In Kaspar Astrup Schröder's documentary "BIG TIME", about Bjarke Ingels and his BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) architectural firm, the Danish star-architect explains to the audience the main principle behind his designs - creating unlikely combinations and coming up with something extraordinary out of the ordinary. One of the best examples of this principle is the plan for Amager Bakke, better known as CopenHill, a smoke ring-blowing garbage-fuelled power plant with a slanted roof that can double up as a ski slope, located in Copenhagen.
"Making a Mountain" (2020), a new documentary by Rikke Selin Fokdal and Kaspar Astrup Schröder, focuses on this project and on the processes behind its design and construction.
The documentary is part of the Architecture & Design Film Festival that, due to Coronavirus, was rescheduled in a digital format. It is now possible for architecture and design fans based in the U.S. and Canada to watch the 17 films part of the virtual programme until December 3 (tickets for individual films and all-access passes are on sale at this link).
"Making a Mountain" opens in 2011 with a meeting in which BIG was announced as the winner of the tender to replace the old and obsolete incinerator that had been active on the island of Amager, Copenhagen, for over 40 years.
The visionary project, inspired by the concept of hedonistic sustainability, revolved around a waste-to-energy power plant focused on high efficiency and minimum emissions and with ski slope on top of it. Yet, combining waste management with a recreational urban space and putting into practice an environmentally, economicaly and socially sustainable idea, soon became a real challenge.
The main problem behind this process set to transform an ugly plant into a landmark for the cultural life of the city, wasn't indeed the actual shape that should have been given to the plant, designed to reproduce the configuration of a mountain, with a façade covered in ultra-light aluminium elements stacked like bricks overlapping each other, nor the integration of leisure facilities in the plant from an architectural and structural point of view, but reconciling regulations for the industrial building and for the recreational activities.
They eventually made it work, but then new questions arose for what regarded other features such as the synthetic mantle that covers the ski slope ground or the material for the steps. Cutting the budget was also important, hence the doubts about the most fantastic element of the project, the ring of smoke that should have been emitted by one of the chimney for every ton of CO2 generated by the burning of waste to make people more aware of pollution. But, while the ring was dropped from the final project, the rest of the design remained more or less the same.
It took several years for the project to be completed and the waste-to-energy plant eventually opened last year. It now includes a hiking and a running path, a rooftop bar, a ski slope with three pistes with different difficulty levels and a climbing wall and represents not just a new home for sports in the heart of Copenhagen, but also a place where people can walk and reconcile with nature.
While people can enjoy these activities on the external part of this building that has radically altered the skyline and topography of the city, inside furnaces and turbines convert 440,000 tons of waste a year into clean energy, delivering electricity and distributing heating to 150,000 homes.
The project was slow, ambitious and its costs were extremely high, but it was worth it as nobody had ever attempted anything of this kind before. The original idea behind CopenHill was indeed developed in 2002 when Bjarke Ingels' first architectural firm submitted another proposal for a ski-slope above the largest department store in the city. Though it won the competition even then, the idea didn't come to fruition as it was too expensive.
Choosing to explore uncharted waters by combining a 41,000m2 waste-to-energy plant with a urban recreation center was a winning option as the iconic structure with its characteristic shape has now become an attraction for locals and for tourists as well. CopenHill should also help Copenhagen reaching its goal of becoming the world's first carbon-neutral city by 2025.
Though short compared to other architecture documentaries, "Making a Mountain" features some key themes of interest especially for young architects: first and foremost the fact that choosing the road less trodden is hard, but it has many rewards; besides, you will also have to learn how to collaborate with other professional figures and companies while developing your project (in this case BIG worked with different people, including SLA Architects, landscape designers).
CopenHill also explores the relationship between buildings and the city and prompts the audience and in particular the design and architecture students watching the documentary to consider how we could employ unused elements of a building and reinvent them as public spaces.
Last but not least, the documentary invites us to consider how architecture can help us shaping a very different future and an ambitious frame of mind as well: as Bjarke Ingels explains at the beginning of the documentary, young kids growing up now in Copenhagen will become adults who know that such a structure is possible and they will go forward in creating even more cutting edge designs. So CopenHill will hopefully be a starting point for further intriguing buildings and, who knows, maybe in future it will also inspire to designers some solutions for a recycling plant or a fashion company HQ based on sustainable values and integrating various public spaces for recreational use.
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