The Twins

For the last couple of weeks I've taken you of a tour of the whole new part of the city of Copenhagen called Ørestad. But that isn't the only area where building is going on. All along the old harbour industry has stood aside for other purposes. At Islands Brygge (Iceland's Wharf) a number of the big industries have closed down and left behind some big buildings. Some of these have been torn down to make place for new buildings, while others have been rebuild for use as offices or residences. One of the most prominent of these last is the Gemini Residence. Formerly a couple of silos for soy bean seeds for Soyakagen, a factory making oil from soy beans and a factory known to be a bit volatile (it exploded in 1980), these silos have been totally converted into futuristic looking apartments.

The silos were constructed in 1963 and reconstructed in 2002-05 into 84 apartments along the outer walls, literally hanging the apartments on the outside of the walls. Inside the 43 m high silos are empty, only making way for the foyer, stairways and elevators.

The Bryggebro (The Wharf Bridge) leading to Gemini Residence and Islands Brygge was build in 2006 as a gangway and cycling bridge connecting Islands Brygge and Kalvebod Brygge. It was the first bridge to be built crossing the harbour in 50 years.

In the photo above you can see another of the converted silos in the centre, the Wennberg Silo. That one is also a residence now with 142 apartments. Actually this whole area is teeming with life. The many residents use the public open air harbour bath, the renovated park and the wharf as a place to stroll, have a drink or a snack or sunbathe in the summer. A couple of nice cafés add to the atmosphere of this place. It is quickly becoming one of the most popular areas to live in in Copenhagen. Tomorrow I'll tell you a little about its neighbouring area.

A House of Signals

When I wrote about the Bridge House I told you, that it has apartments reserved for seniors. This house, the Signal House, is reserved for juniors, or rather young people up to the age of 25. The 72 apartments have been designed so 4 people share kitchen, living room and bathroom. All in all 288 young people live here. The idea of making apartments for young people is a good one, I think, mainly because they are affordable (through heavy subsidies from the municipality). These are perfect for people to try life out without having to buy one of the very expensive apartments in Copenhagen, especially for those without "rich" parents to buy it for them. Though I think that this house is probably not for those craving peace and quiet:-)

A Sailing House?

This house is not special, except for one thing; someone actually thought when designing it. Big glass windows plus sun equals heat. That is common knowledge to most people. The way to combat that is either to remove the heat by putting in massive air conditioning systems (not so popular today with global warming considerations, and certainly not common in Denmark), or to shield against the sun. The latter is the solution in the Sail House. Instead of using traditional blinds or curtains they have used these white sails on rollers on the balconies that can be rolled in front of the window to shield against the sun...and nosy eyes too.

These 118 apartments are for rent only, and they're affordable for a family with double income, or a single with a high one. And as written on the sign, there are still some vacant apartments here.

A Bridge you can't cross

The Bridge House (Brohuset) is on the surface quite ordinary, but it has one feature, that turns heads and make people gawk; the apartments on the bridges! I haven't figured out if these apartments are more expensive than the rest, but I believe so. An apartment without anyone upstairs or downstairs got to be pricier. The prices for the 123 apartments range from 1.000 Euro to 1.300 Euro a month for 80 m2 to 110 m2, so they don't exactly come cheap.


The building has 31 apartments reserved for the elderly, gardens on the roof and some communal rooms for parties and meetings. Not a bad place to live, I guess.

Tagged

A little extra post due to the fact, that I've been tagged by Vogon Poet on Daily Photo Stream and Livorno Daily Photo.

The rules are simple: Tag and link back to the person who tagged you. List six (un) important things that make you happy. Tag six bloggers and let them know they're “it”. We all feel this blogging community to be one of inclusion and friendship.

So to my six things that make me happy:

A day out with the camera.
A nice quiet weekend in a good chair with a good book.
A night at the opera.
To learn new stuff and wonder.
To travel to a nice place.
To meet new nice people.

My six tagged bloggers are:

allineedisagoodbook
Scottsdale Daily Photo
Dusty Lens - North Metro and Beyond
OcalaDailyPhoto
Sniffles and Smiles
Cathrine Mark-Beasant

And the photo, a bit out of theme I know, is from Rome; one of Bernini's angels on Ponte Sant' Angelo. The photo is from a trip I made there three years ago.

Balconies

Like I've shown you before the balconies in Ørestaden come in many different shapes and colours. This one is not an especially fancy building, except for these balconies. A lot more rounded than the ones seen before these appeal more to my taste than the triangular ones from the V-House of the VM Houses.

Ørestadshuset on the left, the Mountain
and the VM Houses in the middle

The building itself is a bit more ordinary; brown and square and a little anonymous compared to neighbours like the Mountain and the VM Houses. It's called Ørestadshuset and has 127 apartments. Almost all of them have been sold, so this is a popular house.

Tomorrows building will be a kind of a bridge that you can't cross.

A Field in the City

I've been telling you a bit about this place already, both in posts and comments. This is Field's, Scandinavia's second biggest mall...and to be honest; not a place I visit on a daily basis. It was opened in the central area of Ørestaden March 9, 2004. I actually remember it, not because I was there, but because half the pupils in my 9. Grade was missing that day. I saw some of them on TV that evening when they reported about the opening frenzy. Chaos is a mild word!

65.000 m2 of shopping, 140 retailers and 20 cafés and restaurants are the numbers for this mall. It does give the residents of Ørestaden ample opportunity to shop, but in a very concentrated area. Actually many of the shoppers come from Greater Copenhagen and even Malmö in Sweden. With a freeway just around the corner and a Metro station 20 m from the entrance it's not a big problem to get here. And there's more than ample place to park the cars too.

I'm no fan of malls, and this is no exception. I have to accept that it's there, but I do prefer a street lined with different shops you can dive into and out of (especially the latter :-)).

I do like the way they have designed the entrance. It reminds me of an entrance to an old Roman, Greek or maybe Egyptian temple with its columns and high roof. Well, I guess this is a kind of temple for the god of shopping.

A Ship's Prow?

Just on the border of the Ørestad in an older neighbourhood called Hørgården is a strange little building. This is Hørgården's House of Activities, a place for the residents in the apartment blocks of Hørgården to gather around different activities. In this 600 sq. meter house is a fitness room, a large kitchen, two halls etc. It has been build to try to make this a better place to live and was finished in 2008 for a mere 900.000 Euros.

The social housings in the area have had it's share of problems and giving the residents a place to gather around activities of their choosing, is one way of dealing with a bad reputation. It has been difficult to attract rersourcefull residents to the area and hopefully this will be of help. It can't stand alone of course but it's a start.

I like this little building in lark wood with it's different angles and colours. But I'm glad that it wasn't me that should furnish the prow.

A Beehive

At the most Northern end of Ørestaden is a large square building. It's called the Beehive Dorm, not because it resembles a beehive, but because it was funded by Bikuben Foundation (Bikube is Danish for beehive). With room for only 115 students this is a much smaller dorm than Tietgen Dormitory from yesterday, but it's not lacking in design, if you like squares and cubes.


The communal rooms such as party hall, laundry room, fitness room, study rooms and the like are not bunched together in one place, but rather distributed on different floors. 10% of the rooms are earmarked for foreign exchange students.


A very strange building I think, but certainly not without its charm. The architects have managed to break the symmetry by putting open spaces and staircases in peculiar places. It is a bit grey but the orange balance it out, so on the whole it's a very nice building.


What stroke me, when I visited it, was the words written in the ceiling and on pillars, words like knowledge, respect, tolerance and honesty. If the students here really live by these words, the world is going to be a better place.

Not a Bullring

This is not a Spanish bull ring but a dormitory for 360 students. Named after financier C.F. Tietgen this dorm was ready for the new residents in 2006. Actually the inspiration for this building was not found in Spain but in the Far East; the traditional Tulou houses found in Southeastern China. It was funded by the Nordea Denmark Foundation.

The ground floor houses a café, a large common kitchen, computer and study rooms, a big hall for parties, laundry, craftshops, music rooms and rooms for meetings. All the student rooms on the upper floors are divided into groups of twelve with a common kitchen and living room. In the middle of the building is a large atrium. A nice place to be in summertime!

This building is a far cry from the normal rabbit warrens of dorms. The wooden panels and irregularity add a cosiness to it, so it's no wonder this is a popular place to live for the students. Especially as it's right next to Copenhagen IT-University and the Faculty of Humanities of the Copenhagen University. At the moment the students come from 100 different studies and 40 nations.

Tomorrow I'll show you another dorm in the area that is even stranger.

Cubes of Black and Blue

The neighbour of yesterday's post is another rather controversial building. It's a building that cost about 5.5 billion DKR (3/4 of billion Euros), which was 34% above the budget. It is of course DR Byen, the Danish Broadcast City. Apart from the money it cost 300 employees their job in an effort to plug the hole in the budget, and the General Manager, the Chairman and several members of the board of directors had to leave too.

It's a great building, designed with the sole purpose of making radio, television and multimedia productions. The main building looks very good in it's black and white. The blue cube next to it is the new concert hall for DR, a much acclaimed hall for broadcasting concerts that can seat an audience of 1800 in terraces all around the orchestra like an amphitheatre. I haven't been inside, but in the pictures I've seen it looks spectacular.

This building was overpriced for sure and cost a lot of jobs and goodwill to DR, and worse still; cuts in the programming, but my overall impression of the buildings is positive, even though I haven't been invited inside yet:-)

A House Snake

This building in the Northern part of Ørestaden is twisting like a snake across the plain, and it is in fact called the Housing Snake. With 300 apartments it's the biggest apartment block at the time in the area and this one even got it's own day-care center. It's placed right next to the new IT University and the new building of Denmark's Radio (the Danish State Television and Radio), so for people working there it's only a short walk.


What's a little peculiar is the fact that it's got all three types of apartments in it; social housing, owner-occupied flats and co-operative flats. Furthermore it was designed by two different architect firms that had to cooperate.

I think it's a rather nice building with a bit of variety and nice green areas and canals around it. I would have liked a little less glass though but with this kind of space to the nearest neighbours it's not a big deal.

Living in an Aquarium

Balconies, V-house

As told yesterday the neighbor to the Mountain is another building by architects BIG; VM Husene (VM Houses). This one is a bit more typical for the style that is being used in Copenhagen at this time. It's mainly glass and steel, and lots of both. Finished in 2005 the two buildings, called V-house and M-house after their shape, have 221 apartments. All apartments in the V-house has a distinctive balcony shaped like a V, much like a ship's prow.

The Aquarium, M-house.
The Mountain as a reflection

Steel and glass, M-house

This building is one that I could never live in, mainly because of the glass walls. I would feel like I was living in an aquarium and that my whole life was wide open to every by-passer and neighbor. I must confess that I like my privacy too much to become the newest member of a public zoo. I do like the balconies though.

V-house

The Hanging Gardens of Copenhagen

I think most people, who paid attention to their history lessons in school, have heard about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. But did you know that in Copenhagen we're going to have our own version? This photo is of one of the new residences in Ørestaden called VM Bjerget (Danish for Mountain) and it really is a mountain. 11 stories high this building has one sloping side facing south with apartments, all with their own small garden lined with hardwood. Inside the building is a big open parking house and nothing else. In other words, every apartment in the building is on this side of the building with a garden and a view. The 80 apartments vary in size from 80 m2 to 120 m2 and in prices from 500.000 Euro to 1 million Euros. Quite a price tag even for Copenhagen.

The building was designed by the Danish firm BIG, and they do think big. Their idea was to build a building that looked like a residential area with gardens and small houses. It was finished in 2008 and if you want an apartment here, there's still some for sale. In 2008 it got the prize as the World's Best Housing at the World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, and they truly deserve this award!



I already love this building, and I think that it's one of the few new residences, that I could live in if I had the money to pay for an apartment here. When the greenery has had time to grow it'll be a beautiful site, exactly like a mountain in the city.

Right next to the Mountain is another building designed by BIG; VM Houses. That one I'll show you tomorrow.

Royal Playhouse

The Royal Playhouse seen from the Opera

The Royal Playhouse with the Opera in the background

Just opposite the Opera from yesterdays post a new Royal Playhouse opened in 2008 as a supplement to the Royal Theater. As with the Opera, the Royal Theater needed new space. They had for quite some years been using ad-hoc facilities around town to be able to perform more intimate plays, because the old scene at The Royal Theater was just too big for this kind of plays.

It was decided in 2001 to build the new playhouse on Kvæsthusbroen at the harbor, construction began in 2004 after an international architect competion, which was won by Danish architects Boje Lundgaard and Lene Tranberg, and it was finished in 2007.

The playhouse got three small scenes and a restaurant plus of course all the needed space for the actors and technicians. What it lacks is parking space. The Ministry of Culture wanted a new parking house build underground but Copenhagen City blocked that. A perfect, empty space right next to it was used for a short time but is now cordoned off. What it will be used for I don't know, but probably not for parking. The result is chaos at night when people park their cars in an area already crawling with cars. That's Copenhagen traffic planning for you!

This playhouse was praised as a beautiful new addition to the harbor as opposed to the heavy criticism of the Opera. Well, again I have to disagree with the majority; I think it's too dark, too drab and too square. In my eyes it doesn't look inviting at all and it lacks appeal. I haven't been inside yet but I hope it's more colorful than the outside.

BTW for the observant reader; I've brought a photo of the theater before during my theme on reflections.