Andersens slides

The problem of cities today is how to represent them. If one is unable to think the city, there’ll be no way to design them. They must be thought. Represented. Plato taught us that behind all reality lies a hidden truth. Reality cannot be real until we learn how to look behind it and discover the whole, divine truth. We have built a complete society, including may cities, based on this idea.
Solipsists in our time say there’s no reality but the images we ourselves make of reality. The world is nothing but images: an unreal reality. Some designers think architecture should be grounded in this understanding.

This plan for Ørestad is to show that both theories are right, although architecture is neither of them, because architecture should be done. It is not so much designing the ideal city: it must be finding it. Not the result is what is important, but the process of finding. This is defining the art itself. Architecture is finding.
Therefore we ourselves must make the images. Knowing that the images show us a way, keep us going but are never final. Cities are never final, never finished. They change or grow. Things as they are, are changed if we represent them. If we do this, if we re-think the concept of a city, it changes into the city we did think and represent. A city of desire. To desire is to know.


How then shall we know Copenhagen?

Life in the city is like a slideshow; when you’ve seen all the pictures, it’s hard to tell what you saw on each of them. Yet there has been a series of seperate slides, of which you’ve seen the pictures, not the frames that hold them. Frames that make it possible for the pictures to be there: to appear. Cities can be imagined, thought, to be that way; architecture is the frame(s), citylife the projected show. Architecture frames the city.

On the Ørestad site slide-frames will be put that define the density of the growing city. Thick frames for high density, narrow frames for low density. Remaining green space and wetlands in between the frames can be read negatively. Apart from the newly planned motor- and railway, connections with the surrounding city will be made by simple, traditional means, making use of existing patterns. Underground stations are situated in high density quarters, where they’ll be able to serve many different people and functions. Around each underground station a special area will come into being: six different representations of the city. Images with the same power as the seemingly trivial images H.C. Andersen made in his (fairy)tales. Therefore this plan for Ørestad can be read as Andersens slidebox.

In the same time it should be read as a analytic method to measure the city. New parts as well as existing parts. A toolbox that urbanists and architects so desperately need to design contemporary cityplans.


The changing city

The slidebox made for Ørestad is to become an urban design and it does so by translating the slides into blocks and to pick out the slides one by one in order te decide how big the built floor area is going to be. We took out thirteen examples, ten numbered ones and three free ones, and drew five possible solutions in building density of each of them.This is the way the masterplan should be read. In every slide can be many different ways to fill it with mass, buildingstructure. In fact every slide should be given to an architect to make a design within that frame. Like in all urban plans, the information needed is being given in those frame: density, height (that is to be 20 m; 5 storeys, like in most of the surrounding neighbourhoods), width, borders and functional partition. However there’s still a lot of freedom in the plan, because the density in each slide-frame can be measured by two parameters: the thickness of the frame in the masterplan and the density-percentage of the slide sections. No formal parameters are given: all architects who starts working here can still make their own choices.

The first board with slides is made in a cinematic kind of way; the pictures are being made in two different scales: horizontally 1:5000 is used (it fits on the masterplan) and vertically 1:500, so one can read the height and density in a understandable way. This method also stresses the idea of imaging the sections; the’re not real buildings, but sectional representations of built density.

On the last board we show ten slide examples again, but this time in a real scale of 1:1000, both horizontal and vertical, as if they were turned into real buildings.
As was asked we divided the development of Ørestad in three times ten years, although we have the feeling a development during the next fifty years could be more realistic. Here again it is very important to make use of both parameters: not only the number of slides can grow, but they also grow more thick and more dense. Density grows in the masterplan as well as in the sections-slides. This way it becomes possible to change gradually the Ørestaden site from greenland into a major citypart. It is necessary to start using the complete site as a whole from the beginning by installing what we’ve called pioneer-frames, consisting of living quarters combined with basic infrastructure and facilities (shops, schools, etc).

Copenhagen as it is today has a large number of townships, that function almost seperately from the main centre. They are all grouped together around a centre they never reach. When you take a bike (as we did) and drive from the old town diagonally to the outskirts, you will pass greenbelts and townships following each other up. You read a section of the city in this way.

We wanted to create the same kind of follow up in Ørestad, which can clearly be read in the Location Plan. But at the same time we made it possible to discover an only green city, if you cross the wetlands-area, or a metropolitan like city, if you only visit the areas around an underground station.

Things as they are, are changed if we represent them.
Existing greenlands are incorporated in the masterplan, being a cultural aspect of the city. Some parts of the Amager island have been developed by Dutch farmers (unions and carrots), specially asked for by King Christian II (1513-1523). All the newly gained land was used in a very Dutch way; by dikes and windmills it became a very cultural aspect; growth of green areas made possible by mans interruption of nature. It stayed this way up to the present day. By making it a part of the frame sturcture, it becomes a indivisible part of the new city; saved and used at the same time.

Existing buildings on the Ørestaden site are being incorporated in the masterplan, just as the greenlands. At some points it was necessary however to make the position more dense; in those cases we did fit in some more floor space and proposed to use aberrant building forms.

As each building is a more or less autonomous part of the city, they all have a combination of functions; housing, offices, parkings, shops etc. all in different variations. Some frames can have special features like bigger schools, sportsfacilities, theaters, an underground station or even a railway station. A combination of frames with more or less comparable functions we gave names like ecologium, trade-ium (at Bella Center), scientologium (at university), ambassadorium (neighbourhood for diplomats), etc. to indicate that also a few frames together can form a township or community, because of their functional partition. Even traffic routes are being solved inside a frame, as long as they are being used for smaller handling. Bigger routes, connections to the main structure, are being made seperately from the frames.
Just like the intensity of the frame, also functions grow more complicated along the 30 years of development.

The further we get in the process, the more the need of office and trade space will grow. At least up to the average of 70.000 inhabitants. After this point, the need will grow less. This is how the interior partition of frames will change through the years.

In the final situation there’ll be approximately 500.000 m2 office floor space, 100.000 m2 floor space facilities and there’ll be 110.000 people living in Ørestad, devided over dense or non-dense areas.

Ørestad project