We continue our 21st-Century Architecture: 25 Years 25 Buildings series with BIG‘s ski-jump-topped power plant, the studio’s signature building that combines sustainability with fun.
The Amager Bakke power station is a building like no other, a typology that has never been built before and may never be built again. As Rowan Moore wrote in the Guardian, it is “probably the best power-station-cum-ski-slope in the world”.
A combination of industry and leisure, the mountain-like building in Copenhagen epitomises the “sustainable hedonism” ethos of BIG and its founder, Bjarke Ingels.
Amager Bakke – also known as CopenHill – combines a waste-to-energy power plant designed to turn 440,000 tons of waste into clean energy annually with an outdoor leisure facility.
The winning entry of a competition to replace the 50-year-old Amagerforbraending facility in 2011, its unique design was the result of a desire to create a building that not was not only functional, but would also be a usable part of the city.
“BIG’s proposal contributes to the city with something useful and beautiful,” said Amagerforbraending director Ulla Röttger at the time.
The ambitious concept immediately drew attention and was named by Time magazine as one of the 50 Best Inventions of 2011.
“Who looks at a giant incinerator and sees an even more giant ski slope?” asked Time. “Those aren’t ordinary thoughts.”
At 85 metres high, the wedge-shaped building is one of the tallest in the city and just under half the height of Denmark’s tallest natural peak.
Rather than hiding the energy plant, BIG aimed to draw attention to it – to create a landmark that promoted the city’s sustainability goals.
“CopenHill is a blatant architectural expression of something that would otherwise have remained invisible: that it is the cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world,” explained Ingels.
Within the artificial mountain, all of the waste-to-energy plant’s functions were arranged in height order, with 250-300 trucks of compostable waste arriving daily at the lowest point.
The waste is mixed and then transferred into incinerators that heat water in a pair of boilers to turn steam turbines connected to generators. This provides heat for around 150,000 homes – approximately a quarter of the city.
It’s an emblem of a culture of why-not and because-you-canRowan Moore in the Guardian.
The smoke created is purified in a system described by its operator as “one of the best in the world”. It passes through an electric filter, dust filter, three scrubbers and a catalyst to remove nitrogen oxides – a first for Denmark – before being released from the facility.
At the tallest part there are 10 stacked floors of office space, while the building also contains a 600-square-metre education centre.
The entire structure is wrapped in 1.2-metre-tall and 3.3-metre-wide aluminium blocks that are stacked like gigantic bricks and allow light into the industrial facility. In the future, BIG hopes that these blocks will become planters.
The waste-to-energy plant started operation in 2017, but it wasn’t until December 2018 that the first people got to ski on its roof.
Accessible by a glass-walled lift with views into the power plant, the 400-metre-long ski slope runs from the building’s peak to its base with one U-bend. Designed in collaboration with architecture studio SLA, the slope was flanked with planting and a hiking trail.
The outdoor centre was completed with the world’s tallest artificial climbing wall and a pair of cafes – one at the foot of the slope and one topping the building.
“As a power plant, CopenHill is so clean that we have been able to turn its building mass into the bedrock of the social life of the city – its facade is climbable, its roof is hikeable and its slopes are skiable,” said Ingels.
“A crystal clear example of hedonistic sustainability – that a sustainable city is not only better for the environment – it is also more enjoyable for the lives of its citizens.”
The building has become a tourist attraction with views across the city and is visited by around 10,000 skiers a year.
Architecturally it has won many plaudits, including being named the best building at the World Architecture Festival in 2021 and being nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2022.
Perhaps surprisingly, one of the main criticisms of the plant is that it is too big. As Copenhagen has become better at recycling, the city doesn’t create enough burnable waste to feed the furnaces. To keep the furnaces burning and provide heat for homes connected to it, its operator is now importing waste from outside of Denmark.
For BIG, the structure has become a calling card – clearly exemplifying the studio’s ethos of sustainable hedonism.
“CopenHill is the closest the studio has come to its goal of realising buildings designed to be man-made ecosystems that intelligently respond to environmental challenges,” wrote curator Beatrice Galilee in the book Radical Architecture of the Future.
The project added to Ingels’s growing stature as he has become by far the best-known and widely commissioned architect of his generation. It pushed his brand of fun, wilfully gimmicky architecture that is being repeated around the world.
“It’s an emblem of a culture of why-not and because-you-can that currently pops up in a number of modern cities: twisting towers in Toronto by the Chinese practice MAD; the Dubai palm-islands and sail-shaped hotels that are by now almost historic,” wrote Moore in the Guardian.
“He does audacity. He does wit. He does projects-with-a-twist – a habitable warped pyramid on Manhattan, for example. They are multistorey haikus, likes-factories, machines for generating ‘aha’ moments in their viewers, journalistic readymades.”
So far in this series we have included work by 12 Pritzker Architecture Prize winners and it seems highly likely that Ingels will be joining them in the very near future.
Did we get it right? Was BIG’s Amager Bakke the most significant building completed in 2018? Let us know in the comments. We will be running a poll once all 25 buildings are revealed to determine the most significant building of the 21st century so far.
This article is part of Dezeen’s 21st-Century Architecture: 25 Years 25 Buildings series, which looks at the most significant architecture of the 21st century so far. For the series, we have selected the most influential building from each of the first 25 years of the century.
The illustration is by Jack Bedford.
21st Century Architecture: 25 Years 25 Buildings
2000: Tate Modern by Herzog & de Meuron
2001: Gando Primary School by Diébédo Francis Kéré
2002: Bergisel Ski Jump by Zaha Hadid
2003: Walt Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry
2004: Quinta Monroy by Elemental
2005: Moriyama House by Ryue Nishizawa
2006: Madrid-Barajas airport by RSHP and Estudio Lamela
2007: Oslo Opera House by Snøhetta
2008: Museum of Islamic Art by I M Pei
2009: Murray Grove by Waugh Thistleton Architects
2010: Burj Khalifa by SOM
2011: National September 11 Memorial by Handel Architects
2012: CCTV Headquarters by OMA
2013: Cardboard Cathedral by Shigeru Ban
2014: Bosco Verticale by Stefano Boeri
2015: UTEC Lima campus by Grafton Architects
2016: Transformation of 530 Dwellings by Lacaton & Vassal, Frédéric Druot and Christophe Hutin
2017: Apple Park by Foster + Partners
2018: Amager Bakke by BIG
This list will be updated as the series progresses.
