Hot to Cold: An Odyssey of Architectural Adaptation
“Hot to Cold: An Odyssey of Architectural Adaptation” is Bjarke Ingels Group’s (BIG) first North-American exhibition and is on view at the National Building Museum in Washington D. C. from January 24th, 2015 to August 30th, 2015.
The exhibition takes the visitor on a journey around the world (going from the hottest to the coldest areas), exploring more than 60 of BIG’s architectural projects, arranged by climate gradation. The models are showcased along the second-floor arcade and proceed around the museum’s grand hall. The designs find inspiration in the climatic extremes, where architecture becomes about shading from the heat or sheltering from the cold. Founder of BIG, Bjarke Ingels explain: “In the extreme climates, the architecture is totally informed by the climate, in the more mild climates, other factors take over.“.
BIG is an ambitious global architecture company striving to be climatically responsive and focused on sustainability. Ingels describes his company’s design philosophy as: “World craft, the belief that we design our own human ecosystems, and should never be limited by technology or the status quo.”
Danish architects focus on sustainability and green thinking
The concern about climate change has focused the world upon the importance of sustainability and green thinking. Danish architects are well advanced when combining sustainable thinking with modern design. C.F. Møller Architects (one of Scandinavia’s oldest and largest architectural companies), together with SLA and Rambøll, have recently won the competition for the new extension to the University of Copenhagen’s Panum complex. The new extension will have Denmark’s most energy-efficient laboratories, in which waste energy from the ventilation system will be recycled as part of the overall energy balance of the building. Furthermore, grass on the roof will be used for rainwater management and emphasis has been placed on creating good conditions throughout the building for optimal use of daylight.
The focus on sustainability and green thinking is also emphasized at the Danish educational level. For the second year in a row Danish students from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) participated in the unofficial World Championships for energy saving houses – Solar Decathlon Europe 2014. The idea behind the competition is to design the intelligent house of the future – energy saving houses, which produce more energy than they consumes. The Danish project, named Embrace, was focused on building cheap, flexible and energy saving houses, placed on roofs of existing buildings in big cities such as Copenhagen. The DTU students ended as number eight out of twenty.
