BIG deal!

On the whole, I admire what I know of the work of the Bjarke Ingels Group. They do hyper-rational 'schemes' with headline social agendas that seem to translate to realisable buildings. Think municipal powerplants that serve as ski slopes in a flat country, multi-storey carparks that are veneered with housing like a walkable hill-town, New York high rise offices that ignore the stepped slab prototypes but work magic with sun, daylight and view angles. I have remarked before that particularly when he presents, Ingels reminds me of a young John Andrews, in the way he can communicate with a strident diagram and a finely plausible story. I am an unreconstructed late modernist; I like that sort of stuff.

So I am not often disappointed, but like all fans, I get doubly upset when I feel let down. And so it is with the latest BIG scheme superficially but enthusiastically covered by Inhabitat. This one is for a seniors' residential complex in Taiwan.

Hey, it's a bit of an ask to intelligently critique a sensitive building type, across cultural divides, and only having rendered images to go on. That is why the images upset me so

But images matter. They are worth more than a thousand glib words. Even more to the point, as an architect, you are supposed to look at your own images, because they might tell you when a design is going wrong, BIG time.

Here is a dump of my top three irritants:

• The scheme is described as BIG’s Hualien Residences Look Like Gigantic Green-Roofed Mountains. What they really look like is a bunch of flat plate apartment buildings with floor to ceiling glass, draped with thin ribbons of vegetation made to look like grass. Impossibly steep, so neither for people nor lawn mowers.

• The renderings are populated by a range of hip Japanese looking youngsters. I finally found one old lady hugging a cat, in a Scandinavian modern apartment of jagged cantilevered bookshelves and no evidence of a lifetime's memories. Is it so hard to dig deeper in their entourage collections for people and things that look even vaguely more like the elderly that the complex is supposed to house?

• Multi-storey apartment interiors with cantilever stairs and open risers, no handrail but suspension rods. Spindly metal legged chairs?
• And then that disaster of an international hotel lobby, replete with escalators and blinding white light! 

Taiwan has some of the most successful prototypes of large apartment complexes, functioning like gently gated communities, typically entered through an appropriately scaled lobby with concierge staff who can see out into the street, and into much of the interior courtyard. The apartments themselves include typologies I never see in my Australian context, and can't remember seeing in the European apartment pattern books. My favourite: entry to the apartment through a courtyard-like open terrace, onto which the main full height glazing opens.  Nothing that clever and well suited to the local climate and culture to be seen in the BIG scheme.

The whole thing looks like it was done by a recent graduate in the office, who has never traveled east of Prague. And who hasn't actually visited an apartment complex intended for the old, or for those who are ready to 'age in place'. I hope I am wrong, and it all turns out to be wonderfully sensitive and radically empowering for all its occupants.

See the Inhabited article and slide show here.