HOT TO COLD: BIG’s “Odyssey of Architectural Adaptation” Opens at the National Building Museum

Circle the globe in 800-feet at the National Building Museum‘s latest exhibition HOT TO COLD. BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group‘s first North American exhibition, HOT TO COLD takes viewers on an “odyssey of architectural adaptation” from the “hottest to the coldest parts of our planet to explore how BIG‘s designs are shaped by their cultural and climatic contexts.”

More than 60 architectural models of BIG’s most recent projects, including 20 premiering for the first time, are being suspended from the second floor of the museum’s historic Great Hall. Each project is interpreted through Iwan Baan‘s “masterful” photography, films by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, and the Grammy Award-winning graphic artist Stefan Sagmeister‘s design for the accompanying catalog by Taschen.

A word from Ingels, after the break.

“Architecture never happens in the clinical conditions of a lab. It is always responding to a series of existing conditions – the context, the culture, the landscape, the climate. Our climate is the one thing we can’t escape – the one condition we always have to respond to. HOT TO COLD is conceived as a colorful exploration of how architecture evolves in response to its context and climate and as an artistic contemplation of how life in return reacts to the framework created by the architecture,” says Bjarke Ingels, Founding Partner, BIG.

“I can’t imagine a greater venue than the National Building Museum for this journey, looking back at our work and massive transformation over the last six years from both sides of the Atlantic,” added Ingels.

“BIG’s projects are currently taking shape from Copenhagen to Manhattan, from Shenzhen to Paris, and soon in Calgary and Vancouver,” stated the NBM. “Now, with a major part of the practice located in New York—and a major stake in Washington, D.C.’s infrastructure as the designer of a $2 billion National Mall and Smithsonian refurbishment—a BIG influence on American architecture and urbanism has begun.”