The Silo in May 2015 - work had been completed on the ground floor and the exhibition space was used for 3daysofdesign

The DLG Silo was a prominent and well-known landmark of the commercial docks to the north of the city … clearly visible to everyone coming into the city by train from the north and perhaps the most obvious sign that you were close to arrival for anyone coming into Copenhagen on the ferry from Oslo.

A massive and stark concrete block, the tower was built to store grain but with the decline of the dockyard it had been left in splendid and derelict isolation. With the redevelopment of the area immediately around the grain silo, mainly for housing, the decision was taken to retain the concrete tower but convert it into apartments with a public exhibition space below and the scheme that was proposed by the architects Cobe will now include a public restaurant on a new top level to be encased in glass and with views across the city and across the harbour to the sound.

The interior spaces of the silo but new windows are being cut through the outer walls and in order to bring the building up to current standards for insulation - grain has to be kept cool and people prefer to be kept warm - insulation has been added to the outside and then a new outer skin added in galvanised steel - pierced sheet metal - that also forms the balconies of the new apartments. This outer metal skin is described by Cobe as "draping it with a new overcoat."

One balcony has been installed on the gable end of the warehouse of the Danish Architecture Centre as part of the current exhibition there on the work of the architects but the recent completion and the opening of a new multi-storey car park next to The Silo means that it was easy to photograph the new balconies on The Silo itself as the work progresses.

COBE

Our Urban Living Room, DAC, Copenhagen until 8th January 2017

photographs of the balconies that are now being fitted - taken from the roof of the P-Hus Lüders multi-storey car park designed by jaja architects and just completed to the east of the Silo

model for the remodelling of the tower and one balcony from The Silo installed on the gable end of the warehouse of the Danish Architecture Centre for the current exhibition on the work of Cobe

After a tiring but very very interesting and exciting three days - talking with designers and manufacturers, sales managers and PR staff at some of the most important design companies in Copenhagen - the only criticism I can come up with is that I’m not 100% certain how to type the name of the event. To give it a go … my guess would be 3daysofdesign

At one stage names of companies or titles of events could make a clumsy URL but now the idea for the URL seems to come first even if that can make things difficult to write or type about without a fair bit of cut and paste. And I’ve not even got to FRAME magazine yet with it’s capital E reversed.

There were more than forty open-house events that were spread around the city but almost half of those were in Nordhavn - the harbour redevelopment area north of the city centre - and that seemed to me to be appropriate and symptomatic … here symptomatic used to suggest something very positive.

Nordhavn through the perimeter fence

On Thursday morning my first stop was at The Silo to see RE FRAMING DANISH™ DESIGN. The exhibition must have been taken down after the final day on Saturday - either on Saturday evening or maybe on Sunday morning - because, I was told, the engineers and workmen were starting today on the massive job of cutting windows and openings through the concrete outer shell of this former grain silo to convert it to apartments.

It is 62 metres or 17 storeys high, and once completed these will be some of the most amazing apartments in the harbour redevelopment. Last month I spent some time at the exhibition Homes Ensembles City Housing Welfare at KADK - The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture - just admiring the model of the scheme from the architects COBE.

In fact the whole Nordhavn area is incredible - right now it is a huge building site but also with port facilities still in operation. So, for instance, the road system around the end of the dock was re-routed just days before the events opened.

New European offices for seven departments of the UN are nearly completed on the other side of the dock basin to the south of The Silo and within a decade or so there will be 40,000 people living in this new district and work here for 40,000.

What seems even more incredible is that this is just one of the major redevelopments in Copenhagen for which CPH City & Port Development is responsible - be it one of the most extensive and complicated of the schemes. The company was formed in 2007 by merging Copenhagen Port Ltd and the Ørestad Development Corporation and it was at that point that the part of the Development Corporation that was responsible for the construction of the city Metro was separated off to a new independent company Metroselskabel. As to ownership, City and Port Development Company is owned jointly by the City of Copenhagen (95%) and the Danish state (5%).

By og Havn (City and Harbour) - the public information side of the redevelopment company - had a good exhibition with models of the scheme for Nordhavn in the same space as the RE FRAMING DANISH™ DESIGN show.

Why is this relevant to the design event? Well for a start all those new apartments will have to be furnished.

But, to be less flippant and to make a much more serious comment about this, the global economic recession has made the city and the design industry here take stock and reassess but it looks as if it was only a brief pause. It looks as if it has made the design companies if anything sharper and much more focused.

Companies showing their work at these events, with some justifiable pride, covered a huge range of types, styles and size of business from the well-established firms with global reputations, that in some cases are now into their second century, to small new companies whose amazing products seem almost impossible to believe as the work from just two or three people after just a year or so.

With breadth and depth; with an important design heritage behind them and palpable drive and enthusiasm, and with the new companies jostling the big firms and keeping them on their toes, the design industry has been on show here and looks phenomenally strong. Sorry if that sounds as if it was drafted by an ad man. It was not. A good ad man would have done a more subtle job. It’s just that I have been fired up and inspired by the people I have met and talked to and by the great design work I saw over those three days.

By og Havn, the Nordhavn redevelopment

COBE and The Silo