Terrace apartments in Aarhus
- Frank Kaltenbach
Just a few years ago the pier between the Marina and Bassin 7 in the Port of Aarhus was merely a vacant concrete platform. The Iceberg, Julien de Smedt's pioneering 2014 project, features offset white prisms with tall, angular pitched roofs that serve to establish unobstructed visual connections. His former office partner Bjarke Ingels, in cooperation with Gehl Architects, created a vivid harbour quarter with a sea water swimming pool. Despite the block border construction required by the site plan, innovative typology was created to provide a direct view towards the water for as many apartments as possible. For the planned 20 storey hotel and the completed residential structure AARhus at the tip of the artificial peninsula, the architects liberate themselves from the constriction of the inner city by creating generous terrace structures. The base of the building includes a below-grade parking garage for residents and is skirted by retail stores. Above it, an asymmetrical trapezoidal volume towers upward, embracing a green interior courtyard that faces the port area named Bassin 7. Stepping upward from the ten storey eastern corner, the terraced trapezoidal block border peaks at 13 storeys above the northern block corner, pointing towards the city. The opposite corner rises even higher up, featuring 19 storeys with views towards the sea. Different than in BIG's other residential megastructures comprised of cube shapes in Copenhagen or Stockholm, the floor slabs here are extremely thin, seemingly floating above each other. Along the block border they transform into slender gallery bands delineated by invisible glass railings and extending past the room-height apartment glazing. Each standard apartment features such a private open space, protected from its neighbours by wedge-shaped timber partition elements. The larger apartments are bordered by the terraces. Their slight curvature allows for an expanded panorama view towards the exterior. The terrace principle is pushed to the extreme on the upper floors of the two peaks, where the area enclosed by glass offers hardly enough room for a chair to sit in. These panorama rooms, resembling the crow's nest of a sailing ship, belong to the penthouse maisonette apartments and are connected to the floor below by an exterior staircase. The puristic and almost archaic impression of the residential block receives its vivid character from the seemingly uninterrupted, stacked concrete slabs. In structural terms, they are actually comprised of multiple components: The visually continuous slabs of the galleries, 1.80 metres deep and up to 7.30 metres wide, constitute an independent structural system. They are also completely separated from the actual floor slabs in terms of structure and building physics. The 486 prefabricated concrete slabs are supported by 442 prefabricated concrete columns that cantilever in front of the thermally insulated facade and are covered by wedge-shaped, timber-clad elements.
