Another book by and about the Bjarke Ingels Group. Phaidon’s latest release is a comprehensive overview of all BIG projects completed to date.
Sandra Hofmeister
Bjarke Ingels Group Atlas, with contributions from Kent Martinussen, Joseph Grima, and Andri Snær Magnason, Phaidon, London 2026 → order now
Back then
Bjarke Ingels actually didn’t want to become an architect, but rather a comic artist. His passion for comics and for the architecture depicted in them was evident in the Bjarke Ingels Group’s first publication. The Taschen volume Yes is More. An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution* was published four years after BIG was founded in 2009. It is a book that reflects an attitude and stands for everything that the Bjarke Ingels Group, then a young architecture firm from Copenhagen, stood for: bold and unconventional, courageous and pragmatic. Clear visions and clear statements were characteristic of BIG’s early years and certainly one of the reasons why the firm quickly gained worldwide acclaim. The Bjarke Ingels Group’s success story began, at the latest, with Yes is More.
Danish Maritime Museum, Helsingor, Denmark, 2013. Photography: Iwan Baan
And then…
From today’s perspective, BIG has achieved what many other architectural firms can only dream of. What began as a makeshift workshop in Copenhagen has grown into an internationally renowned architectural firm with around 700 employees and offices in London, Barcelona, New York, Shanghai, Zurich, and Los Angeles. In the Danish capital itself, the Bjarke Ingels Group is housed in a new building in the North Harbor area that has caused a sensation worldwide. The architects call the design approach that has accompanied their success “Pragmatic Utopia.” Over the years, further publications have been added to the first comic book. The BIG monograph published by Edition Detail features construction drawings. Formgiving, published by Taschen in 2020, explores the architects’ design principles; it is the final volume of the trilogy released by BIG, which began with Yes is more from the same publisher.
Via 57 West, New York, New York, United States, 2016. Photography: Laurian Ghinitoiu
Today
With this new book, published by Phaidon, the Bjarke Ingels Group has come of age. The BIG Atlas is the first monograph on the firm’s complete body of work—and it is comprehensive. The book documents more than 50 projects from 2002 to the present, realized in Canada and China, Japan and Mexico—and, of course, several in Europe and the US as well. With over 600 photographs, plans, and drawings across 504 pages, the Atlas is a magnum opus in its own right and truly “big.” Kent Martinussen of the Danish Architecture Centre, Icelandic filmmaker Andri Snær Magnason, and Joseph Grima of the Design Academy Eindhoven have contributed texts to the book.
“Turning fiction into fact” is how Bjarke Ingels once described his understanding of the discipline of architecture. Self-marketing through books is also part of the Bjarke Ingels Group’s philosophy, though the effect here is the other way around. For in the spirit of good storytelling, the new BIG monograph ensures that the facts of the realized projects become BIG fiction.
Bjarke Ingels Group Atlas,
Bjarke Ingels Group, with contributions from Kent Martinussen, Joseph Grima, and Andri Snær Magnason
Hardback, 504 pages, ISBN 9781837290185
Phaidon, London 2026
