A ski slope on an incinerator

The idea of creating a ski slope in the heart of Copenhagen dates back to 2002. Bjarke Ingels is a young architect, he was only 28 years old at the time and his most expensive choice was to make his future architecture firm the creative center dedicated to urban hedonism. “For me, it was a question of waking up my city, of rethinking its contours but also of changing its uses. With the flattest country in the world, you have constraints, but above all a very vast field of possibilities,” he explains. At the time, his firm, still called PLOT, proposed to insert a topography of ski slopes in the densest area of Copenhagen, where the terrain is the most limited. The news is all the rage and the announcement does not end there. The architect wants to install this project above the largest store in the city: unheard of. If the idea is not accepted by the municipality, the first seed is planted. We know the next one: it's Copenhill.

As Bjarke Ingels explains: “In industrial architecture, the main function of a facade is to hide the fact that factories have a serious image problem and that everything that happens inside should generally not be seen by the public. For Copenhill, industrial production is virtuous, which is why we did not want to make a simple pretty shell but wanted to find functionalities around and on this industrial zone!” warns the architect. He even adds that the ambition to create added value is not opposed to the ambition to create beauty. So, in 2008, when they received the call for projects to design a new incinerator for the city, BIG knew that it was on this project that their creativity would finally be able to express themselves. Copenhill will usher in a series of superlatives beginning by becoming thevalorization plant cleanest waste energy in the world.

Thus, after ten years of work, in 2018 the site also became the tallest and largest building in Copenhagen. The editor-in-chief and journalist Vanessa Quirk wrote in March 2019 in an article in ArchDaily that “BIG was sending a real, clear and optimistic signal here to the world of architecture, but also to politicians, business leaders and manufacturers.” She thus highlighted how the firm had succeeded in connecting with people and in renewing practices. “That's the key: BIG decided to use its extravagant ingenuity to encourage and raise awareness for public participation and then to give purpose to that participation.” Today, Copenhill is the result of nearly ten years of thought, time and design. To carry out the project, the firm worked with SLA, AKT, Lüchinger+Meyer, MOE, and Rambøll. The factory aspires to embody the concept of hedonistic sustainability, “fun fun”, while aligning with Copenhagen's goal of becoming the first carbon neutral city by 2025.

“Copenhill is designed as a public infrastructure with social side effects expected from day one. Replacing the adjacent 50-year-old waste-to-energy plant with the Amager Resource Center (ARC), the new waste incineration plants in Copenhill incorporate the latest technologies in waste treatment and energy production. Because of its location on the Amager industrial waterfront, where raw industrial plants have become the site of extreme sports, from wakeboarding to karting races, the new power plant adds skiing, hiking and climbing to the wish lists of thrill seekers,” explains Patrick Gustavsson, general coordinator.

The internal volumes of the power plant are determined by the precise positioning and organization of its machines in order of height, creating an efficient and sloping roof suitable for a 9,000 m2 ski area. At the summit, experts can hit the artificial ski slope the same length as an Olympic half-pipe, test the freestyle park, or try the timed slalom course, while beginners and kids practice on the lower slopes. Skiers climb into the park from the platform lift, conveyor belts, or glass lift to get a glimpse of the 24-hour operations of a waste incinerator.