Climate-specific buildings by architect Bjarke Ingels to show at Washington, D.C.’s National Building Museum

“Buildings don’t care what country they’re in,” architect Bjarke Ingels said in New York last week at a Kering Talks event at the NeueHouse. “They care what climate they’re in.” He might as well have been summing up his newest exhibition, “Hot to Cold: An Odyssey of Architectural Adaptation,” opening tomorrow at Washington, D.C.’s National Building Museum. The show will take an inside look at Ingels’s design firm BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and the way his projects address disparate weather systems across the globe. From a waste-to-energy power plant in Copenhagen with a ski slope on top (the city gets tons of snow, but the landscape is completely flat) to a plan for New York City meant to protect low-lying areas from a future Hurricane Sandy, BIG’s projects take the surrounding environment, culture, and climate into constant consideration.

In the spirit of the show’s subject matter, Ingels makes innovative use of the National Building Museum’s Great Hall, taking the material off the wall and suspending it in space. More than 60 three-dimensional models will be hung from the second-floor balconies so that viewers can get a true sense of scale and proportion.

From January 24 through August 30 at 401 F Street NW, Washington, D.C.; nbmrg

Click here to view climate-conscious BIG projects.

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