Pragmatic Utopianism: Historically the field of architecture has been dominated by two opposing extremes. On one side an avant-garde of wild ideas, often to detached from reality that they fail to become some-thing other than eccentric curiosities. On the other side there are organized corporate consultants that build predictable and boring boxes of high standard. Architecture seems entrenched between two equally unfertile fronts: either naively utopian or petrifyingly pragmatic. Rather than choosing one over the other, BIG operates in the fertile overlap between the two opposites. A pragmatic utopian architecture that takes on the creation of socially, economically and environmentally perfect places as a practical objective.
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First published in 2009
Taschen | Cologne
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