STATUS
COMPLETED
CLIENT
Høpfner A/S, Danish Oil Company
TYPOLOGY
Residential
SIZE M2/FT2
25,000 / 269,098
SHARE
The VM Houses – shaped like a V and an M when seen from Google Earth – are the first residential buildings in Copenhagen’s Ørestaden neighborhood. Through a series of transformations, BIG opened the block up and turned it to ensure maximum views of the surrounding landscape and to eliminate the vis-a-vis between the buildings.
The buildings open up towards the canals in the East and West.
The V House is angled to turn the residences towards the neighborhood's open landscapes.
The M House gives in to the V House to optimize views and minimize voyeurism.
The VM Houses are designed to allow for all apartments to take full advantage of daylight and views.
The V house is conceived as a balcony condo; the M-house as an Unite d’Habitation version 2.0. Where Le Corbusier designed narrow flats surrounding hundreds of meters of dead end corridors, the zigzagging M-house ensures that all corridors have views and daylight in both directions. These openings transform the circulation into an attractive social space.
For the south façade which faces the park, BIG designed a new type of balcony: a wedge-shaped plane that combines minimum shade with maximum cantilever. On a warm summer afternoon, the balconies form a vertical backyard community, creating connections to neighbors in a vertical radius of 10 m.
As a result of the zigzagging, stepping, sloping, intricate circulation and multilevel apartments, the VM houses are populated by a swarm of different apartments. Out of 225 units there are more than 80 unique apartment types.
The many multilevel apartment types interlock in complex compositions on the façade, transforming the exterior of the VM houses in to a three dimensional game of Tetris.
Finally, BIG celebrated the developers Per Hopfner and Axel Frederiksen using 10×10 cm bathroom tiles in 10 different colors to create thumbnail resolution portraits of them at the entrance of the M-house.
Bjarke Ingels Thomas Christoffersen Finn Nørkjær David Zahle Jakob Lange Ole Elkjær-Larsen Annette Jensen David Vega y Rojo Nanna Gyldholm Møller Claus Tversted Henrick Poulsen Karsten Hammer Hansen Narisara Ladawal Schröder Marc Jay Oliver Grundahl Simon Irgens-Møller Jørn Jensen Ole Nannberg Jakob Christensen Sophus Søbye Ingrid Serritslev Dorte Børresen Henning Stüben Mads H. Lund Søren Stærmose Alistair Williams Anna Manosa Bent Poulsen Christian Finderup Jakob Møller Jakob Wodschou Maria Yedby Ljungberg Nadja Cederberg Sandra Knöbl Xavier Pavia Pages
AWARDS
Mies van der Rohe Award Honourable Mention, 2007
Forum Award for Best Building in Scandinavia, 2006
Copenhagen Municipality Award, 2006
Mies van der Rohe Award Finalist, 2005
COLLABORATORS
Julian De Smedt / PLOT
