Description

Amager Bakke is a modern waste incineration plant on the island of Amager that lies opposite Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid. The architects have made a virtue of the sheer height of the plant by placing a ski slope on its roof, giving it a dramatic presence that has turned it into a new landmark for the port city of Öresund. The northern part of the island of Amager has developed in recent years from outlying periphery into a new development area within easy reach of the city, although business and industry still predominate. Situated in a neighbourhood of apartment blocks, terraced housing and a student hall of residence, local acceptance was almost certainly a key driver for the decision to turn the incineration plant into an attractive location.

The high-tech structure of silos, boilers and pipes as well as the associated offices determine the fundamental volume of the building but in principle this could also have been enclosed in the usual shoebox with chimney. The decision to turn this into an appealing sculpture with a rooftop ski slope was an enormous structural design and construction planning task. The internal programmatic division into three parts is not visible from outside, at least during the day, as the 85-metre-high, 60-metre-wide and 200-metre-long structure is wrapped in a chunky chequerboard pattern of acrylic glass and aluminium that veils its dimensions. The virtually non-existent roof edge further emphasises its monolithic character. From inside, the high proportion of transparent surfaces makes the interior appear like a brightly lit technical cathedral.

Copenhagen’s skiing enthusiasts can now descend the sloping incline, which varies from 14 to 45 degrees, all year round regardless of snowfall. To this end, 9000 m² of roof surface were covered with perforated plastic mats that allow the grass underneath to grow through it. Its surface structure of hard bristles in combination with a silicone-based jelly-like mass is supposed to provide similar friction properties to a prepared snow slope. The man-made mountain can be climbed either via one of the staircases running along the inside and outside of the roof or via a naturalistically winding trekking path. This connects seamlessly with a park, which the landscape architects SLA designed as a “living, green haven for birds, bees and flowers”, which “absorbs heat, filters air and provides ample surface for rainwater infiltration”.

One might be tempted to dismiss Amager Bakke as a spectacle, an artificially staged event space for today’s sensation-seeking society. But to criticise the dressing up of this otherwise single-purpose block is to miss the point. Through the unlikely combination of waste incineration and leisure, it presents a compelling counter-concept for a formulaic typology that dramatically calls into question the still common separation of functions in architecture. Given the increasing need for inner-city redensification, one stands to learn from the Dane’s famed relaxed nonchalance and open outlook. Amager Bakke is a pioneering example that paves the way for a new understanding of hybrid typologies. It begs the question: Now that ski slopes on waste incineration plants are a reality, what else is possible?

Originally published in Bauwelt 25.2019, pp. 20-29, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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