BIG is a leading international partnership of architects, designers, builders and thinkers operating within the fields of architecture, urbanism, research and development. The office is currently involved in a large number of projects throughout Europe, North America and Asia. BIG’s architecture emerges out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes, not least due to the influence from multicultural exchange, global economical flows and communication technologies that all together require new ways of architectural and urban organization. BIG is led by partners – Bjarke Ingels, Andreas Klok Pedersen, Finn Nørkjær, David Zahle, Jakob Lange, Thomas Christoffersen and Managing Partners, Sheela Maini Søgaard and Kai-Uwe Bergmann – with offices in Copenhagen and New York. BIG believes that in order to deal with today’s challenges, architecture can profitably move into a field that has been largely unexplored. A pragmatic utopian architecture that steers clear of the petrifying pragmatism of boring boxes and the naïve utopian ideas of digital formalism. Through completed and ongoing projects BIG tests the effects of size and the balance of programmatic mixtures on the triple bottom line of the social, economic and ecological outcome. Like a form of programmatic alchemy BIG creates architecture by mixing conventional ingredients such as living, leisure, working, parking and shopping. By hitting the fertile overlap between pragmatic and utopia, these architects once again find the freedom to change the surface of our planet, to better fit contemporary life forms, moving the focus from the small details to the BIG picture.