Description

Urban context

In the wake of the closing down of the old industrial and port facilities on
Copenhagen’s southern harbor, the entire industrial zone is being converted into
an urban neighborhood: the Havnstad. Gemini Residence is one of the housing
projects created in that context. Two former grain silos, hollow concrete
cylinders twenty-five meters in diameter and thirty-nine meters tall, were
converted into freestanding apartment buildings. Eight floors house eighty-four
loft-like luxury apartments ranging between ninety and two hundred square
meters.

Ground-floor zone

The former silos are located directly on the harbor piers, which as part of this
urban revitalization have been gradually transformed into urban promenade areas.
A pedestrian bridge ends directly underneath the building. The Gemini Residence
is accessed from the street to the east. Via a broad stairway one reaches a
solid base, beneath which is an underground parking garage. The residential
floors are elevated from the ground. The cylinder remains hermetically sealed on
the ground floor. The entrances are located in the constriction between the two
cylinders; entrance is restricted to residents and their visitors.

Building structure

The project is surprising for its polar worlds: the introverted but
light-flooded, monumental central lobbies and the all-glass panorama apartments.
The entire volume of the former silos could be retained as empty space, simply
by installing a system of stairs, elevators, and access galleries. To avoid
destroying the structure and inner void of the former silos, the apartments were
hung out in front, with the first residential floor beginning ten meters above
ground. In the radial and Y-shaped open floor plans, the secondary rooms are
located on the closed atrium wall; the living and sleeping spaces have
full-height windows and wide, continuous steel balconies in front with wood
floors and glass railings.

Facade

The dialectic of inside and outside, closing and opening, private and urban space
is especially clear from the design of the facade. The urban public space is
brought in up to the closed front door. The cylinder remains hermetically closed
for the first ten meters. Only above that, at a safe distance from urban public
space, do the full-height windows open the apartments along their entire width
to views of the city. The projecting balcony layer with its glass railings
underscores this transparency. Inside, the heavy concrete ring remains closed,
cut out only by the front doors to the apartments.

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Originally published in: Ulrike Wietzorrek, Housing+: On Thresholds, Transitions, and Transparencies, Birkhäuser, 2014.