September 14, 2018 - “Architecture is the science of creating the extraordinary out of the ordinary,” says Bjarke Ingels. The Danish architect is in Toronto to officially open Unzipped, the installation his firm, BIG, created for the 2016 Serpentine Pavilion. The installation’s patron is Ian Gillespie and Westbank, the developer behind BIG’s King Street West condo project, called Westbank King Street. It was recently given the green light to be constructed on the same site as the installation.

And so, the opening of Unzipped coincides with the excitement surrounding the possibilities that have been unleashed with Westbank King Street, which is destined to permanently transform the face of King Street West and raise the bar for condo development across the city. And although Unzipped is temporary (it will be open until November, then tour New York, Shanghai and Seattle before taking up a permanent spot in front of another Westbank project in Vancouver), it speaks to BIG’s ambition to inspire at every scale of architecture.

Assembled with 1,800 fibreglass frames, the installation was designed for prefabrication. “We really thought of it as a piece of furniture. Essentially, it’s a shelf pulled apart, unzipped to create this space within it,” Ingels explains. He was informed by the work of the Uruguayan engineer Eladio Dieste, who made stable structures with undulating walls. While the construction of the space is rational and premeditated, its modularity is what makes it take on different appearances from whichever way you view it – seeming flat and rectangular face on, bulging and multiplanar from an oblique angle, opaque or transparent in various directions. This is what Ingels means about the ordinary becoming extraordinary.

But the aesthetic of the piece also speaks to a recurring theme in Ingels’ work – the particular shape of the square tube as a central idea that can be seen in 8 House, Vancouver House and the upcoming Westbank King Street, which is premised on Moshe Safdie’s iconic Habitat 67 in Montreal (and is a joint venture by Westbank and Allied). It will be integrated into King Street West – a strip with a fascinating mix of laneways, back lots, secret throughways and gardens – as a dynamic, multi-peak, pixelated mass. And it will bring trees into the vertical dimension. Ingels spent time with Stefano Boeri to explore the Italian architect’s paradigm-shifting Bosco Verticale towers in Milan, and in his own projects, from 8 House in Copehagen to an upcoming Singapore development with Carlo Ratti, he has also introduced plant life into big projects.

“As an architect, you have certain things you return to because you’re not done with them yet. It’s not a lack of imagination – there’s more to be discovered. Eventually, you do get satiated, but in that process you will have noticed other paths you can spend more energy on exploring,” Ingels says. Plus, he’s intent on making the idea of the home legible in all of his residential projects. “Rather than making an arbitrary architecture – rather than try to hide that we’re making homes – let’s make it about the homes. For a Vancouver House or King Street resident, you’ll be able to say, I’m not just some random co-ordinate box, I’m that home with that tree.”

Ian Gillespie, who is working with Ingels on nine collaborations since their relationship began in 2010 with Vancouver House, concurs. “As urbanization accelerates,” he asks, “how do you create the conditions for people to have this individuality? King Street does that really well.

Ingels connects the work he’s doing in the residential realm with his most exciting public projects under way. These include the Amager Bakke power plant in Copenhagen, which doubles as a ski slope, and the revitalization of New York’s coastline, which he’s christened Humanhatten. Beyond their landmarks, Ingels argues, cities should also inspire with the “ordinary” places we inhabit on a daily basis, from our homes to our utilities.

“We’re interested in taking all the things that have been strictly ‘utility’ and discarded and integrating them as a part of our world. To re-explore the potential of these formerly purely utilitarian projects that occupy a lot of resources and real estate and to see if we can impregnate these programs with positive social benefits – what we call social infrastructure.”

To truly understand the scope of this ambition, the exhibition inside Unzipped, featuring 10 fantastic projects, is the first step.

[Read more.](https://www.azuremagazine.com/article/big-unzipped-%20pavilion-toronto/)

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BIG’s Magnificent Modular Unzipped Pavilion Opens in Toronto

September 13, 2018 - Renowned canadian development firm and culture company, westbank has reassembled bjarke ingels group’s 2016 serpentine pavilion in downtown toronto. the temporary pavilion has been brought back to life since its original introduction in london, beginning its multi-city tour. located at king and brant streets, the pixelated space provides visitors and locals of toronto with an exceptional, curated experience. designboom is in the canadian city for the BIG reveal.

the pavilion, made of 1802 stacked fiberglass units, stands over 88 feet tall at its highest point and 39 feet long. the BIG-designed structure had been disassembled in london following its 2016 presentation in london by serpentine gallery and transported to north america to be re-assembled in toronto. this marks the first serpentine pavilion to make its way to north america. in its latest site, it will host ‘unzipped,’ westbank’s newest exhibition — showcasing an intimate collaboration between developer and architect where every element of the design is considered in relation to its context.

[Read more.](https://www.designboom.com/architecture/bjarke-ingels-serpentine-pavilion-toronto-09-14-18/)

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Bjarke Ingels Group Presents the Reassembled Serpentine Pavilion in Toronto

September 24, 2018 - Toronto’s newest attraction seemed destined to end up in the dignified solitude of a tycoon’s country home, somewhere behind the stables, perhaps. Ever since the Serpentine Gallery started adorning its flawless English lawn in Kensington Gardens with a summer pavilion designed by some of the biggest names in architecture, such was the afterlife of many of these impermanent exhibits. One particularly eager collector reportedly acquired no less than four pavilions—only to send them straight to storage. And yet, a cool warehouse might be considered a merciful destiny compared to the fate of Zaha Hadid’s 2000 pavilion. This first-ever Serpentine pavilion now plays host to discos and children’s birthday parties in a corner of Flambards theme park in Cornwall, somewhere between Ferdi’s Funland and the Rocking Tug Boat. Toyo Ito’s 2002 pavilion fares marginally better, having been recycled as the beach café of a luxury Côte d’Azur hotel.

When Danish star achitect Bjarke Ingels, responsible for Burning Man’s popular ORB and the new Google headquarters, got the call from the Serpentine Gallery two years ago, he intended to give his pavilion a different afterlife. Ian Gillespie, founder of Westbank, a renowned Canadian development firm and the project’s patron, came up with the idea of sending the structure “on the road” following its initial run at Kensington Gardens. “And so,” says Ingels, “we designed it knowing it would have a traveling life.” The first destination on this world-spanning tour is the bustling Fashion District in Toronto, where it opened last week in a festive ceremony hosted by Westbank and attended by the architect, as well as a few hundred illustrious Torontonians. Further stops are envisaged in Vancouver, New York, and Shanghai.

Ingels’s resurrected Serpentine Pavilion is located at 533 King Street West, just a short stroll away from Toronto’s Union Station (which—incidentally—plays host to Louis Vuitton’s Time Capsule exhibition until the end of September). When you enter the grounds from King Street, the pavilion looks a bit like an enormous, gracefully curved seashell, inviting you to explore its cavernous interior. But first, take a walk around the soaring structure to experience how, depending on the angle, its appearance shifts mesmerizingly from fragile to robust, solid to transparent. 1800 prefabricated fiberglass frames (manufactured by a Danish company that normally produces blades for wind turbines) are stacked to form, what Ingels half-jokingly describes as “a giant piece of furniture.” It’s an elegantly undulating shelf of outsized proportions, that can be disassembled and sent around the world. For the pavilion’s Toronto outing, the positioning of the modules had to be slightly adjusted, to account for the possibility of snow weighing down on it, which—despite England’s reputation for disagreeable weather—hadn’t been a concern in London.

In the past, Bjarke Ingels has professed to not having a style—the notion itself he likens to a self-limiting “straightjacket.” When I suggest that ziggurat-like elements and sloping façades seem to be a recurring theme in his designs, including the pavilion, he concedes a tendency towards mountainous architecture. These forms, he reasons, might just have a greater quality than more conventional buildings, which he describes as “variations of an extruded rectangle.” They also allow for terraces and gardens.

For an illustration of this idea, venture inside the pavilion for “Unzipped,” an exhibition highlighting a few of Bjarke Ingels Group’s (BIG) projects. Perhaps most striking is a plan for Toronto’s King Street, a building Ingels designed for Westbank, to be realized in the very location of the pavilion. Inspired by Israeli architect Moshe Safdie’s groundbreaking apartment compound Habitat 67 in Montreal, Ingels came up with what are essentially four terraced “mountains” surrounding a dramatic courtyard. A magnificent design, it successfully integrates the existing red brick buildings on the plot and promises welcome variation to the city, whose center is otherwise dominated by bland, new apartment towers. Next, take a look at BIG’s spectacular power plant in Copenhagen with a ski slope on its roof (!). Slated to open in 2019, it will be mountainless Denmark’s most exciting skiing opportunity and sure to be Copenhagen’s next major tourist attraction. It seems that BIG doesn’t do run-of-the-mill power plants; another plan for Vancouver dubbed the ‘Green House’ proposes to utilize the by-products of energy production to power a massive greenhouse on top of the building—the harvest to supply local restaurants with fresh produce.

At only forty-three years, the Dane has countless projects in the works around the globe. And during our interview he suddenly gets offered yet another when Gillespie interjects and proposes Ingels build a winery with him (Ingels: “I’m in!”). The architect, whose Instagram following is in the hundreds of thousands and who has appeared on the cover of several popular magazines, acknowledges that luck has played a part in his meteoric rise. “Napoleon famously had two criteria for promoting someone to general. One of them,” he says, “was luck.” In Ingels’s case, the other would surely be—apart from his obvious talent for design—excellent communication skills, aided by a youthful charm. After presenting his pavilion to an enthusiastic Toronto audience, Ingels is off to New York, where he is currently redesigning the entire waterfront of Lower Manhattan to guard the city from flooding. His pavilion in Toronto, meanwhile, will be open to the public until November.

[Read more.](https://www.vogue.com/article/bjarke-ingels-serpentine-pavilion-is-on-a-world-tour-first-stop-toronto)

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Bjarke Ingels Group Presents the Reassembled Serpentine Pavilion in Toronto