On a Thursday morning in June 2016, a 32-story residential building at the corner of West 57th Street and the West Side Highway in Manhattan received its certificate of occupancy from the New York City Department of Buildings. The building occupied the western edge of the block bounded by 57th Street, 58th Street, West End Avenue, and the West Side Highway, on a site that had previously held a parking garage and a low-rise commercial building, both demolished in 2012. The Durst Organization had developed the project across the prior four years on a budget industry sources placed at approximately $700 million. The architect of record was SLCE Architects, the Manhattan firm responsible for the technical drawings and code compliance work on most major residential towers built in the city through the decade. The design architect was Bjarke Ingels Group, the Copenhagen practice founded in 2005 by a Danish architect named Bjarke Ingels.
The building did not look like a Manhattan residential tower. The roofline rose from approximately five stories along West End Avenue at the southeast corner to thirty-two stories at the northwest corner, generating a continuous warped surface that geometry textbooks classified as a hyperbolic paraboloid, a doubly-ruled surface whose straight-line generators twisted across the form’s curvature. The base of the building enclosed a 22,000 square foot landscaped courtyard at the center of the block, a Copenhagen typology imported into Manhattan at the exact density the New York zoning code allowed. The exterior cladding ran in stainless steel panels arranged in a chevron pattern that reflected the Hudson River sunset off the western face through the late afternoon. The building was called VIA 57 West. The architect was 41 years old when it opened.
The 2010s Bjarke Ingels operation inverted the 2000s Herzog & de Meuron Tate Modern operation across every load-bearing variable. The Swiss practice had operated as inheritors of the European modernist tradition, with Pritzker Prize credentials, Basel office discipline, and a press posture that ran serious, restrained, and philosophical. The Tate had taken a decommissioned 1947 oil-fired power station and converted it into the world’s most-visited modern art museum through restrained adaptive-reuse intervention. The brick shell stayed. The turbine hall got hollowed out. The existing volume did the work. VIA 57 West inverted the operation: pure formal invention rather than inherited shell, generated geometry rather than adapted volume, marketing-rendering aesthetic executed at architectural scale rather than monastic restraint dropped onto industrial heritage. The Tate was inherited. VIA was generated.
Ingels was not just an architect. Ingels was a different communication infrastructure for the architectural profession.
The Copenhagen Routing
Bjarke Ingels was born in Copenhagen on October 2, 1974. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture in Copenhagen from 1993 to 1998 and at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona from 1998 to 1999 on an exchange program. He worked at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam under Rem Koolhaas from 1998 to 2001, the structural training ground that produced more design-led-practice founders of the subsequent generation than any other office in European architecture. The Koolhaas alumni list across the same window ran Joshua Prince-Ramus (REX), Winy Maas (MVRDV), Floris Alkemade (FAA), and Ingels himself, with each founding a practice that carried OMA’s diagrammatic methodology into independent operation.
Ingels founded PLOT, a Copenhagen partnership with the Belgian architect Julien De Smedt, in 2001. The practice produced the VM Houses (2005), the Mountain Dwellings (2008, ongoing construction at the time of the partnership dissolution), and the harbor-bath project at Islands Brygge (2003) as the early proof-of-concept work. PLOT dissolved in early 2006 when Ingels and De Smedt separated the practice into two independent firms. Ingels founded Bjarke Ingels Group on January 1, 2006 with a staff of seven operating out of a Copenhagen office on Nørrebrogade.
The Mountain Dwellings completed in 2008 as the first signature BIG project under the new firm name. The building stacked 80 residential units onto the upper terraces of an existing parking garage in Ørestad, with each apartment receiving a private garden on the sloping rooftop and the residual parking-garage volume below serving the building’s parking requirement. The diagram ran as a single legible image: parking on the bottom, dwellings on top, with the dwellings stepped back to give every unit a south-facing garden. The 8 House completed in 2010 in the same Ørestad district ran a figure-eight floor plan around two internal courtyards, generating a continuous public-access bicycle ramp that wrapped from street level to the tenth-floor roof terrace.
BIG opened a New York office in 2010 at 36 East 12th Street in the East Village, with Ingels splitting his time across Copenhagen and Manhattan through the rest of the decade. The expansion into the American market routed the practice into the development-economics context that would define the bulk of the firm’s revenue across the subsequent ten years.
The Yes Is More Manifesto
The communication infrastructure ran ahead of the building delivery. Yes Is More published in 2009 through Taschen as a 400-page architecture monograph executed in comic-book format. The book ran panel-by-panel cartoon sequences of Ingels narrating BIG’s project case studies, with the architect drawn as a cartoon character in a black t-shirt walking the reader through the diagrammatic logic of each project across the firm’s eight-year history. The format ran outside the conventional architectural-monograph convention. El Croquis, 2G, A+U, and the Phaidon project monograph series had established the standard format of the design-led practice’s career retrospective: photographs, plans, sections, axonometric drawings, occasional dense theoretical essays from invited critics. Yes Is More ran cartoon panels.
The structural function of the comic-book format was the communication grammar it established. The book made the practice’s diagrammatic methodology legible to a readership that ran orders of magnitude wider than the architectural-trade-press audience the conventional monograph reached. The book sold through Taschen’s international distribution to bookstore customers who would never have picked up an architectural monograph in conventional format. The communication operation ran outside Perspecta at Yale, GSD Platform at Harvard, Log in New York, and the academic discourse channels that the European theoretical practice tradition had operated through across the prior thirty years.
Ingels articulated the underlying framework as “pragmatic utopianism” across repeated interview appearances and lecture engagements through the decade. The framework positioned architecture as accessible, optimistic, problem-solving practice rather than theoretical, contested, and intellectually closed discipline. The pragmatic component routed the practice into developer-economics reality. The utopian component routed each project’s diagrammatic logic into a story the developer’s marketing team could deploy at sales-launch press events.
The corresponding press infrastructure scaled across the back half of the decade. Ingels delivered his first TED Talk in 2009, a second TED Talk in 2011, and continued lecture appearances at design conferences, business schools, and university programs across the following ten years. Time magazine named Ingels to the 100 Most Influential People list in 2016. Netflix produced a feature episode on Ingels for the Abstract: The Art of Design documentary series released in 2017, with the episode running as a half-hour profile distributed to the platform’s 100 million-plus global subscribers. The press operation ran at scale that no prior-generation Pritzker-tier practice had attempted, and that the prior-generation press infrastructure had not been built to accommodate.
The VIA 57 West Specification
The building specification ran the BIG diagrammatic methodology executed at full Manhattan development-economics scale. VIA 57 West completed in 2016 at 625 West 57th Street on a site of approximately 88,000 square feet between West End Avenue and the West Side Highway. The building delivered 32 stories at its peak elevation of approximately 467 feet, 709 residential units across rental apartments running from studios to four-bedroom penthouse configurations, and 830,000 square feet of total floor area. The Durst Organization served as developer, financing the project through its conventional debt-and-equity capital stack with the residential lease-up running through Durst’s in-house leasing operation.
The hyperbolic paraboloid form generated the building’s signature image. The geometry started from a courtyard-block typology imported from the Copenhagen urban-housing tradition, with the perimeter of the block holding the street wall and the interior of the block opening as landscaped courtyard. The Manhattan implementation lifted one corner of the perimeter block to thirty-two stories while holding the diagonally opposite corner at approximately five stories, generating the warped roofline that resolved the courtyard typology into Manhattan tower-density requirements. The form delivered both the higher floor area the project economics required and the courtyard amenity the Copenhagen typology delivered, with the warped roof serving as the geometric reconciliation between the two.
The 22,000 square foot landscaped courtyard at the building’s heart ran as the residential amenity that distinguished the project from comparable Manhattan rental tower competitors. The courtyard included planted gardens, a reflecting pool, seating areas, and unit windows oriented toward the interior across the lower floors. The hybrid program ran traditional Manhattan tower density at the upper levels and Copenhagen courtyard typology at the lower levels, with the building’s geometry resolving the transition between the two scales across the warped exterior surface.
The exterior cladding ran in stainless steel panels arranged in chevron patterns across the warped surface, with the panel layout adjusting to follow the building’s geometric curvature. The metal surface reflected light from the Hudson across the western face through afternoon hours, generating the photogenic exterior condition that drove the building’s marketing imagery across press coverage and Durst’s leasing collateral. The AIA New York chapter awarded VIA 57 West its 2016 Honor Award. The Wall Street Journal named the project its 2016 House of the Year. The building entered the published architectural canon through Architectural Record, Architect Magazine, The Architectural Review, Domus, and Casabella coverage across the following twelve months.
The Practice Scale
The practice operation scaled across the decade at a cadence that ran outside the conventional design-led-practice growth pattern. BIG grew from seven staff in 2006 to approximately 700 staff across offices in Copenhagen, New York, London, Barcelona, and Oslo by 2020. The project portfolio expanded across typologies that ran from single-family residential through urban masterplans and into entire-city science-fiction propositions.
The 2 World Trade Center reboot commission, awarded to BIG in 2015 following the original Foster + Partners design’s failure to secure an anchor tenant, ran the practice into the highest-profile commercial-tower commission in Manhattan through the second half of the decade. The Foster design was set aside in favor of a stepped-massing BIG proposal that proceeded through extensive design-development work before the project itself was suspended pending tenant commitments and subsequently routed back to a revised design under a different team in 2023. The Lego House completed in Billund, Denmark in 2017 as a 130,000 square foot brick-form children’s experience center designed around stacked Lego-brick-shaped white-tile volumes. The Google Bay View campus completed in Mountain View, California in 2022 as a 1.1 million square foot office campus under tented translucent canopies. The Spiral at Hudson Yards completed in 2022 as a 65-story commercial tower with a continuous landscaped ramp wrapping the exterior. The Vancouver House completed in 2020 as a residential tower twisting from a triangular base plate to a rectangular tower above. The Amager Bakke waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen completed in 2019 with a ski slope on its sloped roof. The Smithsonian South Mall campus masterplan commission was awarded in 2021 with completion projected through the late 2020s.
The practice’s operational scale routed across project typologies and continents at a cadence that ran at multiple times the project velocity of the Herzog & de Meuron Basel office, the SANAA Tokyo office, or the Renzo Piano Workshop. The scale required the production infrastructure to match: a digital-design workflow standardized across all five global offices, a project management protocol that allowed any office to pick up work from any other office across time zones, and a marketing-and-communications operation that handled press and publication output as a continuous workflow rather than a project-specific exercise. The practice operated less like a traditional atelier than like a venture-backed startup that had scaled into the established-firm operating mode.
The Equipment Cancellation
The optimistic-starchitect operating model that BIG had scaled through the 2010s ran into structural pressure across the back half of the decade and into the 2020s. The Toronto Quayside Sidewalk Labs masterplan, a BIG-designed urban district proposed by Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs subsidiary for the Toronto waterfront, collapsed in May 2020 after sustained community resistance to the project’s data-collection and privacy implications, combined with the pandemic-era uncertainty that ran across capital commitments through the second quarter of the year. The Hyperloop One station and pod designs BIG had produced for the Virgin-backed transport venture from 2017 to 2019 became obsolete when the underlying high-speed-tube transport technology failed to advance past prototype testing, with Virgin Hyperloop One ceasing operations as a passenger-transport venture in 2022. The Mars City masterplan that BIG produced for the United Arab Emirates Mars 2117 program ran as a press event that generated coverage in Wired, Dezeen, and the Financial Times without producing any construction outcome.
The pattern routed through the broader architectural discourse across the early 2020s. The “starchitect” model that the prior two decades had built, in which a single named principal carried a recognizable design signature across global commissions delivered at marketing-rendering scale, ran into the harder physical and political constraints of the post-pandemic decade. The supply-chain disruption of 2020 to 2022 lengthened construction timelines and raised material costs across the sector. The community-engagement requirements that municipal planning processes adopted across the same window made the conventional single-designer-vision approach harder to advance. The financial-conditions reset of 2022 raised the cost of capital across real estate and reduced the developer appetite for signature-architect premium projects.
VIA 57 West still rises at West 57th and the West Side Highway. The hyperbolic paraboloid still reflects the Hudson off its western face through afternoon hours. The courtyard still holds residents through summer evenings. The next building’s marketing rendering loads on a different screen, for a different developer, in a different city, with a different team of architects who came up reading Yes Is More in a bookstore the year it published.
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