The instructional and research spaces are organized around the perimeter of the building – providing classrooms with picturesque views while keeping the quieter instructional spaces farther away from the more social atrium. Overall, the interior’s materiality is defined by the contrast of the warm wood-clad beams, concrete floors, and the functional double-duty surfaces found within the integrated sciences labs.

BIG conceived the bank as a simple urban perimeter block of workstations and the executive floor surrounding a large public space on the ground with all the banking facilities, including café and art galleries for the bank&#;s art collection. Bordered by two radically different contexts, the park and the sea on one side and the historic downtown on the other, BIG envisioned a building so flexible that it would become the architectural imprint of the forces of the city around it.

BIG&#;s design has evolved over the years to ensure the best possible solutions in function, program, sustainability, and future security. Designed as a piece of social infrastructure, the travel center is shaped for the flow of people and public life. The building celebrates movement and creates a welcoming, warm and transparent mobility hub that will become an important social and economic node redefining the city’s infrastructure and landscape.

BIG&#;s design combines four universal archetypes across space and time into a new national symbol: the circle, the rotunda, the arch and the yurt are merged into the form of a Moebius strip. The clarity of the circle, the courtyard of the rotunda, the gateway of the arch and the soft silhouette of the yurt are combined to create a new national monument appearing local and universal, contemporary and timeless, unique and archetypal at the same time.

Like the monsoons, the dust storms and the mountains, the BIG Pin is also an exceptional moment, a point of reference and a mechanism to set the still landscape in motion &#; only this time through the movement of the spectator. Instead of referencing other observation towers, the Pin takes as a point of reference Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated Guggenheim Museum of New York. The visitor experiences the museum as a spiral motion looking inward. At the BIG Pin, the focus is reversed. Instead of a void, there is the dramatic landscape of Phoenix, Arizona.