Description

This project description is an excerpt from the longer article “Big Buildings”. For a comparative analysis and further data on this and all other categories including accompanying graphs, please see the article “A Turning Point”.

An iconic submultiple that represents an experiment in generating diversity of unit types taken to a whole other level is the 8 Tallet project by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) completed in 2010. Unlike the brownfield redevelopments undertaken in the two examples above, this project was constructed on a greenfield site in Ørestad, a new five-kilometer strip of development in southern Copenhagen between the historic city and the Kalvebod Fælled (Common) nature reserve. Just 10 minutes to the city center by metro, Ørestad was planned as Copenhagen’s ‘sixth finger’ of urban growth in 1994, and is expected to accommodate 20,000 residents and 60,000 to 80,000 employees by the time it is completely built out.
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Intended to support a highly diverse population as reflected by the range of large and small dwellings in apartment complexes alongside of student dormitories, residence halls, and housing for the elderly, Ørestad was envisioned as a dense, mixed-use, live-work urban quarter with adequate public infrastructure and transit services, and easy access to nature. The master plan for the district was won by a Danish-Finnish studio named ARKKI which subdivided the long strip into four smaller districts, threaded together by a system of canals and waterways as well as the Vestamager metro line that opened early on in 2002 when the districts were under construction. From the outset, the competition brief stipulated “full artistic freedom concerning architectural form, so that the new city quarter… will boast state-of-the-art within architecture and art”.
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Considerable attention was thus paid to design and constructing buildings of outstanding architectural quality through the engagement of both Danish and international architects who were commissioned to undertake projects in a district conceived to be a contemporary, lively, and attractive neighborhood.

In 2006, St. Frederikslund Holding and Høpfner Projects Ltd commissioned the BIG team to design what was then Denmark’s largest private residential development at the very edge of the nature reserve. In particular, this was a collaboration initiated by Per Høpfner who had already formed a working partnership with Bjarke Ingels dating back to two earlier projects also in the Ørestad – the V & M Houses, and the Mountain House – which were designed by PLOT before Ingels and Julien De Smedt parted ways. As at The Whale, the BIG team started with a 10-storey, 230 meters by 110 meters perimeter block. Rather than adhering to the conventional Danish treatment where the variation on the façade is produced as a serial permutation of different waterfront row houses, the team decided instead to stack the functions: they began with a commercial base, followed by a layer of row houses as a modern interpretation of the traditional kartoffelrækkerne or ‘potato rows’ of townhouses with private gardens, another layer of apartments, and finally a tier of penthouses topped by a complete green roof meant to reduce the urban heat-island effect while blending the massive development with its natural environs. This stacking of programs is expressed on the building’s eastern façade, where the glazed commercial layer is topped by three aluminum bands in different shades of grey. A pedestrian pathway connects the Richard Mortensens Vej road west of the complex across a canal to the Hein Heinsens Square on the east, and at the point where this pathway intersects with the block, the team introduced a knot, resulting in the figure of ‘8’ that became a defining feature of the project. Next, several push-and-pull operations were conducted to merge the ground floor commercial units with the street, maximize solar insolation into the two internal courtyards, as well as to create a slope on the south-western edges of the block to maximize views to the water body and the nature reserve beyond. Anchoring the south-western corner of the complex is a popular café servicing the residents and visitors, while the rest of the commercial space is given over to offices, a small grocery store, as well as a childcare center, creating a submultiple with integration of housing and community services.

From Ingels’ perspective, 8 Tallet was designed to be a “three-dimensional neighborhood rather than an architectural object… [w]here social life, the spontaneous encounter, and neighbor interaction traditionally… restricted to the ground level” is allowed to “expand all the way to the top”.

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Bjarke Ingels, cited in “Copenhagen’s BIG Architects Complete 8 House Landmark Residential Project,” by Alma Kadragic, World Property Channel, accessed November 2, 2013, http://www.worldpropertychannel.com/featured-columnists/uae-watch-big-bjarke-ingels-group-8-house-guinness-book-of-records-emaar-burj-khalifa-stfredeikslung-holding-per-hopfner-hopfner-partners-3367.php

This ‘three-dimensional’ character of the project takes its form in two key spatial operations: first, the strata of some 150 kartoffelrækkerne townhouses that stretched continuously in a loop from the street level up to four or five storeys above ground and back down again; and second, a public path wide enough to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists that winds alongside this townhouse configuration, simulating the sense of an elevated street and sidewalk section that concomitantly maximizes views of the lush reserve and the interior courtyards. The project was similarly very intentional in its landscaping design, creating two contrasting gardens. The smaller, northern courtyard is composed of circular mounds and several trees surrounded by gravel, intimating the topographical elevations generated by the building structure itself. In comparison, the southern courtyard is more expansive, framed by the two green slopes converging upon the café at the south-western corner; the circulation access is demarcated by a black-tiled foot and bicycle path winding around the irregularly-shaped geometrical lawns that are gently terraced for a variety of outdoor activities. Housing a total of 476 dwelling units, ranging from studios to two- to six-room configurations, this submultiple offers a variety of residences with amenities for people in different life stages. Each of these room configurations is no more than 12 meters deep with dual aspect, and they have their own assortment of unit types, amounting to more than 45 different unit variations cleverly disguised in a seemingly straightforward envelope. This extremely high degree of unit diversity stems from the architect’s desire to “offer not one, but many possibilities” of living.

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Bjarke Ingels, cited in “8 House, Village Gigantesque = 8 House, A Giant Village,” by Marie-Douce Albert, Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 380 (November–December 2010): 155.

Area-wise, these units range from 58 square meters to 175 square meters, all of which are relatively commodious in their space provisions. Besides this exceptional degree of diversity, 8 Tallet was also successful in creating a dense live-work environment, attaining a residential density of 188 dwelling units per hectare.

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Originally published in: Peter G. Rowe, Har Ye Kan, Urban Intensities: Contemporary Housing Types and Territories, Birkhäuser, 2014.