det grønne strøg / the green line - the high-level landscape of Kalvebod Brygge

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An ambitious plan to create a raised landscape at a high level between new buildings on the railway side of Kalvebod Brygge was set out in the local plan of 2006 where it was described as if it was to be a series of hills.

The first part of the gardens, at the north end - with a steep slope up from Bernstorffsgade, between the towers of the SEB offices, was completed in 2009 and the gardens were soon extended on across the roof of a new archive building and through to the Tivoli Hotel and Congress Center. Then the new developments stalled.

The west end of the landscape gardens, through the Nexus building, has just been planted but construction work on the middle section, across the roof of a new IKEA store, has only just restarted.

All these new buildings, that frame the gardens, are between Kalvebod Brygge and Carsten Niebuhrs Gade and, when finished, the high-level landscape will extend for over a kilometre from Bernstorffsgade to a new railway traffic control tower on Otto Busses Vej.

Lokalplan nr. 403 "Rigsarkivet" 2006

the landscape scheme starts at Bernstorffsgade at the SEB buildings
a winding concrete path climbs up a steep slope from the road with well established trees

this sequence of photographs shows the gardens from Bernstorffsgade to Arni Magnussons Gade and the bridges across to Hotel Cabinn

At the city-centre end, at Bernstorffsgade, the landscape starts at street level with pathways twisting from side to side to climb up between the SEB buildings to a point 7 metres above the level of the pavement.

There is then a wide bridge that crosses a service road for the State Archive and the gardens continues between the archive stores on the side towards the railway and a newly-revamped office building, now known as KB32, on the Kalvebod Brygge side. That straight section of garden, 190 metres long and 29.6 metres wide, is 8 metres above the pavement of Kalvebod Brygge.

Maintaining that level, there is a single narrow bridge over another service road before the gardens open out between the towers of the Tivoli Hotel and Conference Centre.

Beyond the Tivoli hotels, there is a slightly odd and over-complicated series of narrow bridges - with handrails that would grace a multi-storey car park - that cross a wider street called Arni Magnussons Gade. It is a dual carriageway that will be the access to a new bus station between Carsten Niebuhrs Gade and the railway.

Here, the landscaped area first forms the canopy over the entrance to the Hotel Cabinn before the garden then climbs up steeply between the two towers of the hotel where it now ends abruptly at a fence before the next section where work has just started on building a new IKEA store.

There, about 17 metres above the pavement of Kalvebod Brygge, the garden or "green lounge" on the roof of IKEA will be level and will cross over Dybbølsbro.

Then, between the two towers of Kaktustårnene or The Cactus Towers designed by Bjarke Ingels, the gardens will drop down at a very steep angle to the entrance level to the two blocks of the new Nexus building and then, between the those two office blocks, drop down again to end at the level of Carsten Niebuhrs Gade.

 

map from 2006 in Kalvebod Lokalplan 403 with the different stages of the development of this area from the SEB site at I through to the IKEA site at IV ….
then, the green line was only to extend as far as the area where Kaktustårnene are, beyond Dybbølsbro, but not the site of the railway control tower

①  Danske Banks Hovedsæde / headquarters for Danske Bank by Lundgaard & Tranberg - under construction
②  SEB Bank & Pensions by Lundgaard & Tranberg 2008-2011 and The City Dune by SLA design studio
③  Rigsarkivet / State Archive by PLH Arkitekter
④  KB32 by Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects and JJW ARKITEKTER completed in 2021
⑤  Tivoli Congress Centre by Kim Utzon 2009-2016
⑥  Hotel Cabinn 2019
⑦  IKEA store by Dorte Mandrup - under construction
⑧  Kaktustårnene / The Cactus Towers by Bjarke Ingels - under construction
⑨  Nexus for Energistryrelsen Trafikstyrelsen and Banedanmark by Arkitema 2014-2019
⑩  Trafiktårnet Øst / Railway control tower by Tranberg Arkitekter 2013-2015

A Bernstorffsgade B Carsten Niebuhrs Gade C Kalvebod Brygge D proposed bus station E Dybbølsbro F Fisketorvet G Metro station opens 2024

 

the gardens on the steep slope where they climb up between the towers of Hotel Cabinn

from the bridge over Arni Magnussons Gade, the gardens climb steeply up to a temporary fence where the gardens will continue on over the roof of a new IKEA store

 

details of the planting and concrete paths on the slope up from Bernstorffsgade between the two SEB buildings by the landscape designers SLA

Planting is well-established between the SEB buildings with a good selection of trees, many with decorative bark, and with some that have grown up through large holes in the prominent concrete canopies of the buildings. Narrow slots in the concrete path channel away rain water that is recycled for watering the trees and shrubs.

Across the roof of the archive, the design is more architectural with low planting and trellis that form a sequence of simple spaces with seating. The gardens help control the temperature and internal climate of the archive.

The section through the Tivoli Hotel has well-established shrubs and trees but the spaces could be better used. This is one area that might be treated like public squares and might even be used to host events. It would also be the one place, along the length of the gardens, that might benefit from a small coffee bar or cafe although, generally, the main character of the gardens is that it is quiet or peaceful ... when taking some of these photographs on a Sunday morning, only two people walked through and there were birds singing loudly in the trees.

The steep path up between the towers of Hotel Cabinn has no trees and although the low planting is good - with a variety of leaf types and shrubs - the plants could be in bolder groups, to create a stronger architectural character against the stark buildings, rather than being scattered. There are benches at intervals up the slope where you can take in the views.

At various points through the gardens there are views out between the buildings to the railway and Vesterbro on one side and through to the south harbour on the other.

There are drawings of the proposed garden on the roof of the IKEA store but it is difficult to imagine how the areas of planting will then drop down the steep slope between the Cactus Towers although Bjarke Ingels has produced planted areas at a similar steep angle on the 8 Building in Ørestad and at Copenhill on the roof of the Amager Bakke incinerator.

Where the garden drops down again between the two blocks of the Nexus building, new planting has established itself quickly and there is an interesting concrete rill or channel to take rain water down through the garden.

Back at the city end, when finished, new headquarters for Danske Bank on Bernstorffsgade immediately north of the SEB towers, will have broad flights of steps up between the buildings to a new terrace overlooking the railway and this will be connected to the main landscaping by a bridge over Carsten Niebuhrs Gade between the SEB building and the Archive.

When finished there will be public access for the full length of the high landscape and with steps up to the gardens at several intermediate points.

new steps up to the gardens with Tivoli Hotel to the left and Hotel Cabinn to the right and with the cross road Arni Magnussons Gade between the two hotels

 

the gardens on the roof over the IKEA store with the two Catus Towers beyond

the far end of the gardens where it drops down between the two blocks of the Nexus building with a view of the new railway control tower beyond

 

another scheme for the cinema site

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Another scheme has been submitted for the site of the Palads Teatret in Copenhagen.

This design, from the Bjarke Ingels Group, has a series of massive blocks that are stacked up but offset to follow the curve of the railway and of Hammerichsgade that together mark the west side of the site.

At the lower south end is what looks like an open amphitheatre that would step back and up from street level but it would face what is now a very busy road and would look across to a less-than-attractive block at the back of the Axelborg building.

At the north end of the proposed complex, these blocks would be stacked so high as to be as tall or taller than the tower of the SAS Royal Hotel nearby so - like the other scheme for a series of tower blocks bridging the trench of the railway - it would throw a deep shadow over streets and buildings to the west and north and would certainly dominate and interrupt the skyline from many parts of the historic city centre. Is the design really that good to be that intrusive?

The design of the exterior appears to be a stripped-down, simple and open white framework - a relatively elegant variation on international modern - but it could be anywhere - so it hardly seems to be site specific, apart from the curve, and, if it could be anywhere, then why not anywhere but here?

And there could be 12 cinema spaces within the building although that is hardly obvious from the exterior but then that is hardly surprising because the cinemas will be in the basement to free up valuable rental space where tenants will pay for their views out.

There is that overworked phrase about form following function in good design but it is still useful when turned the other way round because, in many situations, buildings are better when their function is reflected in their form. Cinemas now, since the arrival of the multiplex, are smaller and, in any case, cinemas, from their very function, have little relationship to the world outside once you are inside - detachment from the real world, some would argue, is a crucial part of going to the cinema - but this looks like an office block paying little more than lip service to being an entertainment complex.

In some locations this would not matter but here, just west of the city hall, the commercial life of the city has always existed alongside major venues for popular entertainment so this is or should be downtown offices alongside Times Square night life where the city made its money and spent it.

National Scala, a complex of restaurants and tea rooms and concert halls - the building that was on the site of what is now Axel Torv - closed in the 1950s but the amazing Cirkus building from 1886 survives across the square from the cinema site and, of course, Tivoli is just a block away.

Redevelopment of this site should be a reason for trying to not only revitalise the area but also to pull it together in a coherent way but, in the design shown here, this building would completely dominate the view from the entrance gates of the Tivoli gardens.

Surely there has to be a comprehensive development plan for this important but now rather vulnerable part of the city, that should re-establish the links between the fragmented areas of public space and should set parameters for what new buildings can or should be allowed, because each of the recent developments have gone their own way and that has meant destruction by an unrelenting attrition from developers.

 

what would be the view of the development from the entrance of Tivoli

 

the dotted line is the building line of Hammerichsgade extended across the trench of the railway tracks …. the one advantage of the other scheme - the development that would construct blocks across the trench - had this line as the back edge of a new public square with the 1930s building of the Vesterport suburban station at the centre and with all the new tower blocks in the wedge between that line and the Vandværksviadukten but with one large building beyond the viaduct.

the scheme from BIG respects the curve of Hammerichsgade on the west side but leaves a series of odd triangular spaces against the pavement - so undermining the line of the curve - and makes the line of Ved Vesterport the alignment of the entrance

just to quote .... Bjarke Ingels on sustainability

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Model of the proposed flood protection for Manhattan in the current exhibition on the work of BIG - the Bjarke Ingels Group - at the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen

note the exhibition Formgiving closes on 12 January 2020

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

it's all downhill from here

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SLA have published plans and drawings for the ski slope and the planting that are to be added in the final stages of the building works for Amager Bakke - the new incinerator and waste processing plant in Copenhagen designed by Bjarke Ingels. The plant is now up and running but still without the promised smoke rings.

 

View of the incinerator at night taken in December ... the ski run might not look that daunting in plan but that's not a bad angle. If you don't ski, there will be steps and a pathway for walking (or maybe that should be climbing) up to a cafe at the top which will have pretty amazing views over city and out over the Øresund.

SLA Copenhagen

 

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

The Infinite Happiness

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The Infinite Happiness, by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, is a fascinating film profile of the 8House  - the large block of apartments in Copenhagen designed by Bjarke Ingels.  It is in their Living Architecture series and looks at the building by talking to people who live and work there … so the best people to understand and appreciate or criticise the architecture. The film was screened recently by Arch Daily and the series has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

open-uri20161124-20276-1cirogl.jpg
 

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.