BIG, one of the world’s leading architecture firms, will consolidate its position in Barcelona by inaugurating new offices in Ronda de Sant Pere in September, where around 80 professionals will work. The firm created in 2005 by the Danish Bjarke Ingels opened a smaller office here in 2019, in the Colón tower, on Avenida de las Drassanes. Its new headquarters in Barcelona, ??now in the finishing phase, is located on the ground floor and basement of a spacious building, also facing Trafalgar Street.
Although some medium-scale French or Dutch firms have offices in our city, there are not many delegations of large global firms here, beyond those that have been able to establish themselves temporarily to undertake some work. However, the relationship of Bjarke Ingels, who is now 48 years old, with Barcelona is close and dates back three decades, when he lived here for a year as an Erasmus student to attend the classes he taught at the ETSAB Enric Miralles . Subsequently, Ingels established personal and family relationships in the city, strengthening their bond. And, later, he organized work structures in it.
Currently made up of 700 professionals, BIG has offices in Copenhagen, its headquarters, and also in New York, London, Shenzhen and Barcelona.
Most of these locations are related to dozens of large commissions that BIG has landed over the past decade. In Denmark he has built highly publicized works, such as the initial The Mountain, a residential project in Copenhagen; or the Lego headquarters in Billund; or the excellent Danish Maritime Museum in Elsingor. In the United States, he has built the West 57th St. tower in New York, and in 2015 he presented his design for the 2WTC tower, in Ground Zero. In London he is responsible for the Google headquarters, still under construction. And in Shenzen he has a contract with the Shenzhen Energy Company and, among other projects, the Quianhai Prisma towers stand out, up to 300 meters high.
Ingels’s reasons for settling in Spain obey, on the one hand, as we noted, his old relationship with the city. Although there are also strictly architectural ones. In his day, he participated in the competition for the rehabilitation of Barça, together with Idom engineering and the local firm BAAS. (Projects not developed for the Institute of Science and Technology or for the Térmica del Besòs also appear on the BIG website). And, later, she won the competition to build the new headquarters of the Joint Research Center in Seville, which has been defined as a “cloud of pergolas”, destined for the Seville island of La Cartuja, which hosted Expo’92. Also last year, she won the competition to build the headquarters of the Gastronomy Open Ecosystem, promoted by the Basque Culinary Center in San Sebastián.
Another reason for BIG to settle in Barcelona could be related to the very competitive costs, both real estate and personnel, especially if we compare them with those of New York or London.
After starting out in 2001 with the firm PLOT, Ingels gained global fame at a very young age, at the beginning of this century, still in his thirties, in times of the emergence of iconic architecture. Hers often is too, and she is not ashamed of it, because it is also marked by environmental concerns. In an interview with La Vanguardia in 2011, he indicated that “I try to instill in my students at Columbia University the need to find global sustainability criteria; I like to synthesize that ambition with the word ‘ecolomy’, a cross between ecology and economics, because it is necessary to attend to the needs of both disciplines”.
