Det Grønne Strøg - the green line - will continue through Kaktustårnene / Cactus Towers

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Kaktustårnene or the Cactus Towers at Dybbølsbro will not be finished until the summer and it is still difficult to see how the high landscape of Det Grønne Strøg / the Green Line will transition across from the roof of the new IKEA store - still under construction - and then drop down steeply to the level of the entrance to the NEXUS building.

From the street and from the shopping centre of Fisketorvet, you can see what appears to be a large, square slab of concrete set at a sharp angle at the base of the towers and that forms, in part, the roof of a large, open, lobby or entrance into the towers and supported on high and slender columns. Drawings show that there will be a sharply-winding path dropping down between the towers through planting.

The towers were designed by BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group - and they have experience of forming steep landscapes at 8Tallet in Ørestad and on the roof of the Bakke or incinerator which is steep enough for a ski slope.

When finished this summer, there will be 495 apartments in the towers that are wedge shaped and each has a striking and sharply-angled balcony.

There will be a few apartments with two rooms but most are single studio rooms of just 33 square metres and have been described as providing "Micro Living" so it is slightly ironic that publicity material promotes the location as next to a new IKEA store when the furniture in the apartments is fitted and with little space for anything else. They even seem to have a bed that is, it appears from drawings, to be a mattress on the large windowsill.

Marketing of the apartments is aimed at young, single, people and there will be communal spaces in the towers for meeting and eating but they might also appeal to professionals who want a base for working in the city during the week but return home at weekends.

Copenhagen has a chronic shortage of housing for students and for single young professionals so it will be interesting to see how quickly tenants are found but my guess is that living in Kaktustårnene will be popular and fashionable.

from the entrance to the shopping centre at Fisketorvet with the two round towers of Kaktustårnene still being fitted with balconies but with the lobby area on slender columns in place
straight ahead is Dybbølsbro - the bridge crossing the railway to the suburban railway station and to Vesterbro beyond
Det Grønne Strøg - the Green line - will be carried over the road with a bridge or bridges from the roof of the IKEA store

looking towards Kaktustårnene at the lower level of Carsten Niebuhrs Gade with the first stages of the IKEA building to the left showing just how high above street level the garden across the roof will be
Dybbølsbro runs across the view left to right with the lobby of the entrance and the towers beyond …. the public gardens of the Green Line will continue from the roof of IKEA to the roof of the lobby and then drop down at a sharp angle to the level of the entrance to the NEXUS building beyond

still threatened with demolition?

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the Palads cinema building alongside the railway trench at Vesterport suburban rail station (above) and proposal from BIG for the Palads site (below)

With the pandemic hanging over the city, much of day-to-day life seems to have been put on hold although building work - particularly on the site of the old Carlsberg brewery on the west side of the city - seems to have continued.

Decisions about two very different buildings appear to have been suspended but for very different reasons.

The first is the Palads cinema, close to Vesterport suburban railway station and alongside the railway trench. It dates from the early 20th century although it is probably best known for it's bright colours when the exterior was painted in 1989 in a scheme by Poul Gernes in dark pastels but primarily in pinks and deep sky blue.

The building itself has been altered extensively over the years, so cannot claim to be of great architectural significance so there have been two applications to demolish with two separate schemes for redevelopment of this prime site - one with the railway trench built over and with a large group of towers, including a new hotel, and the other scheme by BIG - the Bjarke Ingels Group - with a cinema below ground and with a huge glass tower of offices and apartments above that would be as high as the SAS Royal Hotel nearby.

Both schemes mean the total demolition the existing building in order to develop the whole site but both seem to have underestimated just how many people in the city feel that the present cinema should be kept. They have fond and happy memories of coming to the cinema and restaurants here that, for many, go back decades and, for some, back through several generations.

The second building that is, apparently, awaiting a final decision about its survival, is very different.

It is an apartment tower on Amager that is immediately north of the south campus of the university and is part of a large development by the Bach Group.

Before work was completed, it was discovered that there were serious problems with the concrete of the foundations and then suggestions that there were also problems with the concrete structure above ground.

The developers have claimed that the concrete can be reinforced but since then there have been no further reports in the newspapers so, presumably, a final decision - to demolish or to reinforce the tower and complete the fitting out - is still to be resolved.

is the redevelopment of Vesterport still on track?
another scheme for the cinema site

update:
22 March 2022. An article yesterday, on the Byrummonitor site, stated that the sale of the tower to a large Swedish property group has been cancelled by mutual agreement. The article also said that remedial work on the foundations of the tower were completed last year.

 

Njals Tårn from the west

a BIG hotel for Tivoli

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Back in June, newspapers in the city published an illustration (above) to show the proposal for a new hotel that Tivoli want to build towards the north-east corner of the pleasure gardens - close to the back of the Dansk Industri / Danish Industry building - along with a scheme to close Vesterbrogade to traffic to create a new urban park across the front of the main entrance to Tivoli that has been drawn up by the studio of Jan Gehl.

This would link the gardens to the new square on the north side of the road - part of the relatively new development called Axeltorv designed by Lundgaard & Tranberg Arkitekter - and it would create a much more attractive route from the central railway station - a block west of Tivoli - to the public square in front of the City Hall to the east.

From the drawing it is difficult to judge the scale of the space but this part of Vesterbrogade - from Bernstorffsgade to HC Andersens Boulevard, the main road running north south between Tivoli and the square in front of city hall, is about 220 metres. Although the alignment of the front of buildings vary slightly - it is around 50 metres from the buildings on one side of the street to the front of buildings on the other.

The drawing suggests at least two obvious and major concerns that surely have to have very careful consideration.

The round tower for the hotel has been designed by BIG - The Bjarke Ingels Group - and, described as a pagoda , is shown with large terraces or balconies that are covered with greenery but neither the description nor the greenery disguise the fact that the building proposed would have eighteen floors and be around 70 metres high. There are towers within the gardens but these are relatively insubstantial - most formed with open frameworks of steel - and a tower here, so close to the north-east corner of Tivoli, and a building of this height and mass would block and compete with the views of the tower of the City Hall immediately to the east and with the silhouette of the SAS hotel by Arne Jacobsen to the north west that is just under 70 metres high.

The form of planting and hard landscaping along the street is schematic - this is simply an initial proposal - but is it appropriate for an urban context? Would a better model be the formal avenues of the King’s Garden with simple gravel walkways or the trees of Kongens Nytorv, at the east end of the old city, where the surface is cobbled and has double lines of trees to provide an area where people walk.

Are running water and meadow-like planting really appropriate for an urban and city-centre setting?

Cobbles over wider areas of pavement and double avenues of trees with space under the natural canopy for people to walk and creating space for occasional small-scale events would be more robust and provide a stronger but simpler foil to the buildings along the street.

Initially, traffic could be restricted to a lane in each direction along the centre for essential access and relatively short traditional lamp posts could provide a better level of good light at night. That is not to suggest something staid but lower lighting …. lower in height not in brightness … would compete less with the more important lighting of the gardens and of the electric advertising signs high up on the buildings.

If a major project to construct a tunnel - to take the heavy traffic from HC Andersens Boulevard down underground - and to create a landscaped area between Jarmers Plads and the harbour does go ahead then the two areas of new park would link together to create an extensive area of green from what are now some of the busiest roads in the city.

Tivoli press release

 

historic view of the entrance to Tivoli from Vesterbrogade.
the entrance was designed by Richardt Bergmann and Emil Blichfeldt and built in 1890 to replace an earlier gateway - note the wide pavements; large open area in front of the pleasure gardens - a deep but uncluttered set back from the pavement where people can meet and the relatively narrow cobbled road; low street lighting and double line of young trees

proposal from 2017 by Tredje Natur to divert most of the traffic from the city end of Vesterbrogade to create an area of trees and water across the front of the main entrance into Tivoli … published by Magasinet KBH

Magasinet KBH

looking across Vesterbrogade from Axeltorv to the main entrance to Tivoli
the problem is not just the traffic but the narrow and crowded pavements and the clutter of street furniture and bikes

 

Ⓐ City Hall
Ⓑ Rådhuspladsen Metro station
Ⓒ Vesterbrogade
Ⓓ Axeltorv

Ⓔ SAS tower by Arne Jacobsen
Ⓕ Central Railway Station
Ⓖ Main entrance to Tivoli
Ⓗ proposed hotel?

 

BIG will be less big

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PLAY - the section of the exhibition in the Golden Gallery

model in LEGO of the new headquarters for LEGO designed by BIG

Formgiving - from Big Bang to Singularity - the current exhibition at the Danish Architecture Centre on the work of the Danish architecture practice BIG - the Bjarke Ingels Group - is ….…. well the best word is big.

It has taken over nearly all the exhibition space in the new building. It's in the lobby from the underground car park; it's by the ticket desk; it climbs up the main staircase and on the way fills the smaller exhibition space known as the Golden Gallery; fills the main exhibition area - literally from floor to ceiling - and then comes down through the different separate landings of the staircase that takes visitors back down to the shop and then the exit.

The exhibition will continue until the 12 January 2020 but actually this is the last few weeks to see the full exhibition because on 20 October the part titled PLAY in the Golden Gallery will be dismantled for a new exhibition - the Cabinetmakers’ Autumn Exhibition that will open on the 8 November - and the part of the exhibition down the staircase to return to the shop will revert to the exhibition space for the Dreyer’s Gallery that showcases the work of young, newly-established architects.

The part of the BIG exhibition titled Play in the Golden Gallery is part of the introduction to the main exhibition and this is where there are a series of models of key building from BIG that are made from LEGO and with stacks of LEGO bricks in the centre for children (of all ages) to try their hand at designing and building.

The landings on the narrow staircase back down show the possible future for the architecture practice under the titles THINK, SENSE, MAKE and MOVE as you descend and looks at how architecture could develop to end with ideas about moving a colony of people to Mars. BIG think big.

Formgiving - from Big Bang to Singularity
Danish Architecture Center
Dreyer’s Gallery

 

Formgivning … from big bang to singularity

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  • Connect by Bjarke Ingels and Simon Frommenwiler at entrance

  • BIG at BLOX

  • stairs up with the start of time line

  • PLAY - models of the buildings in LEGO

  • SHOW - Manhattan

  • HOST and LIFT

  • proposal by BIG for BIG in Nordhavn

 

BIG - the Bjarke Ingels Group - have taken over the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen so this exhibition is not just in the two main galleries but flows up and down the staircases and even reaches out into the entrance area. About the only space not occupied by BIG is the half-in-half-out space of the lobby to the underground car park and they also missed an opportunity to take over the public square in front of the building.

Bjarke Ingels is one of the best communicator of ideas and theories about modern architecture - his talks on line are exceptional - so here, at several points in the exhibition, there are life-sized images of the man himself introducing his work and explaining his theories and their application to the phenomenal number of major projects with which BIG have been involved over the last fifteen years.

The main staircase, climbing up from the entrance level, has become a time-line of architectural and cultural history … “the history and future of how thinking, sensing, making, and moving have evolved and will continue to evolve.”

In the gallery at the first landing, PLAY has models of 25 BIG buildings but made by master model makers using plastic LEGO bricks.

Ingels designed LEGO House, in Billund, for the company - completed in 2017 - and here that partnership - between the company and Ingels - is reinforced. This makes a serious point that getting children to see architecture and design as fun from the start - from playing with building bricks or by building dens or play houses - then their approach to their built environment as adults will be more informed and more curious and possibly more adventurous - but the models in LEGO also make sense of these large and complicated buildings by BIG in the way that cartoons or sketches from a good artist can focus our attention on the essential elements of a complicated idea.

Up on the main exhibition area, the floor has been painted with swirls of strong colour that take you to colour-coded areas for this part of the exhibition with each area covering one of the series of main themes. It's a way to group complicated but apparently diverse commissions with sections including - among many others - LIFT, HOST, MARRY and GROW … caps courtesy of the exhibition designer and not mine.

Architectural drawings and rendered digital views - again all colour coded - hang from the high ceiling like banners so it feels like entering a huge medieval bazaar with a touch of Mad Max or Burning Man.

  • model for new apartment building on Dorotheavej in Copenhagen

 

In each section, on trestles, there are architectural models.

Scale models for building projects are the traditional and the well-established tool of the architect and usually a final stage between concept and reality. Models can be the best way for the client and the planning officers to understand what the architect wants to do and models are particularly important if people distrust sketches or are not comfortable with reading and understanding plans and scale drawings.

Here, many of the models are internally lit - to add to the drama - and several use colour for the model that is not used in the final construction but emphasises the main volumes or large building blocks of the architectural composition and there are also some projects where a series of models show how a project evolved as different arrangements of volumes and primary building blocks were tried and ideas developed.

Down the stairs to leave and you find the BIG vision for the future - our future - including concept studies for people building on Mars. As you walk down the stairs, the sections are headed LEAP, THINK, SENSE, MAKE, MOVE.

As an exhibition, it is overwhelming and I will have to get into training and start overloading on energy bars before going back to think about a more carefully-considered review to add to this initial impression. Even if it sounds like it, I'm not carping or trying to be cynical. Seen together, these projects by BIG are impressive and the exhibition really is inspiring. So … the first impression is that it is overwhelming but inspiring.

Ingels is clearly driven - by enthusiasm and with passion - and revelations of theories underlying his ideas should, at the very least, initiate serious discussion about what we need from our buildings now and encourage people to think more about what we want in the future or, to quote, “rather than attempt to predict the future, we have the power to propose our future” although I’m still not sure if that we with the power is us or BIG.

It is appropriate that this exhibition follows on from the retrospective, here at DAC last year, that looked at the life and works of Ove Arup. Both men, although so different in character, can be seen as philosophers who, rather than write, build and make. Both set out to challenge the preconceptions of the staid or the cautious, to move architecture and engineering forward an alternative to simply making sequential improvements or recycling ideas.

If there is one omission, it is that Ingels fronts an atelier - a team of 600 professionals who are divided between offices in Copenhagen, London, Barcelona and New York - but from this first look at Formgivning there seems to be little sense of how responsibility is managed or delegated: an architectural practice on this scale and with this throughput of commissions is as much about management skills and, with growing fame, about the management of expectations as it is about inspiration.

And there is an aspect of modern architecture that the exhibition skirts around and that is the problems and the realities of the present. We tend to gloss over or ignore obvious mistakes of the past as now they are in the past and we want to be rushing on towards the buildings and the materials and the life style and the promises of an attractive and imminent future but in reality, and to be honest, architecture and building, particularly on the scale of many of these projects, is a protracted process where the present is the slowest part. The limbo of the present. Many of the designs here were commissioned five or more years ago and could take a decade to complete or might, even now, be shelved or abandoned as political or environmental pressure dictates a different course.

A case in point is shown in the exhibition with drawings and models for a new building in Nordhavn - the North Harbour - that has been designed by BIG for BIG.

It has been on hold for months because the proposals submitted were rejected in the planning process. A future on hold is frustrating but, sometimes, to take stock and to have to defend a design and to have to fight a corner or, even, when necessary, to accept and understand and take on board concerns should not thwart inspiration but could mean a better building but, in reality, it can be a slow and frustrating process.

BLOX, the new home of the Danish Architecture Centre by the architectural practice OMA, was commissioned in 2008 and completed in 2018. It has been heavily criticised but the rejoinder has been that if this building was commissioned today, it would not be this building that would be commissioned. Will that also be true for some of major projects from BIG that are shown here but are still to be realised?

If there has to be one single and simple contribution that the exhibition makes, it is that Ingels - in the very title of the exhibition - seems to challenge our use of the word design.

For at least the last decade, the word design has been kidnapped by marketing men so, for too many, design has become not so much a process but little more than an ingredient … a selling point to up the amount on the price tag.

Bjarke Ingels seems to have thrown in the towel and abandoned the word to go back to a Scandinavian notion of giving form so, the role of the architect is to have the idea and then to make that idea real … to have the idea and to give it form.

 

Formgivning / Formgiving
an architectural future history from Big Bang to Singularity
continues at Dansk Arkitektur Center / Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen
until 5 January 2020

Dorotheavej apartments by BIG

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This new apartment building on Dorotheavej - affordable housing designed by Bjarke Ingels Group - has just been nominated for the Bygningspræmiering - the annual city architectural award.

Out to the north-west of the city centre, just over 4 kilometres from city hall, this is an interesting area just below Bispebjerg and Nordvest cemetery, with a mixture of older apartment buildings and new apartment developments but also older industrial buildings on either side of a main road and, to the west, just beyond this site, low suburban housing.

The main road, Frederiksborgvej runs north - climbing up the long slope up to Bispebjerg - and Dorotheavej is on the west side, itself rising up a slope across the hill, with the new apartment building just in from the main road and on a very wide site with a long frontage to the street that faces south.

The form of the block is a long, gentle and sinuous curve back away from the street towards the centre but hard against the pavement at each end with the area in front planted with grass and trees. There is a high and wide archway through to the back of the building at the point where that curve is furthest back from the street.

The apartments have the typical through form - typical for Copenhagen - so here with a series of seven separate entrances along the façade and each giving access to a staircase with an apartment on each side at each level those apartments are relatively narrow but deep and run through from front to back of the block. 

 

design by Bjarke Ingels rejected

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Bjarke Ingels submitted proposals for a large new building at the outer end of Orientkaj in Nordhavn that would have dominated the entrance to the inner harbour. This was to be a new headquarters for his architecture company BIG but the application was submitted anonymously - without the name of the architect or of the occupant - and it has just been rejected.

This would be a very substantial building with eight floors but with a large square footprint that gives it rather squat proportions and the building was to be in concrete and, unfortunately, even good drawings submitted for the application still managed to make it look brutal.

Unfortunate because, as Ingels himself explained in a subsequent statement, he was attempting to use concrete in a more honest way.

I have written here in many posts about the new buildings going up so quickly across the South Harbour or on the new Carlsberg development and here at Nordhavn and they go up so quickly simply because they are built with pre-formed slabs of concrete for floors and walls but the outside is then disguised by a veneer of facing materials that are, in most cases, unrelated to the form of building and the logic of the structure underneath. In strict architectural terms they are dishonest.

The drawings of the building proposed by Bjarke Ingels show that it would be very large and it certainly dwarfs the large warehouses that are to the west of the site on the same quay but the proportions are actually good and the series of ramps or diagonal lines respecting a complex arrangement of external and internal staircases is clever, giving the facades a regular spiral that is an echo of the design by Ingels for Søfart - his brilliant design for the maritime museum at Helsingør - but here rising up rather than there spiralling down.

Concrete done badly for cheap and quick building can be horrendous but it can also be a material of real quality when used well and, although the building here would have been large, and dominate Orientkaj, it would, at least, have returned the harbour front to something closer to the bold forms that are a strong part of the recent development of Langelinie Kaj on the seaward side of the former Free Port and those buildings echo the scale and simple forms of the large historic warehouses of the inner harbour.

 
big nordhavn 2.jpg

the site for the proposed building is to the right of the brick and concrete warehouse - itself a substantial building - view from the south west from Fortkaj

 

BIG Art at Kunsthal Charlottenborg

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An impressive and entertaining exhibition at Kunsthal Charlottenborg with large-scale works created by artists working with the architectural studio of BIG and primarily for major new buildings or for public spaces.

Each work has a video presentation by Bjarke Ingels and this confirms that he is one of the most articulate proponents of modern architecture and planning.

the exhibition continues until 13 January 2019

Kunsthal Charlottenborg

BIG’s Bakke

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OK … I could hardly wander around Kløvermarken and Refshaleoen with a camera in bright clear Spring sunlight and not take more photographs of the new waste incinerator designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group.

The steam released from the chimney shows that it is up and running although the building is not completely finished and, as yet, there is no sign of the promised smoke rings or the ski slope that will run down from the top.

I still have some reservations about the size of this building so close to the historic city centre but actually the scale - along with not trying to hide or disguise it - is really the point here because you just can’t hide something this big. The only alternative would have been to banish it to some distant fringe of the city but that would defeat the need to reduce the impact and cost of transporting and dealing with the waste that the city produces. 

And making it bold and impressive and - hopefully - fun then that makes the proximity and, to be honest, the cost possibly more acceptable. It is a huge investment by the city but they have ended up with a pretty amazing chunk of engineering and if it’s covered in trees and snow and if you can ski down from the top then maybe the citizens can at least see it as their BIG BFG ... even if they don’t all love it.

Amager Bakke

 

a brand identity for design from the Nordic region

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An interesting post on the Dezeen site today about a new initiative from the Nordic Council of Ministers for the advertising agency Mensch with Bjarke Ingels of BIG and others to develop a brand image for marketing design from the Nordic Region - the countries of Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden and the Faroe Islands and Åland Islands. Interesting and worth watching as this develops.

 

to read the article go to the Dezeen site

progress on the Amager incinerator .....

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Work to complete the Amager incinerator is progressing … this photograph was taken today in the late afternoon as I walked back across the new bridge over the harbour. External facing seems to be complete and the single stack is in place but wonder how the gizmo for blowing smoke rings is coming on.

 

Amager incinerator

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Taking the harbour ferry was a chance to take yet another photograph of the Amager Resource Centre designed by BIG - the Bjarke Ingels Group - and due to come into service next year. The stack - the one that will blow smoke rings - is finished and much of the exterior cladding appears to be in place and it's now easy to judge the angle of the ski slope that will run down from the top. Perhaps more important, if only from the design aspect, is that the grey colour helps drop the bulk of the building back into the cloudscape and tones down the impact of the building on the sky line.