Earlier this month, BIG debuted a new website. The change, announced on Twitter yesterday, noted that the firm’s original website was made during the 2000s Flash era:
Our original website was conceived during the flash era nearly 20 years ago! Check out the new https://t.co/ZjfcuHqLg0 which reflects our built body of work and our growing multidisciplinary practice: Landscape, Engineering, Architecture, Planning & Products: BIG L E A P pic.twitter.com/pxBzrlGxzT
— BIG (@BIG_Architects) January 11, 2023
The new site marks the shift in the company’s direction since its founding. A statement on the website from founder and creative director Bjarke Ingels said, “Our latest transformation is the BIG LEAP: Bjarke Ingels Group of Landscape, Engineering, Architecture, Planning and Products.” (Sustainability is listed on the page as one of the key disciplines of the firm but this didn’t make it into the new acronym.)
Eschewing the easy formalism for which the firm is known, Ingels writes that “[for] architects today, the Golden Ratio is no longer the standard—rather, the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals are. From a single elegant solution, architects are now held to multidimensional success criteria with almost infinite variables.”
BIG LEAP’s website reflects the firm’s expansive mindset. On a desktop, the new site zooms through a stack of completed projects. On a phone, the site shares a vertical scroll of projects. When selected, a horizontal scroll of images showcases individual projects in detail. Beyond the central discipline of architecture, the website recognizes the allied work of landscape, engineering, planning, and products reflected in the firm’s new name.
True to the old website’s styling, where color-coded projects were represented by pictograms stacked in a Tetris-like, periodic table arrangement, each project on the new site has its own unique icon.
The redesign also scuttles the Millennial loading screen, a display programmed in several iterations that spelled out “Loading” in block letters as a percent ticker below gradually inched up to “100%” before revealing the main homepage.
While the new site is an undoubted improvement that shows a serious portfolio of built and proposed work, the cheeky big.dk URL remains the same.
