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 …