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Click
on images for larger views. [Google Earth link]
Situated within the new 770-acre Ørestad
neighborhood south of Copenhagen's city center is the University
of Copenhagen's Amager campus. Part of that campus is the
Bikuben
Student Residence, a building with 107 studio flats on
six floors that also includes a gym, laundry room, terraces,
and a party room. Like the nearby Tietgen
Residence Hall, common kitchens and lounges on each floor
help to create relationships among the residents.
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Architects aart
a/s stressed that "loneliness and lack of social
relations are major problems for many students." They
aimed to "provide the greatest possible contact between
common and private rooms, while at the same time ensuring
the privacy of each residence." The primary architectural
means of providing this contact is via the "double spiral"
surrounding the atrium space
at the center of the cube-like building. |
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This atrium
space is a complex space whose boundaries are shared by
common rooms, terraces linked to the building's exterior,
and the vertical circulation. So interaction is seen in various
ways, be it via moving through the building, making dinner
in a kitchen, or merely sitting
in a lounge space and seeing across
the space. It is the variety of spaces and orientations
of these common areas that makes the decision to orient the
project towards social interaction so successful. Placing
a lounge at each elevator core responds to the same goal,
for example (speaking from my undergraduate experience), but
it wouldn't be as successful.
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The complexity of the circuit
of circulation and common spaces is expressed on the building
via the cut-out terraces that wrap the four sides of the building.
These areas are further accentuated by the bright orange
color of the vertical circulation, with the remainder of the
facade treated in a checkerboard pattern of light and dark
gray, a gesture that seems to hide the windows, as if to give
the separate residences a certain anonymity or privacy. As
mentioned earlier, this last is a concern of the architects,
contingent on its relationship to the common areas. The latter
is open and bright, the former is closed and dull, like two
sides of the same coin. |
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Click
on images below for larger views.
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