Let’s be blunt: In New York City, there are a lot of tall buildings. So much so, that the idea of a scenic view involves nothing more than gazing out your office window at the wall of buildings across the street, or down at the scurrying crowds of people below. Some people take a trip to the top of the Empire State Building for a panoramic vista, but honestly, who does that besides tourists?

While most New Yorkers rarely admit it, sometimes all we want is to flee the city and surround ourselves with nature. And, what better way to appreciate the natural landscape than from a tall observation tower. Today, we bring you five truly unconventional observation towers that, unlike the skyscrapers of Manhattan, provide unobstructed views of the surrounding scenery. Click through to see them all!

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BIG’s masterplan (top) and OMA’s (bottom)

Miami Beach is heating up as two of the biggest international architecture firms compete for the masterplan of its convention center area. High-profile competitions between high-profile firms are nothing new; usually involving four out of the ten usual contenders, these matches happen on almost a weekly basis. What makes this instance more captivating, though, is the strong frisson of oedipal tension at play between contenders BIG and OMA: Bjarke Ingels, founder and head of BIG, used to work at OMA. More after the jump!

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Image via Youngsan IBD

By now, so many renderings of South Korea’s Yongsan International Business District — otherwise known as the “Dream Hub” — have circulated through the Internet that it practically exists, given the semi-virtual reality we live in today. But according to Business Insider, the $28-billion scheme that has wooed the design talents of Daniel Libeskind, Foster + Partners, BIG, MVRDV, and Dominique Perrault might, technically speaking, never actually exist. Still feeling the effects of the the 2008 global financial crisis, the Yongsan Development Corporation was forced to default on a major loan repayment, and the Dream Hub is looking more and more like, well, a dream.

Planned for 56 acres in central Seoul, the Dream Hub scheme originally promised a lively pop-up business district equipped with shopping malls, hotels, retail stores, apartment blocks, and mixed-use office towers, all master-planned by Daniel Libeskind and sprinkled with trophy architecture including MVRDV’s pixelated “Cloud” building and BIG’s enormous, distorted pound sign. Such designs quickly became Internet icons, drumming up serious controversy and generating plaudit in the form of mass re-tweets and Facebook likes. Yongsan was poised to become a design laboratory of sorts, showcasing the fantastical architectural spectacles endemic to the contemporary age. It seems almost appropriate, then, that the buildings might never be built, and these Internet sensations may rise and fall without ever entering the material world. The collapse of the project, however, is still speculative, with another round of loans taken out by the Yongsan Development Corporation scheduled to mature this June.

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Before we could even finish saying “trash-incinerator-ski-slope,” BIG has dished out another dazzling showcase of founder Bjarke Ingels’s “hedonistic sustainability” concept. The Danish wunderkind and his firm were recently announced as the winning designers for EuropaCity, an 80-hectare cultural and commercial destination between Paris and Roissy in France described by the architects as “a laboratory for sustainable technologies.” Sure enough, the renderings are drenched in neon green, illustrating the crowning achievement of the design: an enormous continuous green roof spanning over a new metropolis of retail, culture, and leisure. More after the jump.

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This project won the 2013 Architizer A+ Popular Vote Award in the Landscapes and Gardens category. See the full list of winners here.

A lot can be said about a neighborhood from observing its parks. The social interactions that go on in these public areas—the groups of people who visit at different times and utilize the spaces and amenities in divergent ways—can reveal a great deal about the socioeconomic systems undergirding the community. So though an unsuspecting bench, tree, or bike rack might not seem to communicate much, these objects set the stage for very telling public exchanges.

For their design of Superkilen, a half-mile-long urban park in Copenhagen, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), Topotek 1, and Superflex took the concept of the park as a social laboratory a step further. The designers crowdsourced ideas from the community—a famously diverse group of local inhabitants—to come up with a collection of objects from 62 countries to incorporate into the park plan. See how it turned out after the jump.

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When we first saw the renderings for BIG’s much buzzed about Amager Bakke Waste-to-Energy Plant in Copenhagen, we thought, “Cool! Green energy and sleek design!” We did not, however, anticipate the winding ski slope that crowns the inclined roof of this eccentric waste-burning facility. The building dominates the landscape of the city, while providing an odd blend of urban recreation and valuable utility. With a smokestack that emits circular smoke clouds of CO2 emissions lit up by neon lasers, a building that masks something dirty and ugly with a fun and beneficial activity, and renderings imbued with an early-European Modernist aesthetic, BIG’s latest project shows a true commitment to the Dutch philosophy of hygge—making sure your daily life is pleasant and cozy. Click through to see the photos!

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Landscaping is the butt of many an undergraduate architecture student joke. But what do undergrads know about anything, right? At its best,  landscaping melds structure and context, ensuring that the best attributes of the site — or the sense of “place,” if you prefer — are preserved while still accommodating the new building. This relationship can be very literal (i.e. a “green-lawned” building) or more general, functioning in more subtle ways (i,e, a park). In both senses, landscaping — in which we include gardens and parks — is an essential component to the making of architecture.

The finalists for the Architizer A+ “Landscaping” and “Parks/Pavilions” awards make a great case for the indispensability of landscape design. Click through to see them all!

(Psst. You’ve got just 2 days left to vote for your favorites! Head over to the Awards site to vote now.) 

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Critics of BIG poke fun at the blocky, elemental formalism that the firm employs — or did, at least in their earlier projects — by likening them to mountains of LEGOs. Bjarke seemed to be in on the joke when he (and a poor team of interns) built a gigantic 250,000-piece LEGO model at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2007.  The installation played to BIG’s critics and advanced Bjarke’s, admittedly sketchy, “hedonstic sustainability” agenda, balancing architectural “research” in form and program with unabashed, if unironic, fun. Six years later, Bjarke is embarking on another LEGO venture.

BIG will design the first ever LEGO museum in Billund, Denmark, according to a report by Architect Magazine. Known as the LEGO’s “Brand House,” the project’s function is being described as a “public museum and experience center.” The architect envisions an open museum with walls of “user content of such a high quality,” though what that says of the project’s spatial program, or even curatorial approach, we’re not sure. If you’re having any doubts, put them to rest. ”It will be the best museum ever,” Ingels promises—yes, EVER.

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Yesterday, we brought you our favorite razor sharp architecture, which got us thinking; “What if those spiky buildings were turned on other buildings?”Being the archi-nerds that we are, we started looking for some buildings that have benefited from a little slice-and-dice. Perhaps the architects behind these projects took cues from the precise knife-work seen on reality cooking shows, fierce sword fighting on Game of Thrones, the token Valentine’s Day slasher movie, or our culture’s obsession with plastic surgery. Probably not, but we’ve rounded up our top 8 buildings that appear to have gone under the knife. Click through for the slide show!

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Of all the things to stop Bjarke Ingels‘ (and that hair’s) incredible winning streak, who would have thought a tree might do the job. A protected 80-year-old tree located on the site of BIG’s Marina Lofts project for Ft. Lauderdale has locals worried about its fate. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, the octogenarian rain tree (albizia saman)—the largest in Florida—stands on the spot of one of BIG’s 36-story mixed-use towers that form the heart of developer Asi Cymbal’s plan to revitalize downtown Ft. Lauderdale. Continue.

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