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 banks 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.
Structurally, the pavilion was a giant self-supporting tubular steel truss, similar to the hull of a steel ship. The external façade structure was the buildings most efficient element. The perforation holes let in daylight and created natural ventilation. It was the only pavilion out of + that did not use mechanical cooling. Due to the structural performance of the truss, the degree of perforation varied with the structural stress along the façade.
Keen to shape buildings and cities in Southern Europe, BIG has opened its latest office in Barcelona, Spain. Located in Barcelonas Las Ramblas neighborhood, the studio houses nearly BIGsters working on projects spanning from the west to the east of the Mediterranean region, most notably the HQ for Farfetch, and Fuse Valley campus in Portugal, the Joint Research Center in Sevilla for the European Commission, and the Gastronomy Open Ecosystem for Basque Culinary Center.
Intrepid’s front façade is created by the strategic stacking of High Concrete’s precast panels of varying sizes, figured in a basket-weave pattern to realize the top of the building’s straight edge. As the panels reach upward they also tilt outward, creating an inviting, cave-like canopy over the building’s front sidewalk. Each of the building’s other three sides stand straight up, maintaining the structure’s signature paneling.
Building a sustainable presence on the Moon requires more than rockets. Project Olympuss robust structures will provide better thermal, radiation, and micrometeorite protection than metal or inflatable habitats can offer. Built using ICON’s D printing technology, using lunar regolith as the main building material, the habitat is designed to accommodate four astronauts for a period of up to a month at a time and maximize In Situ Resource Utilization.