ar+d
Emerging Architecture Awards
PLOT
Youth centre
Amager, Copenhagen, Denmark
December 2004
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In the haphazard tatterdemalion surroundings of sheds and abandoned industrial buildings, the new centre stands out as an organized oasis. It is not so much a building as a landscape, a wooden one that undulates between harbour and Sound. Since Foreign Office Architects completed their pier in Yokohama (AR January 2003), such artificial landscapes have become common on the drawing boards of students and young architects, but few of them are based on anything more than fashion and delight in being able to manipulate non-Euclidean geometry. At Østamager, there are reasons for the strategy. The ground is heavily polluted with heavy metals, and the cost of excavating the site and removing the toxic material would have been beyond the means of the client (the Copenhagen Commune), so the architects decided to cover the plot with a 2100m2 deck. Its undulations both shelter dinghies and provide an eventful play surface.
Two separate single-storey buildings are enfolded by the deck. The L-shaped eastern one has social facilities such as the sailing club room and a general purpose space complete with a kitchen. In the opposite corner of the rectangular wooden landscape is a block that contains workshops, locker rooms and boat hall. Both buildings have vertical glass walls through which they are entered, but their other faces are formed of curving, sloping wood over which the users run, sit and play. Clearly, there is a danger that people involved in energetic activities could fall off the roof down the glass cliffs. To avoid this, balustrades top the potentially dangerous places; they are one of the most successful parts of the whole design, with widely-spaced thin stainless-steel balusters joined by stainless-steel mesh. In some countries, and in other hands, the balustrades could have been extremely visually heavy and the death of the project, but at Sundby, the metal rails are not obtrusive and from some angles they almost disappear. Not all the details are so felicitous, for instance detailing of the vertical walls is a bit clumsy in places, but it has to be remembered that this project (part of the communes Østamager improvement project) had to be created on a small budget so it was necessary to use off-the-shelf components.
The jury was most impressed by the architects imaginative response to limited resources and their ingenious command of new geometries.
Architect
PLOT Julien De Smedt, Bjarke Ingels
Project team
Julien De Smedt, Bjarke Ingels, Henning Stüben, Jørn Jensen, Annette Jensen, Marc Jay, Nina Ter-Borch
Photographs
All photographs by PLOT/Julien De Smedt except 3rd from left which is by Mads Hilmer