The World According to BIG

In 1995 media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron critically described the emergence of a new global orthodoxy put forward by “the prophets of the Californian Ideology,” a skilled agora of tech-savvy libertarians and entrepreneurs who argued that “only the cybernetic flows and chaotic eddies of free markets and global communications will determine the future. Political debate, therefore, is a waste of breath.” If Barbrook and Cameron decided to reimagine their list of signifiers describing this “virtual class” of “techno-intelligentsia” as an illustrated architectural treatise, the result would be Formgiving. An Architectural Future History, a weighty tome chronicling over one hundred projects by the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).

Formgiving is the most recent installment in Taschen’s triptych of BIG monographs, which includes 2009’s Yes Is More and 2015’s Hot to Cold. It advances many of the themes found in those previous volumes, such as the need for balancing utopia with pragmatism and sustainability with economics, to plot a history of design that speaks to the future. It also showcases the New York– and Copenhagen-based office’s Extreme Engineering approach to architectural design, predicated on innovative speculation involving robotics, machine learning, augmented reality, systems engineering, and 3D printing. Ironically following a “decelerating logarithmic timeline counting down from the Big Bang,” the book trawls through past and present projects to reach its final destination—a speculative BIG multiverse of high-tech habitats connecting Earth with outer space.

The book opens with another BIG manifesto about method and instrumentation, with an epigraph courtesy of the science fiction author William Gibson, who writes: “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly-distributed.” The framing glosses over the more sinister implications of Gibson’s quote in favor of a brief spiel about “fragments of the future” and a belief in collective action being the driving impetus behind every single project that crosses every single three-monitor workstation in BIG’s offices; and readers (all eight billion) are likewise exhorted to make such an effort. It’s unclear what the recommended actions are specifically, but all signs point to collectively waving about the magic wand of “technology” in order to advance human evolution safely beyond our contemporary crises of climate change, migration, unequal resource distribution, and social unrest. While not explicitly named, these specters are lurking and can be exorcised one generic rendering at a time.

According to Ingels, architecture’s fundamental purpose is to give form to vessels that can shape the future, a process involving the “10 gifts” of design, a series of keywords such as the oxymoron (formal contradiction); the x-ray (formal revelation); the response (formal contextualization); reincarnation (recycling space); the z-axis (3D space); the symbiote (mixed- use space); productization (prefab construction); biophilia (construction by nature); collective intimacy (social space); and mindpool (collaboration). From a theoretical standpoint, the book is a vague manifesto that dabbles in technological determinism, a reductive stance that sees technology as the driving force behind social and cultural structures. From an aesthetic perspective, it is cold hyper-capitalist alienation. Corporate commissions such as the Google Bay View Complex (a collaboration with Heatherwick Studios) in Mountain View, California, and Toyota Woven City, a “living laboratory” for testing human mobility and movement in Susono, Shizuoka, Japan, seem to embody the bland technocracies they encase, while the more speculative proposals are just straight up terrifying. These include the resplendently sterile and baroque “City of New Hope,” a commercial outpost on the Moon that would support “science, quantum computing, mining, and tourism” while functioning as an ideal model of a society in space, albeit one with unclear parameters; the prototype for “Mars Science City,” a mixed-use Martian settlement built by robotics and 3D-printed “inflatable membranes,” intended for research, commerce, and exhibition purposes; and the exceptionally tone-deaf “Masterplanet” proposition, described as a master plan for achieving carbon neutrality on Earth while ensuring its mastery over the rest of the solar system. Name aside, it’s impossible to ignore the ways in which these propositions mirror colonial practices of territorial conquest and extractive capitalism.

If Formgiving has its own orthodoxy, it is an uncritical belief in the epistemic function of technology in shaping the future. The book neatly leverages its case studies into predictive forecasts that simultaneously privilege architecture as the key to sustaining human life, while absolving it from any complex ethical or social responsibility for its outcomes. Ingels may be adamant about the importance of collaboration between scientists, politicians, and architects, but only as singular functionaries within a technocratic regime; architecture doesn’t possess any explicit “power” over finance or politics. Instead, its practitioners are freewheeling entrepreneurs who view architecture as a creative act of world making and who navigate complex technological systems with predatory ease while commanding an army of high-tech labor. In a world built by BIG, our future is a foreclosed, updated version of Barbrook and Cameron’s Californian Ideology, where social and democratic solidarity is jettisoned to make way for the unobstructed “evolution of the machine.”