Bjarke Ingels
After co-founding PLOT Architects in 2001, Bjarke Ingels started his own office in 2006: BIG / Bjarke Ingels Group. Through a series of award-winning design projects, Ingels has created an international reputation as a member of a new generation of architects that combine shrewd analysis, playful experimentation, social responsibility and humour. In 2004 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for the Stavanger Concert House and the following year received the Forum Award for the VM houses. Recently he has been nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award as well as the International Iakov Chernikhov Prize. The work of BIG challenges the role of the architect. Through a series of projects BIG has pro-actively proposed projects that have often triggered public debate and influenced urban politics. The High Square project is a proposal for a public square in Copenhagen on top of an existing department store. In the Mountain Dwellings which are under construction, a parking block is transformed into a hillside covered by housing units. By practicing what Ingels describes as 'programmatic alchemy', BIG often mixes conventional ingredients such as living, leisure, working, parking and shopping into new forms of symbiotic architecture. These projects clearly represent BIG's efforts to free architectural imagination from habitual thinking and standard typologies in order to deal with the constantly evolving challenges of contemporary life. Bjarke Ingels has been a visiting professor at Rice University's School of Architecture and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. (For more information visit: www.big.dk)
Mark Wigley
Since 2004, Mark Wigley has served as Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Prior to joining Columbia in 2000 as Director of Advanced Studios, Wigley taught from 1987 to 1999 at Princeton University. He received both his BArch (1979) and PhD (1987) degrees from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Wigley has also served as guest curator for exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. An accomplished scholar and design teacher, he has written extensively on the theory and practice of architecture, and is the author of The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt (MIT Press, 1993); White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (MIT Press, 1995); and Constant's New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (Uitgeverij 010, 1998). In addition to numerous essays on art and architecture, he co-edited, with Catherine de Zegher, The Activist Drawing: Situationist Architectures From Constant's New Babylon to Beyond (MIT Press, 2001) and is one of the founding editors of Volume magazine. (For more information visit: www.arch.columbia.edu)
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