Orestad monolith.

This proposal for a huge new archives institute in Copenhagen inventively exploits the building's mass.

The redevelopment of the Orestad district of Copenhagen (AR June 1995) aims to implant a lively and predominantly urban mixture of activities to a long finger of land on Amager island, just south of the city centre. Now the individual components of the overall masterplan are beginning to take shape, with architectural competitions being instigated for the development of specific sites. The first such competition was recently organised by the Danish Ministry of Culture for a major state and provincial archives institute on a site immediately to the east of the planned Gronjordsveg city line station. The building will protect and preserve a large quantity of irreplaceable material, as well as making it accessible to researchers, government administrators and the general public. Both the scale and institutional importance of the new building make it a key element in Orestad's future evolution. The brief also raised the issue of how such a large building can relate to the city in a distinct manner without dominating the skyline. (The most visible building in the vicinity is the slab of Jacobsen's Royal Hotel at the north end of Amager.)

Ten practices were invited to take part in the competition. One of the more interesting proposals came from Matthew Priestman Architects in collaboration with Boje Lundgaard & Lene Tranberg. Their design seeks to express the building's mass as an elegantly proportioned monolith (not unlike Jacobsen's hotel block). The archives are contained in a central core enclosed by a dark casing of oiled steel. Wrapped around this brooding shrine is a glazed skin, set 5m apart from the archive core. At ground level is an entrance volume containing the building's reception, together with a lecture hall and exhibition area. This connects vertically with public levels at the top of the block; between them are 15 storeys of archive stacks. Like a 'building within a building', the library, reading rooms, offices and staff facilities are organised around a toplit four-storey atrium, within a dissolved interior landscape of ramps and mezzanines. Elevated on the podium of the archive core, all the public and staff levels enjoy panoptic views of Copenhagen. Symbolically, as the building rises, its mass is gradually fragmented. The steel carcass is split and penetrated, fracturing into lighter, glazed upper levels. The proposal has a calm, refined intensity, embodying a thoroughly modern Danish sensibility.