West Amager "Growth"

Location: Ørestad, Amager
Client: Copenhagen X
Team: Stig L. Andersson, Jonas Sangberg, Lisbeth Westergaard
Collaborators: PLOT, Morten Stræde, Mikkel Bogh
Design phase: 2004
Area: 52 ha.

Along with an interdisciplinary group consisting of architects, artists and art historians SLA have created a planning project for the southernmost part of Ørestaden on West Amager. The team has consciously distanced itself from the desk-top planning of modernism, where the city is divided according to function in favour of a dynamic and open comprehensive plan that can satisfy the challenges and requirements of the future.

Instead of a sharp division between buildings and green spaces, planting and buildings are put together in alliances in the extremely varied plan. Vegetation shifts between clipped plane-tress and autonomous biotopes, from shrubberies growing wild between the buildings to a glistening waterfall gushing from a building.

The plan offers light, variation and good conditions for housing and industry in a break with present-day buildings-fixated planning. Instead it is about creating sensory spaces for future users, full of amenity value, which is why all structures are created from the user’s standpoint with the focus on well-being.