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Danish architect reveals World Trade Center plans

In a newly-released video, Bjarke Ingels has unveiled his plans for Two World Trade Center, the latest in a string of high-profile design jobs for the 40-year-old Dane.

Published: 12 June 2015 08:07 CEST

Danish architect reveals World Trade Center plans

BIG's Two World Trade Center (centre). Photo: BIG/DBOX

Star Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and his BIG group have revealed their plans to revamp the Manhattan skyline with the final tower at the World Trade Center site.

In a video released by BIG on Wednesday, Ingels shows off his design for Two World Trade Center, a glass tower made up of seven stacked cubes with green roofs.

See it here. Story continues below:

2 World Trade Center in New York City, a BIG design, Squint/Opera production from BIG on Vimeo.

“The completion of the World Trade Center will restore the majestic skyline of Manhattan and unite the streetscapes of TriBeCa with the towers Downtown. To complete this urban reunification we propose a tower that will feel equally at home in TriBeCa and the World Trade Center,” Ingels says in the video.

“From the World Trade Center, the individual towers will appear unified, completing the colonnade of towers framing the 9/11 Memorial. Horizontal meets vertical. Diversity becomes unity,” he adds.

Bjarke Ingels. Photo: Henning Bagger/Scanpix

Bjarke Ingels. Photo: Henning Bagger/Scanpix

The New York project is just one of a recent string of high-profile projects landed by the 40-year-old Copenhagen native. Ingels is co-designing a new headquarters for Google in California, will carry out a “radical reinterpretation” of the Smithsonian Institute grounds in Washington DC, will renovate Aarhus’s waterfront and will turn a Copenhagen waste-to-energy plant into a year-round ski slope.

Click through on the photo below for a gallery of the Two World Trade Center plans.

Two World Trade Center. Illustration: BIG/DBOX

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Futuristic Gehry tower opens in World Heritage Arles

Gehry's Luma Tower opens in Arles, France. Photo: H I / Pixabay

The tower, which opens to the public on Saturday, is the flagship attraction of a new “creative campus” conceived by the Swiss Luma arts foundation that wants to offer artists a space to create, collaborate and showcase their work.

Gehry, the 92-year-old brain behind Bilbao’s Guggenheim museum and Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall, wrapped 11,000 stainless steel panels around his tower above a huge glass round base.

It will house contemporary art exhibitions, a library, and offices, while the Luma Arles campus as a whole will host conferences and live performances.

From a distance, the structure reflects the changing lights of this town that inspired Van Gogh, capturing the whiteness of the limestone Alpilles mountain range nearby which glows a fierce orange when the sun sets.

Mustapha Bouhayati, the head of Luma Arles, says the town is no stranger to
imposing monuments; its ancient Roman arena and theatre have long drawn the
crowds.

The tower is just the latest addition, he says. “We’re building the heritage of tomorrow.”

Luma Arles spreads out over a huge former industrial wasteland.

Maja Hoffmann, a Swiss patron of the arts who created the foundation, says
the site took seven years to build and many more years to conceive.

Maja Hoffmann, founder and president of the Luma Foundation. Photo: Pascal GUYOT / AFP

Aside from the tower, Luma Arles also has exhibition and performance spaces in former industrial buildings, a phosphorescent skatepark created by South Korean artist Koo Jeong A and a sprawling public park conceived by Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets.

‘Arles chose me’

The wealthy great-granddaughter of a founder of Swiss drug giant Roche, Hoffmann has for years been involved in the world of contemporary art, like her grandmother before her.

A documentary producer and arts collector, she owns photos by Annie Leibovitz and Diane Arbus and says she hung out with Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York.

Her foundation’s stated aim is to promote artists and their work, with a special interest in environmental issues, human rights, education and culture.

She refuses to answer a question on how much the project in Arles cost. But as to why she chose the 53,000-strong town, Hoffmann responds: “I did not choose Arles, Arles chose me.”

She moved there as a baby when her father Luc Hoffmann, who co-founded WWF,
created a reserve to preserve the biodiversity of the Camargue, a region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Rhone river delta known for its pink flamingos.

The tower reflects that, with Camargue salt used as mural panels and the
delta’s algae as textile dye.

Hoffmann says she wants her project to attract more visitors in the winter, in a town where nearly a quarter of the population lives under the poverty line.

Some 190 people will be working at the Luma project over the summer, Bouhayati says, adding that Hoffman has created an “ecosystem for creation”.

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