“What could be better than one icon sat next to another icon?” asked Rob Tincknell, chief executive of the Battersea Power Station Development Company, when he announced last year that Frank Gehry would be building a group of flower-shaped apartment blocks next to Giles Gilbert Scott’s majestic brick temple. The answer? A third icon of course.
In the latest glamorous appointment to the £8bn redevelopment of the south London site, the building-bending, tower-twisting Danish wunderkind Bjarke Ingels has been selected to design an iconic “front door” to the complex. According to the Architects’ Journal, his New York and Copenhagen-based practice, BIG, has been chosen to work on a major public space south of the power station, representing its first project in the UK.
Christened Malaysia Square, after the country where the scheme’s developer SP Setia hails from, it will be the key entry point to the reborn cathedral of shopping. It’s where visitors will arrive after being funnelled down a “high street” – flanked by Gehry’s teetering blossoms on one side, facing off against a wavy wall of luxury flats by Norman Foster on the other – to be greeted with Gilbert Scott’s monumental south facade, and more jazzy flats poking into view around the corner.
It’s a heady cocktail of architectural showmanship before you’ve even got inside the revamped turbine halls, or explored the wiggling snakes of apartment blocks that will be doing their best to strangle the power station in Rafael Viñoly’s clumsy masterplan. So what might BIG have in mind? As their name might suggest, it’s unlikely they’ll be trying to fade into the background.
Before he has even reached 40 – a veritable child in architectural terms – Bjarke Ingels has built a global reputation for buildings that ooze energetic, cartoonish glee, his process of design presented with a polished TED-talk logic that makes the BIG brand seductive to clients the world over. Take a look at some of the weird and wonderful projects his office has conjured so far.
Mountain Dwellings, Copenhagen
In a city with no hills, BIG decided to make its own – stacking up a multi-storey car-park into a concrete mountain, topped with a thin layer of housing. With a cleverly stepped section, each house has a backyard on the roof of its lower neighbour, and all residents can drive straight to their front door, “combining the splendours of the suburban backyard with the social intensity of urban density,” in the architect’s words.
8 House, Copenhagen
Following the success of the Mountain Dwellings in attracting residents to the bleak wasteland of Ørestad (a new district south of the city), the 8 House builds upon Ingels’s mountain-making tendencies, taking two courtyard housing blocks and knotting them into a great undulating loop. It’s an ugly hulk from the outside, but a beguiling Escher-like sequence of ramping terraced streets when you venture in – and of course it makes agreat backdrop for free-running videos.
Superkilen park, Copenhagen
A joy-filled fun strip threading through one of the most deprived parts of Copenhagen, the Superkilen park incorporates street furniture and play equipment from 60 different countries, representing the nationalities of the diverse community. There are neon signs from Russia and Qatar, picnic benches from Armenia and ping-pong tables from Spain, as well as a giant black octopus slide from Japan. So in Battersea, perhaps we can look forward to a public space dotted with oligarchs’ pearl-encrusted sofas?
West 57th, New York
One of BIG’s most ambitious hybrid building types yet, this New York apartment block, due for completion in 2016, takes the form of a “courtscraper” – the love child of a European courtyard block and a Manhattan skyscraper. With its north-east corner pulled up into a sharp spire, the courtyard opens views to the Hudson river, while limboing beneath its neighbours’ existing viewing corridors. “It’s this weird combination of something that is actually straight lines that then describes these curving geometries,” says Ingels. “Maybe we do have certain obsessions we can’t escape no matter what we do.”
Amager Bakke power station, Copenhagen
The long-running mountain obsession will reach its peak with the completion of the Amager Bakke project in 2017, a waste-to-power incinerator plant in Copenhagen topped, in a moment of whimsy, with the snaking pistes of a ski slope. Its chimney will blow a smoke ring every time a tonne of carbon dioxide has been released – a cheery reminder to local residents of their extensive carbon footprint.
Lego House, Billund
Long building vast architectural models with bucket-loads of Lego bricks, Ingels was always going to be the go-to architect for the Danish toy empire’s new “experience centre” in Billund. Using Lego bricks to model the building, the final design unsurprisingly takes the form of a boxy stack of blocks, piled up to form – you guessed it – “a mountain of interconnected terraces and playgrounds.”
