Andreas Klok Pedersen, David Zahle, Kai-Uwe Bergmann and the chief executive Sheela Maini Søgaard. From then on the name described a group of partners, with Ingels at its head, rather than a single designer’s studio.

Copenhagen, New York and more offices.

BIG’s identity is tied to the places where it works. Wikipedia says the practice opened a branch office in New York City in 2010, where it had been commissioned to design VIA 57 West on West 57th Street for Durst Fetner Residential. Wikipedia lists the building as completed in 2016. In March 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported, as cited by Wikipedia, that BIG had signed a lease for an office in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Dumbo, and Wikipedia says the New York team later moved there.

Back in Copenhagen, the office kept building in Ørestad. Wikipedia lists the 8 House there as a 2010 project. Further afield, Wikipedia says BIG worked with LEGO on the LEGO House in Billund, Denmark, which opened in 2017, and released a second book and exhibition, Hot to Cold, in 2013. A third exhibition, Formgiving, followed in 2018, with a book of the same name in 2020.

In Copenhagen, the practice combined a power plant with a sports slope. STIR reported on 2 November 2019 that CopenHill, also known as Amager Bakke after its site on the industrial waterfront of Amager, had recently opened as a waste-to-energy plant topped with a ski slope, a hiking trail and a climbing wall. The plant replaced an older one next door for the Amager Resource Center, and STIR said the rooftop landscape was designed by the Danish landscape practice SLA. STIR also described a façade of large aluminium “bricks” with glazed openings between them, and quoted the idea of “hedonistic sustainability” that BIG has used for the scheme.

At that point, STIR said, the firm had offices in Copenhagen, New York, London and Barcelona. Wikipedia says BIG added seven partners and opened a London office near Liverpool Street in July 2021, opened a further office in Barcelona in 2022, and opened offices in Los Angeles and Oslo in 2023. The two founding cities, Copenhagen and New York, remain the poles of the practice.

Initials, partners and a harbour headquarters.

An architecture practice’s identity usually begins with a name, and that name is often a list of founders’ surnames joined by commas and ampersands. Over time those lists tend to compress into initials or a single surname, and the shortened form becomes the working mark on letterheads, drawing sheets and websites. Other studios choose a single word or the name of one designer, which shifts the identity from a partnership to a studio.

Much of a practice’s visual identity lives on working documents rather than in advertising. Title blocks on drawings, the lettering on presentation boards, competition panels and the hoardings that wrap a construction site all carry the practice name, and each sets a typeface, a weight and a placement rule that repeats across projects. Monographs, exhibition catalogues and project books extend the same typography into print.

Physical spaces act as brand surfaces too. A studio’s own office, its reception and the model shop where physical models are built and photographed shape how clients and visitors meet the firm. For a design guide, the useful lesson is restraint: a short name, one typeface used with discipline, and a consistent way of presenting drawings, models and photographs.

A headquarters on the harbour.

In Copenhagen, the practice now works from a building it designed for itself. The design site designboom reported on 29 October 2024 that the new headquarters for Bjarke Ingels Group stands at the tip of Sundmolen in the waterfront district of Nordhavn, and that it was completed in spring 2024. Wikipedia says the practice debuted the building in 2023, the year the office moved in.

designboom described the headquarters as one of the buildings to fully realise what BIG calls its LEAPP model, an acronym that the practice spells out as Landscape, Engineering, Architecture, Planning and Product design. Like the name BIG itself, LEAPP is a set of initials that groups the disciplines under one word. The report said the building was made with a Uni-Green concrete developed with the Danish concrete maker Unicon, that it was designed to meet the DGNB Gold standard, and that its floors are carried by a central column built from layers of Scandinavian stone. Outdoor terraces on each level are joined by a continuous staircase that wraps around the outside of the building.

The office that took over from PLOT in Copenhagen now works from a building of its own design on the harbour. Wikipedia lists the founder Bjarke Ingels as founder and creative partner, alongside a large group of partners across the offices.

For a design guide, BIG shows how a founder’s initials can become the short name of a whole partnership, used next to the full name rather than in place of it, and repeated in the titles of books, exhibitions and working methods. Compare Snøhetta, an architecture practice named after a Norwegian mountain, and LEGO, the toy company for which BIG designed the LEGO House in Billund. For this guide we use harbour teal, slate and night with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.