Combining buildings and URBAN SPACES

Combining buildings and URBAN SPACES 

Bjarke Ingves and his firm BIG are designing the Scala Tower in Copenhagen. The core of the design of this contemporary multifunctional conference center is to link the building with the URBAN SPACE in order to create a more liveable CITY while making the most of a building.  

 “The City of Towers” has a lot of church towers creating a very interesting skyline. It was important for BIG to interact the historic skyline with the modern one. The result is a building conceived as a reinterpretation of the historic Copenhagen tower, consisting of two elements: a base relating to the scale of surrounding buildings, and a slim tower becoming a part of the Copenhagen skyline. 

The base house consists of a shopping and conference center as well as the new Main Library of Copenhagen. The tower is a luxury hotel. The tower and the base are morphed together in a serial-shaped cascade of stairs leading to a public roof top plaza overlooking the City Hall square.

The proximity to the Central Station and the central location make the building suitable for conferences, hotel rooms and offices, which all in all means many activities in one place.  A dense and lively house for the city that combines both private and public space in a sliding scale from the street to the rooftop in one continuous movement.

“In contemporary architecture we find that the concept of CITY is in an internal battle between traditional and modern. The building process of a city in traditional architecture got stuck in following tradition without any regard to its functionality while industrialization, new material possibilities and modernism in general changed the way we see cities. With modernist architects like Le Corbusier or Antonio Bonet and Castellana modern architecture, in its quest of rendering traditions as useless and ignoring the surroundings of new edifications, eliminated the concept of a CITY as a team. “      —    Alexandra Hernandez.