Architect(s): BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group | JDS Architects
Address: M-Huset, Ørestads Blvd. 57-59, COPENHAGEN, Denmark
Latitude/Longitude: 55.63436895068125,12.581983780945768
Photographs: Iwan Baan | Johan Fowelin | Julien Lanoo
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 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 10m.
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 10x10cm bathroom tiles in 10 different colors to create thumbnail resolution portraits of them at the entrance of the M-house.
Text description provided by the architects.
Contributed by BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group
