AR Awards for Emerging Architecture

 Honourable mention
DORTE MANDRUP ARKITEKTER
Water tower conversion
Gentofte, Denmark
December 2006
Water towers are curious structures. Set in rural landscapes, some are objects of sculptural beauty. In cities, however, they commonly lack the same formal sophistication, dressed up as castellated turrets or left as purely utilitarian assemblages. Loved by some, loathed by others, many remain formally crude, over-engineered and top heavy. An option now exists, however. If you can’t bear to look at them, you can now live in them; in bolt-on apartments that provide excellent views that are blind to the tower's external form.
In this example the architects have fitted 40 apartments and a youth centre around the tower's core, by occupying the space that sits between its hexagonal and dodecagonal structures.
There are two plan types: a simple orthogonal unit; and a triangulated unit that (when paired up) shares the diamond-shaped space defined by four columns. The external form is articulated by a series of bay windows and balconies. R. G.

Architect
Dorte Mandrup Arkitekter, Copenhagen
Photographs
Jens Lindhe, 1
Torben Eskerod, 2
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