Freitag, 5. März | 16:35
BLOX – robust surfaces for an urban Danish concept
The BLOX project, home of the Danish Architecture Center (DAC), contains exhibition spaces, offices and co-working spaces, a café, a bookstore, a fitness centre, a restaurant, twenty-two apartments and an underground automated public carpark. But it is not the acrobatic mixing of uses that defines this project; its ultimate achievement is in “discovering” its own site.
The Old Brewery site, split into two by one of Copenhagen’s main ring roads, didn’t really register as a building site until the design of the new DAC identified it as such. Straddling the road, making public connections both above and below, BLOX connects the parliament district with the harbour front and brings culture to the water’s edge. A space for cars becomes a space for people; a space to pass through becomes a space to reside.
Contrary to most city blocks in Copenhagen – often introverted and inaccessible – the building absorbs the city’s life. The urban routes through the building lead to unexpected and unpredictable interactions between the building and the city, linking the different museums, libraries and historical sites around the culturally rich Slotsholmen area.
The BLOX surfaces, colours and textures mirror the diversity of the types of use and its skins seem to be an abstract of the various shades of the green waters of Copenhagen’s harbour, taking shape behind thin veils of mist. And it is exactly the proximity to social life, to the daily use of its composed parts and even more to the salty atmosphere of the surrounding that called for extraordinary robustness and corrosion resistance of the powdercoated profiles and sheets of the facades.
A.F. | T.R.
Adrianne Fisher joined OMA in 1996. She is a Director responsible for the development and realisation of Advanced Buildings – a role built upon her extensive and proven experience in delivering some of OMA’s most memorable projects including Casa da Musica in Porto (2005), CCTV Headquarters in Beijing (2012), New Court Rothschild Bank in London (2011) and the acclaimed BLOX in Copenhagen (2018).
Thomas Roll, born 1962 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Architect and marketer who started the industrial path of his career in 2005 at IGP and is in charge for sharing knowledge with the architectural segment of IGPs core market. He keeps an eye out for the requirements of today’s surfaces to transfer them with IGPs R&D team into innovative functionalities such as the Self-Cleaning Effect (2005), Anodic Look-Alikes (2008) or Scratch Resistant Coatings (2017).
BLOX, Kopenhagen, 2018
Turn On Partner: IGP Pulvertechnik AG
Foto: DSL Studio