Copenhagen: The Latest Architecture and News

We now know that first, we form the cities, but then the cities form us.

Meet 81-year-old Danish architect Jan Gehl who, for more than fifty years, has focused on improving the quality of urban life by helping people to “re-conquer the city.” Gehl has studied the relationship between life and form since the mid-1960s, when he started questioning the modernist approach of looking at the architectural model from above instead of from the inside. The architecture of that time was very often "an obsession with architecture for architecture’s sake," and took very little interest in the inhabitants.

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Danish practice 3XN’s ‘Playfully Logical’ proposal has been selected as the winner of a competition to design the new National Children’s Hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark, emphasizing the power of play as an integral part of medical treatment.

Working with Architema Architects, Niras, Rosan Bosch Studio and Kirstine Jensens Tegnestue, 3XN’s scheme for BørneRiget takes the form of two hands grasping together to support the various aspects of pediatric care. The hospital has been designed to allow children to stay close to their families while maintaining as much of a regular day-to-day routine as possible.

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A new project in central Copenhagen will see two Danish practices—Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Dorte Mandrup Architects—create a new urban IKEA store, a budget hotel, and housing linked together by green space. Set to open in 2019, the area—which sits adjacent to Kalvebod Brygge, close to the railway lines that pass through the city core—will be master-planned by Dorte Mandrup while two striking high-rise residential towers, dubbed "Cacti", will be designed by BIG.

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Denmark-based AART architects have been selected to design the country’s national rowing stadium, seeing off strong competition from prominent firms such as BIG and Kengo Kuma. Situated upon Bagsværd Lake on the outskirts of Copenhagen, the scheme seeks to allow the sporting elite and broader public to form a close interaction with picturesque natural surroundings.

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This year's Copenhagen Architecture Festival (CAFx) offered a wide range of activities, from film screenings to exhibitions on the future of social housing. The festival's fourth edition took place over 11 days and featured more than 150 architectural events in Copenhagen, Aarhus, and Aalborg.

Festival Director Josephine Michau explained that since its first edition, the intention behind CAFx was to bring many local agents together in order to build new dialogues around architecture. As a society, how do we identify with architecture? What values do we ascribe to it? These questions were part of this edition's overarching theme: "Architecture as identity."

Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects, in collaboration with Holscher Nordberg Architects, has been selected to lead a 120,000-square-foot (36,000-square-meter) redevelopment of the new Carlsberg City district in Copenhagen. Located on the former site of the famous Carlsberg Brewery, the project will incorporate the area’s historic industrial elements in creating a new sustainable city district with inviting open spaces, public transportation, and a series of context-sensitive new buildings, including a 262-foot-tall (80-meter-tall) residential tower.

Founded in 1996 by Buenos Aires-born Martin Rein-Cano, TOPOTEK 1 has quickly developed a reputation as a multidisciplinary landscape architecture firm, focussing on the re-contextualization of objects and spaces and the interdisciplinary approaches to design, framed within contemporary cultural and societal discourse.

The award-winning Berlin-based firm has completed a range of public spaces, from sports complexes and gardens to public squares and international installations. Significant projects include the green rooftop Railway Cover in Munich, Zurich’s hybrid Heerenschürli Sports Complex and the German Embassy in Warsaw. The firm has also recently completed the Schöningen Spears Research and Recreation Centre near Hannover, working with contrasting typologies of the open meadow and the dense forest on a historic site.