LEGO

LEGO

PROJECT RESIDENCES & MIXED USE
CLIENT HALMTORVET 29 A/S
COLLABORATORS: MOE & BRØDSGAARD
SIZE 50,000 M2
LOCATION COPENHAGEN, DK
STATUS: Competition 1st prize, local planning process

During the Marshall years when post war Denmark was being rebuilt, the state chose to favour prefabricated concrete over all other forms of construction. As a result the in-situ cast concrete industry has almost vanished, leaving the entire building industry based on prefabricated modules and concrete elements. Contemporary Denmark has become a country entirely made from LEGO bricks.

When asked to do a dense mixed use development comprising parking, retail, offices and housing into a single super dense development of a rather small but central site, we knew that the program could not fit in a generic perimeter block. We knew that we once again had to step in to the minefield of public tower phobia. Once again comparing the popular spires to the modern monoliths, we attempted to diagnose the demise of the Copenhagen high-rise. It appeared that until the early 1900s architects had been capable of designing imaginative towers in the honour of the church or the king. But upon the arrival of functionalism, with all its good intentions for daylight, views, functionality and production technique, our imagination seemed to have been reduced to the repetition of identical rectangular slabs. Could we today harness all the good intentions of functionalism and turn it into a platform of the creative process, rather than its straightjacket.

LEGO CREDIT LIST
Partner-in-Charge: Bjarke Ingels
Project Leader: Andreas Pedersen
Contributers: Jan Børgstrom, Camilla Hoel Eduardsen, David Vega, Eva Hviid-Nielsen, Tina Lund Højgaard Jensen, Ville Haimala

LEGO by Bjarke Ingels in Denmark won the WA Award Cycle 1. Please find below the WA Award poster for this project.