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The entire urban space in front of the DR Concert Hall and around DR Byen will be part of the "The Impact" project. (Illustration © BIG)
“The Impact” is the name of the urban space project that has won the comprehensive architecture and art competition “Byens Scene” (the city's stage) in Orestad, Copenhagen.
The winning project is a collaboration between the renowned Danish architect Bjarke Ingels’ firm, BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), and American artist Doug Aitken. The aim is to develop three urban spaces around the DR Concert Hall and DR Byen (the DR City), as well as in front of Bella Arena and Royal Arena. NIRAS and the consultancy firm Volcano are also involved in the project. The urban spaces will share a unified expression where art, architecture, and urban design merge, creating an attractive space that unites city life, everyday life, and cultural events.
In particular, “The Impact” fulfills the competition’s ambition to break with conventional thinking and the traditional separation between architecture and visual art in urban space projects. “This is exactly what we aimed for from the beginning of the competition – and what is now being realised through a unique interdisciplinary collaboration, where urban space becomes art and art becomes urban space,” says Anne Skovbro, CEO of By & Havn (Copenhagen City & Port Development), in their press release about the winning project (in Danish).
Bjarke Ingels adds in the press release: “With "The Impact", we’ve chosen an approach that strikes the perfect, finished surfaces like a meteor impact, creating space for life and exceptions, nature and culture.”
NIRAS has assisted with engineering services in the areas of traffic, mobility, and infrastructure.
“Our role has been to ensure natural, well-functioning connections between the urban spaces, metro stations, and the rest of the district, while also accounting for the heavy daily traffic of pedestrians and cyclists. The project introduces some unconventional solutions, which we as a team are now beginning to design,” says Anne Gedved Christoffersen, project manager at NIRAS.
With a combined audience capacity of over 25,000 seats, the three concert venues represent one of the largest cultural providers in the Nordics. “The Impact” project supports Orestad’s ongoing development as a Copenhagen destination for art and culture.
The space in front of DR Byen will be transformed into a plaza with a dramatic water basin and cliff-like landscape. The area will take on a meteor-like shape, occasionally enveloped in mist and fog. The landscape will connect the plaza to the metro station and extend outward toward the rest of the district.
At Bella Center, the surfaces of the urban spaces will be broken up by dense green vegetation, setting the stage for branching cracks that run through the spaces – serving as wayfinders and thematic visual elements. Nature will rise from ground level and climb the facade, adding identity and spatial depth to the area.
At Field’s and Royal Arena, the earth’s inner force is dramatised through golden light – a golden vein – breaking through the surface as if released from the earth’s core. At each end of the passage from Field’s to Royal Arena, two sculptural forms covered in golden reflective material rise and fall, as if torn from the earth or like meteorites glinting toward the sky from which they came.
The project’s design and planning phase will take place in 2025 and 2026, with construction to be tendered.
The competition brief stated: “The purpose of the ‘Byens Scene’ project competition was to propose designs for three extraordinary urban space experiences with a strong and distinctive artistic and architectural character. The proposals were to highlight a shared narrative between the locations, as well as the site-specific qualities of each of the three project areas. It was essential that art and architecture contribute equally to the aesthetic, social, and everyday aspects of the urban spaces.”
The partnership behind “Byens Scene” includes DR, Bellagroup, Bellakvarter, Live Nation, By & Havn, Metroselskabet, Steen & Strøm Danmark A/S, and Orestad Innovation City Copenhagen (ØICC).
See more project illustrations on BIG's website.
