Mountain Dwellings - BIG

Mountain Dwellings

The Mountain Dwellings project in Copenhagen by Bjarke Ingles Group (BIG) consists of apartments above a multi-story park. The parking garage has enough space for 480 cars and there are 80 apartments that are arranged on a slope that resembles a hillside. This project sits directly across from the VM Houses project that BIG completed in 2006.

The Mountain Dwellings were designed to try and combine the luxuries of a backyard with urban density. Therefore, the parking area turned into the base where housing with terraces could be placed so the housing and the parking work together as one building. The structure developed into a concrete “hillside” covered with a layer of housing from 11 stories down to the ground. The apartments need air, light, and views so all the homes also have roof gardens giving the apartments a suburban neighborhood look with gardens flowing over the “hillside.”

The sketch on the left shows the basic organization of the floor plan for the project. The sketch on  the right is of the back of the 'hillside' at its highest point.

 

I made a model of the general shape of the structure of the Mountain Dwellings. I think that it's a very interesting idea to combine a parking lot and a building by making a group of apartment buildings resemble a landscape, and I think Bjarke Ingles Group was very successful in doing so. The model shows the basic organization of the apartments, and the shape of how the apartments move upwards and backwards up a hillside. It starts at the top with only a few and the row of apartments is longest in the middle, and then it shortens again as it reaches the ground.