BIG’s combined waste-to-energy power plant and ski slope in Copenhagen has been named World Building of the Year at World Architecture Festival 2021.
Danish architecture studio BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) combined infrastructure with leisure facilities at CopenHill – or Amager Bakke – in a former industrial area of Copenhagen. The building contains furnaces and turbines that run 24 hours a day and convert 440,000 tons of waste each year into clean electricity and heating for 150,000 homes in line with the city’s goal of becoming the world’s first carbon-neutral city by 2025.
Its wedge-shaped roof hosts a ski slope in winter and a hiking trailing in summer, and it’s tallest facade is a 85-metre climbing wall, which claims to be the tallest in the world.
The project was selected as the winner of the fourteenth edition of the awards by a jury made up up WAF programme director Paul Finch, 3XN Architects founder Kim Herforth Nielsen, Studio Seilern Architects principal Christina Seilern, Mecanoo associate partner Nuno Gonçalves Fontarra and Abdelkader Damani, the director of Frac Centre-Val de Loire and Artistic Director of Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans.
“[It] addresses the role of architecture in the new world of recycling and zero carbon. It treats infrastructure projects in a way which makes people say ‘Yes in my back yard’ rather than ‘no’. It encourages designers to think beyond the brief, to argue for ideas, and to ride the tides of politics and economics in the pursuit of the socially beneficial. And it reminds us that buildings can be fun!” said Finch.
The festival, which began in 2008 and has been hosted in Barcelona, Singapore, Berlin and Amsterdam, was held online this year in line with pandemic restrictions.
Architecture Today editor Isabel Allen recently spoke to the practice’s BIM specialists, Jens Majdal Kaarsholm and Peter Mortensen, about the impact of real-time rendering technology like Epic Games’ Twinmotion is having on the practice’s work.
