Buenos Aires is a lively city with a vibrant social life, but to our surprise it only has m of public green space per person compared to the nine square meters recommended by WHO. This was something BIG&#;s design could address. As a result, the two blocks are transformed into five towers. Each tower is given a different height to eliminate the sensation of a wall. The podium is reduced into semi-sunken pavilions, turning their roofs into green slopes. The bases of each tower are eroded diminishing the footprint and allowing a public park to expand.

A continuous public path stretches from street level to the penthouses and allows people to bike all the way from the ground floor to the top, moving alongside townhouses with gardens, winding through the urban perimeter block. Two sloping green roofs totaling , m are strategically placed to reduce the urban heat island effect as well as providing the visual identity to the project and tying it back to the adjacent farmlands towards the south.

Cloud Valley takes its inspiration from the natural Wulong Karst in the Chongqing Wulong National Park, where valleys and mountain form stunning connections between the earth and the sky. BIG’s proposal for Cloud Valley is conceived as two plots along Xinzhou Avenue and Gaoxin Avenue, that mimic each other’s opposites. There is the Mountain, which forms a striking landmark in the area that gives shelter to a protected network of courtyards filled with inviting public functions. Then there is the Valley, which offers the largest publicly accessible green rooftops in China for open-air events. Below the roofscape, the building opens up to the surrounding public to invite visitors into this new neighborhood.

Keen to shape buildings and cities in Southern Europe, BIG has opened its latest office in Barcelona, Spain. Located in Barcelona&#;s 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.

BIG proposes to turn the light rail line into a spine of dense urbanity with a series of peaks at the stations. By combing the rail with strategies for energy exchange, waste management, water treatment and electric car stations, the infrastructure could become the base for a new sustainable ring of development around Copenhagen, and an artery of true urbanity pumping life into the heart of the suburbs. At certain points the rail becomes a building itself almost like a Roman aqueduct passing through the suburbs, at other points it forms small pockets of urbanity around the stations.