Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)

CopenHill (2019), officially the Amager Resource Center, is BIG’s most iconic manifesto of “hedonistic sustainability.” This waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen — typically the ugliest and least welcome of municipal infrastructures — was transformed through BIG’s design into the world’s only power plant with a rooftop ski slope. A 450-meter sloping roof clad in green artificial turf features four ski runs of varying difficulty, a hiking trail, and an 85-meter climbing wall.

The ingenuity of this design lies in its refusal to deny the power plant’s reality as an industrial facility — the smokestack is still there, but he designed the chimney as an urban totem that puffs a steam smoke ring each time one ton of CO₂ is emitted. In BIG’s eyes, pollution is no longer a shame to hide but a visualized process transformed into a public education medium. At the end of the workday, local residents do not avoid this area but come here willingly to have coffee, ski, and enjoy the harbor views.

From an engineering standpoint, CopenHill’s rooftop slope is an enormous concrete shell structure housing complex heat recovery and waste treatment systems below. Integrating such a massive irregular concrete shell atop an operating industrial facility was a formidable technical challenge, but the result surpasses all expectations — it symbolically answers the fundamental question for contemporary cities: How can we make the unavoidably non-beautiful things (trash, exhaust, infrastructure) part of our everyday lives, even a source of civic pride?

No contemporary architectural firm provokes such polarized assessments as BIG. In academic and critical circles, BIG is often described as superficial optimism, market-driven formalism, or the reduction of complex social and environmental issues to overly slick diagrams. A common critique: BIG’s buildings are too successful at the level of the image — their Instagram-friendliness and shareability are so potent that they appear insufficiently “serious.” This is tantamount to saying: because an idea is understood and liked by too many people, it must be of low value.

Yet from the perspective of the public, clients, and municipalities, BIG is exactly the architect they want: capable of transforming the most difficult problems (climate change, housing crisis, public space degradation) into exhilarating, concrete, buildable proposals. In VIA 57 West (2016) in New York — a “Courtscraper” fusing the Copenhagen courtyard and the Manhattan skyscraper into one — BIG demonstrated how, under extremely constrained market conditions, an entirely new housing typology could be created: the scooped, chamfered courtyard provides a private oasis while maintaining presence on the Manhattan skyline.

The BIG phenomenon poses a deep question: What exactly is the architect’s public role? If architecture is meant to serve society, then when a firm influences urban and political decision-making by winning broad public appeal — whatever the academy may think — should this not be regarded as a form of architectural success? A line from Ingels’s TED Talk perhaps best summarizes his position: “Rather than dedicating ourselves to criticizing the world we don’t want, let’s focus on building the world we do want.” In a post-critical and post-truth era, this constructive optimism — regardless of your aesthetic taste for it — provides a rare, concrete hope.