BLOX | OMA
The BLOX project, home of the Danish Architecture Center (DAC), contains exhibition spaces, offices and co-working spaces, a café, a bookstore, a fitness center, 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 harbor 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.
The Copenhagen inner harbor has a long industrial and military history. On reclaimed land, the building site initially housed a cluster of brewery buildings which burnt to the ground in the 1960s. Since then the harbor has become the home of some of Denmark’s most notable architectural icons; a linear display of the tenets of Danish Modernism: monumentality, simplicity, and politeness.
BLOX adds a new impulse: creating an encounter between the water frontages, Kierkegaard’s Square and the city. Its square volume positioned directly along the harbourside, creates a sheltered public city square against the traditional yellow buildings and a much needed built front for the existing library square.
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. A linear park along the harbor flows down below water level along the quay wall and through the building. The former playground is incorporated into the new building, as a partially covered and terraced public space, which can be transformed in the evening into an open-air cinema acting as a public foyer.
The building’s exterior is marked by a stacking of the same geometric forms in different arrangements. The offices are contained in a rectangular ring of glass facades shaded in a white frit. The ground floor functions are located in separate volumes generating openings which form the public entrances and bring the city into the center of the building. The apartment volumes are fragmented and recessed for privacy, the landscaped terraces encircle the DAC’s central skylight. The building’s coloured textures subtly echo the sea tones of the harbour, ever-present in the reflected light of the water.
The DAC itself forms the core of the BLOX Project, positioned in the centre, surrounded by and
embedded within its objects of study: housing, offices, and parking. It is organized as a vertical sequence of spaces running through the building, starting below ground and moving upwards to the cafe with its view over all of Copenhagen.
Sustainability
A broad sustainability vision has been developed for the project, not just in terms of the usual energy, carbon and resource issues, but addressing the wider social and economic impacts. The Arup SPeAR® assessment served as a tool to analyze the project and record progress against a comprehensive, holistic set of criteria spanning environmental, social and economic aspects within the wider cultural and geographical context.
Denmark’s advanced low energy requirements for buildings, arising from the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, demand an operational energy usage much lower than other countries. Bringing the building’s design in line with these criteria involved rethinking its mass and façade concepts, involving ways to reduce CO2 emissions and embodied carbon during construction and operations, as well as researching new solutions to offset and neutralize the carbon usage. The building makes use of on-site renewable energy and achieves the Low Energy Class with a primary energy usage of under 40 kWh/m2/yr.
User comfort and lifetime flexibility are important elements for the durability of BLOX. The building is acoustically isolated from road noise and vibrations with a highway bridge construction and high insulation facades. The office facades are fully glazed to provide a generous outlook and to reduce lighting energy usage. Minimal low-energy lighting fixtures combined with user task lights are used, and both lighting and facade sun shading is automated through centralized daylight control, with user controls. The building is served by a high specification heat recovery plant which uses Copenhagen’s district heating and cooling system based on seawater cooling and the use of residual heat from electricity generation.
Credits
Project: Blox
Architect: OMA
Status: Completed, open 4 May 2018
Owner: Realdania
Client: Realdania By og Byg
Address: BLOX, Bryghuspladsen, 1473 Copenhagen K, Denmark
Program: Mixed Use building: DAC Danish Architecture Centre, Apartments, Offices, Restaurant, Retail, Automatic parking, Urban Park & Playground.
Partner: Ellen van Loon
Project Director: Adrianne Fisher / Chris van Duijn
Construction Assistance (Project Followup)
Project Manager (Design Manager): Ariel Wallner
Team: Koen Stockbroekx, Federico D’Angelo, Fred Awty, Soren Thiesen, Nina Grex, Piotr Janus, Ansis
Šinke, Berenice Moran, Frederick Juul
Tender & Construction Documents (Main Project)
Project Manager (Design Manager): Morten Busk Petersen & Koen Stockbroekx
Team: Federico D’Angelo, Fred Awty, Soren Thiesen, Will Hartzog, Dennis Rasmussen, with Nina Grex,
Lea Olsson, Brigitta Lenz , Anna Grajper, Chong Ying Pai, Cristina Martin de Juan, Saskia Simon,
Mateusz Kiercz.
Schematic Design (Project Proposal)
Team: Koen Stockbroekx, Federico D’Angelo, Paul Allen, Sebastian Arenram, Fai Au, Alessandro De
Santis, Daniel Dobson, Katharina Ehrenklau, Clarisa Garcia Fresco, Waqas Jawaid, Gustavo Paternina,
Parizad Pezeshkpour, Jad Semaan, Soren Thiesen, Bas van der Togt, Katrien van Dijk, Pero Vukovic,
Joe Wu, Jung-Won Yoon, Haohao Zhu, Didzis Jaunzems
Concept Design
Team: Mette Lyng Hansen, Koen Stockbroekx, Dirk Peters, Alessandro De Santis, Sebastian Arenram,
Sandra Bsat, Shengze Chen, Karolina Czeczek, Katharina Ehrenklau, Andrea Giannotti, Maaike
Hawinkels, Cristian Mare, Gianna Ong-Alok, Mariano Sagasta, Nurdan Yakup, Yanfei Shui, Marc Balzar,
Andrea Bertassi, Marc Dahmen, Ludwig Godefroy, Carmen Jimenez, Hyoeun Kim, Joana da Lima, Ana
Martins, Konrad Milton, Gabriele Pitacco, Daniel Rabin, Ola Sandrell
AMO Study:
Chris van Duijn, Dirk Peters, Koen Stockbroekx, Ali Arvanaghi, Talia Dorsey, Jonah Gamblin, Alasdair
Graham, David Moon, Daniel Rabin, Ian Robertson, Todd Reisz, Christian Staynor
COLLABORATORS
Engineering: Arup with Cowi
Façade Engineering: Arup Façade Engineering (van Santen & Associés)
Local Architect: C. F. Møller (PLH Architekter)
Cost & Risk Management: Aecom
Landscape: Kragh & Berglund, 1:1 Landskab (Inside Outside)
Scenography: Ducks Scéno
Lighting Design: Les Eclaireurs with Ducks Scéno
Acoustics: Royal Haskoning DHV
Sustainability: Arup with Cowi (EnPlus Tech)
Automatic Carpark Consultant: Niras
