The Globe and Mail
Summary
A waste incinerator with a ski slope on top: The idea seems surreal. And yet the Amager Bakke plant on Copenhagen’s waterfront actually exists, evidence of a particular sort of architectural and urbanistic creativity. The plant is typical by Western European standards, incinerating waste while creating either heat for a district energy system or electrical power. But its fanciful touches are the work of the architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), today among the world’s most famous architects.
In 2011, BIG – then fairly young and inexperienced – and a team of collaborators won an international design competition for the centre. Their winning scheme, which also created a climbing wall up one side of the 85-metre structure, won over a competition jury by promising to turn this piece of infrastructure into a site of recreation and leisure. This represents a current in public projects across the West: combining hard infrastructure with what is sometimes called “soft infrastructure,” allowing places that might be hostile to become part of the social life of the city. Toronto’s Bentway, which makes a public space from the zone underneath that city’s elevated Gardiner Expressway, is one example. More than anything, the project nicknamed Copenhill proves the worth of design competitions. In a practice that is common in Europe but not in North America, the public agency that commissioned the project opened it up to ideas from around the world.
Locals BIG won out; and, principal Bjarke Ingels told me in a 2018 interview, “We never thought they would ask us to actually build it.” But they did, remaining largely committed to the design in all its madcap exuberance. Today, it towers over the flat city of Copenhagen, a visual icon and a gathering place for sports enthusiasts. A big public expenditure has made the city a more interesting place – thanks to the courage of an agency and a culture that are willing to bet on an idea.
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