a cult of the ugly?
/Is it just me or is this new apartment building on Richard Mortensens Vej in Ørestad downright ugly? More like a housing project on the Lower East Side in New York than the lower west side of Copenhagen …. Google “housing projects New York” and go to images.
Maybe it's just oppressive and grim. For a start this cliff-like slab of building faces north which certainly does not help. Maybe to call it a cult of the ugly is over the top but surely this shows either a disturbing acceptance or possibly a blindness to buildings that are ugly when they should not be.
It's right next to the 8House by Bjarke Ingels and seems to dominate and overshadow even that huge building.
The Ingels building is now a decade old and was one of the pioneering developments for new, large-scale housing down at the south end of Ørestad. I've always thought the 8 was not particularly well built, or, rather, not as well finished as it should have been, with insufficient focus on the details, but presumably that was because the architect, in his early days, was not able to bring in the sort of financial backing that a project like that actually needed. What 8House has lost, in terms of the quality of the finish, it certainly made up for or compensated for with imagination and bravado. It is still one of the most exciting and one of the most innovative and clever buildings in the city and certainly deserves more respect from the new neighbour that now push hard against it on the west side.
These new apartment buildings are on plots that have been open ground that was left empty for a decade as developers were stymied by the outwash from the 2007-2008 financial meltdown. Weird if social or architectural histories in the future write this up as a development that snuck through planning in a lull between two financial storms … an aberration that somehow got through between a banking crisis and the economic consequences of a pandemic. Odd if this somehow represents a good decade for speculative investment in building.
is this development best described as the new brutal style?
This recently-completed development of apartment buildings is a leviathan that surrounds on three sides and completely overshadows older and well established row houses.
The Rækkehuse designed by Tegnestuen Vandkunsten were built in 2011 with two rows of houses stepping down in a series of terraces to the lake and certainly do not deserve to be buried in this man-made canyon.
