HUMANS SINCE 1982 x BIG x SOLIDNATURE

Copenhagen, 18 June 2025 – As part of Materialism, a sweeping, multi-level installation at the BIG headquarters in Copenhagen curated for this year’s edition of 3 Days of Design - SolidNature is proud to announce a landmark collaboration with BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) and Stockholm-based design studio Humans since 1982.

Curated by Bjarke Ingels in his role as 2025 guest editor for Domus, Materialism is a year-long editorial and spatial investigation into the elemental role of materials in architecture and design. The first seven issues of the magazine, and their corresponding installations, each focus on a single material: Stone, Earth, Concrete, Metal, Glass, Wood, and Fabric, highlighting how designers manipulate matter into spaces and objects that shape contemporary life. Within this framework, SolidNature’s work is featured in the “Stone” exhibition: a poetic and technical expression of time made tangible.

The focal point of the collaboration is the debut of two iconic kinetic artworks, ClockClock 24 ​ - Bjarke Ingels and A million Times 96 (Bjarke Ingels), reimagined for the first time in natural travertine. Created and developed by Humans since 1982 over a period of 16 years, these choreographed grids of analogue clock faces move in precise, abstracted patterns to create fleeting moments of legibility before dissolving again into motion. They reframe the experience of time not as more than a means of measurement - it’s a felt experience, an unfolding sequence that bridges order and entropy.

“Humans since 1982 are a brilliant studio, working with such archetypical elements as analog clocks, to manifest transcendent experiences like emergence, deterioration, and reemergence. I live with their works, and it feels like a manmade form of life that constantly flows in and out of being in my home. When they invited us to collaborate, I immediately knew that we had to work with Solid Nature. The fact that stones – especially sedentary and even metamorphic rocks are like geological calendars, each stratum like a date in a ledger, makes it a beautiful natural illustration of the concept of time. The two coming together – technology and geology, Minutes, Hours and Millenia, Humans since 1982 and SolidNature – seems like inevitability. And I am happy we could be the midwives in the birth of this new series of stone artworks.” – Bjarke Ingels, Founder & Creative Director, BIG

By translating these timepieces into stone, the project introduces a dual narrative: the micro-precision of contemporary technology set against the macro-timescale of geological formation. Travertine, the natural stone formed over hundreds of thousands of years in mineral-rich freshwater environments, offers a visible timeline of the Earth’s history. Its striations, tonal variations and porous layers read like a core sample of time, such as volcanic eruptions, bacterial growth, and organic decay frozen in sediment. Both ClockClock and A million Times are crafted in Desert Dune travertine, a richly layered stone selected for its expressive striations and warm, earthy tones. As part of the exhibition, five distinct travertines will be on display, offering collectors a carefully curated palette of natural stone options to choose from.. Interested collectors are invited to register their interest exclusively through Humans since 1982, ensuring early access to these singular, stone-crafted timepieces.

The execution of these kinetic sculptures in stone represents a remarkable feat of craftsmanship and technical ingenuity. Each clock body is CNC-milled to just 5 millimetres in thickness, an achievement that demands both precision engineering and an intimate understanding of the material’s structural behaviour. Together with Humans since 1982 and BIG, SolidNature re-engineered the internal geometry to ensure absolute stability, reinforcing the stone only where necessary while maintaining its visual purity. The result is an object that balances grace and gravity.

Humans since 1982 reflect on the significance of this material transformation:

“We feel that using stone adds a more existential, geological reading to the clocks. The contrast between the rigidity of the material and the fluid motion of the hands makes time feel more physical, more mysterious. It’s a reminder that the slow processes of nature and the engineered precision of human technology can co-exist, sometimes even elevate one another.”

The collaboration reflects years of parallel conversations. Bjarke Ingels has long championed the work of Humans since 1982, having collected their pieces and exhibited them in BIG’s studios globally. Simultaneously, BIG and SolidNature have cultivated a shared design ethos around material authenticity and spatial storytelling. 3 Days of Design presented the ideal moment to unify these sensibilities.

SolidNature’s contribution also extends to the sixth floor of BIG’s headquarters, where a curated “material library” showcases over 50 stools and seven tables crafted from raw matter, each corresponding to a Domus material theme. SolidNature has delivered 13 stone cubes for the installation, each representing a different category of natural stone, including travertine, marble, onyx, granite, and quartzite. These monolithic 45x45 cm stools are presented in their raw, uncoated state, highlighting the material’s intrinsic qualities. Together, they demonstrate the extraordinary variety found in natural stone, differences in patterning, structure, colour, and texture, offering a tactile and visual experience of the Earth’s geological diversity. These sit alongside stone tabletops engraved with the Domus cover for the Stone issue, objects designed not only to be seen, but touched, sat on, and experienced physically. Here, materiality is not aesthetic; it is sensory and narrative, each piece inviting reflection on deep time and slow design.

For SolidNature, this project underscores a core belief: that natural stone is not just a finishing material but a medium with voice, memory and enduring relevance. CEO David Mahyari comments:

“Stone is a material that carries time within it—it doesn’t just represent durability; it records history. A material that carries the history of thousands of years, shaped into an object that measures mere seconds. Our goal was to reveal that history with elegance and precision. Collaborating with BIG and Humans since 1982 allowed us to stretch the limits of what stone can do, without losing what makes it timeless.”

The installation will be on view from 18–20 June, with dedicated talks alongside BIG on the themes of stone and time with David Mahyari of SolidNature on Thursday 19 June at 16:00 and Humans since 1982 on Wednesday 18 June at 11:00.

NOTES TO EDITORS

Materialism ​
​Location: BIG Headquarters, Sundkaj 165, 2150 Copenhagen

Talks
​Location: BIG Headquarters, Sundkaj 165, 2150 Copenhagen

Wednesday 18 June, 11:00 - Humans since 1982 ​
​Title: TIME ​
​Thursday 19 June, 16:00 - SolidNature ​
​Title: STONE

About BIG

BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group is a Copenhagen, New York, London, Barcelona, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Zurich, Bhutan, and Oslo-based group of architects, designers, urbanists, landscape professionals, interior and product designers, researchers, and inventors. Led by Bjarke Ingels, the studio is currently involved in projects throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East. BIG’s architecture emerges out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes. BIG believes that by hitting the fertile overlap between pragmatism and utopia, architects can find the freedom to change the surface of our planet to better fit contemporary life forms. 

big.dk

About Humans since 1982

Humans since 1982 is a pioneering studio and global luxury brand for collectible art and design, based in Stockholm, Sweden. Their groundbreaking works ClockClock 24 and A million Times, which consist of grids of carefully choreographed and programmed clock faces, are both kinetic art objects and functioning timepieces. 

Humans since 1982 operate at the intersection of design, art, and technology. Rooted in their philosophy of “Form follows fascination” their work has been collected by museums and Hollywood stars. Through their many exhibitions worldwide — including Somerset House, Saatchi Gallery, and Smithsonian Design Museum — they have established themselves as a force for immersive and captivating experiences. 

The studio behind the brand was founded in 2009 by Per Emanuelsson and Bastian Bischoff, both born in 1982. Together with their partner, CTO David Cox, they develop objects committed to quality, creativity, and craftsmanship. Humans since 1982 is comprised of a specialist team that develops and manufactures all objects in their studio in Stockholm. 

humanssince1982.com