Ørestad Copenhagen Denmark

Ørestad in West Amager, Denmark, also known as Copenhagen S, is built around nature, water and architecture. Since the development in Ørestad started in 1995 many families and students have moved into the inspiring architect-designed buildings. Ørestad is a new developed city area in Copenhagen, Denmark, on the island of Amager. It is expected that 20,000 people will live in Ørestad, 20,000 will study, and 80,000 people will be employed in the area. The area is being developed using the new town concept with the Copenhagen Metro as the primary public transport grid, connecting the area with the rest of Metropolitan Copenhagen.

Ørestad College, Copenhagen
3XNs award winning "Best building in Scandinavia 2007" Ørestad Gymnasium (upper secondary school) creates a framework for cross-disciplinarily and an extended use of IT-based learning by revolutionizing educational space in a structure without traditional classrooms.

Bella Sky Hotel, Ørestad, Copenhagen
Architect: 3XN
Right now the construction of the Bella Sky hotel in Copenhagen is the largest building site in Denmark. In only 6 months Bella Sky will open as one of Scandinavia’s largest and most spectacular hotels. The spectacular four star hotel will open in May 2011.

VM-housing, 2002-2008
Architects: BIG and JDS architects.
This complex was the first built in Orestad. VM houses owes its name to the floor plan of the two buildings in the form of a V and an M, which can be viewed on Google Earth. Emphasis was placed on daylight, privacy and visibility. Each apartment has a diagonal view of the surrounding fields. Corridors were kept as short as possible. In total, the two buildings have 209 units, 80 of which are different types. There is no use of partition walls, each apartment consists of 1 room. In this way the owner can organize and change his space himself. Sometimes there are also apartments on different floors. The most photographed detail is the balconies on the V-building. These are in triangular form to block as little light as possible to the adjacent apartments.

VM mountain contains 80 apartments and a parking garage for 480 cars. The program consisted of 33% residential units and 66% parking. This concept has been worked out in a sort of slope, so that each apartment becomes a penthouse on top of the parking garage. Each accommodation unit has a terrace on the roof of the adjacent apartment. The parking garage uses colors that Verner Panton also used in his work as a tribute to this Danish designer. The space of the parking garage also serves as an atrium and access to the apartments. The northern and western façades are decorated with a 3000 m² image of the Himalayas, printed on aluminum. Due to the concept of the slope, the lift also had to be tilted.



8-house or 8-tallet, housing and offices, Ørestad, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Architects: BIG, Bjarke Ingels Group, 2006-2010.
BIG has completed three remarkable buildings in Ørestad, the VM Houses, The Mountain and finally the 8 House. The bowtie-shaped 61,000 sqm mixed-use building of three different types of residential housing and 10,000 sqm of retail and offices comprises Denmark’s largest private development ever undertaken. The 8 House sits on the outer edge of the city as the southern most outpost of Ørestad. Rather than a traditional block, the 8 House stacks all ingredients of a lively urban neighbourhood into horizontal layers of typologies connected by a continuous promenade and cycling path up to the 10th floor creating a three-dimensional urban neighbourhood where suburban life merges with the energy of a city, where business and housing co-exist. The 8 House creates two intimate interior courtyards, separated by the centre of the cross which houses 500 m2 of communal facilities available for all residents. At the very same spot, the building is penetrated by a 9 meter wide passage that allows people to easily move from the park area on its western edge to the water filled canals to the east. Instead of dividing the different functions of the building – for both habitation and trade – into separate blocks, the various functions have been spread out horizontally.