From the Series
Love is in the air today, and even more so in the Big Apple, thanks to architect Bjarke Ingels. His Danish firm, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), designed an interactive art installation in the shape of a fluorescent heart for Times Square, New York, to mark Valentine's Day.
The “BIG ♥ NYC” installation is made with 400 transparent LED tubes that form a suspended red heart in a cube of acrylic tubes. As the installation moves in the wind it creates the illusion of a heart beating. There’s also a heart-shaped sensor that visitors can press that takes the energy from their hands and turns it into light to make the heart shine brighter and beat faster.
A BIG way to say I love you!
Ingels’s work is both experimental in form and solution-based in outcome, underpinned by his “Yes in More” philosophy. In thinking big about modern architectural challenges, Ingels has worked on skyscrapers, mixed-use urban developments, museums and resorts.
BIG’s “8 House”, a mixed-use building in Copenhagen, comprises three different types of residential housing units, alongside office and retail space. The building was designed to allow residents to cycle along a path from the street to the penthouses on the 10th level. Read more about the 8 House.
For the Danish Expo Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo BIG took the best of Copenhagen lifestyle and incorporated it into the design of the pavilion. The pavilion was designed as a traffic loop on which visitorsc could ride around on one of the 300 bicycles that was available at the entrance, biking being typical of the Copenhagen urban lifestyle. Read more about the Danish Expo Pavilion.
Bjarke Ingels will be speaking at Design Indaba Conference from 29 February to 2 March 2012.
