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FOR BECCA

Sep 28, 2005 19:01

September 25, 2005Design: Copenhagen
By ARIC CHEN

It lacks the buzz and hype of London and the familiar ring of Bilbao. But Scandinavia's Oresund region, which includes the Danish capital, Copenhagen, and Malmo in southern Sweden, has - at least for the moment - taken Europe's center stage for new architecture.

Since its completion in 2000, visitors have gawked at the Oresund Bridge, a nearly five-mile-long engineering feat that helps shuttle thousands across the Oresund Strait, between Copenhagen and Malmo, each day. But in recent weeks, attention has returned to the cities on shore, with the near-simultaneous completion of buildings by architecture heavyweights like Santiago Calatrava, Zaha Hadid and the MVRDV firm.

In all respects, the most high-profile newcomer is the Turning Torso, www.turningtorso.com, a spine-tingling residential and commercial tower in Malmo that spirals 54 stories above the Western Harbor, a former shipyard area that many see as a model for urban redevelopment. The building is the work of Mr. Calatrava, the Spanish architect who has also designed the new transit hub for Lower Manhattan. "I was asked to create a new sign for the city," he said of his tower's iconic presence in Malmo.

Rising alone on the skyline of the once heavily industrial city, Mr. Calatrava's design is a vertiginous stack of nine twisting cubes braced by a finlike steel exoskeleton. Its form closely follows that of a six-foot-tall marble and steel sculpture that he created in 1991 and that will be included in "Santiago Calatrava: Sculpture Into Architecture," an exhibition that opens Oct. 18 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Not to be outdone by its neighboring upstart, the perennial design bastion of Copenhagen - which is less than an hour away by car, or 40 minutes by train - unveiled its own architectural showstoppers this summer. Ms. Hadid's addition to the Ordrupgaard, the art museum in suburban Charlottenlund at Vilvordevej 110, (45-39) 64-11-83, www.ordrupgaard.dk, oozes with flowing linear volumes in black concrete. And on the city's waterfront, in the Havnestad neighborhood, the leading Dutch firm of MVRDV transformed two grain silos into the Gemini Residence, a dazzling housing complex where the apartments have been hung off the existing concrete cylinders like stacks of glass rings.

Indeed, Copenhagen has long been steeped in the cachet of Danish design, but like many other cities, it has taken to luring star names from abroad. Opened last year in the former Royal Boathouse, the Danish Jewish Museum, at Proviantpassagen 6, (45-33) 11-22-18, www.jewmus.dk, was designed by the New York-based Daniel Libeskind, who retrofitted the early-17th-century building with the gashed and tilting surfaces that are among his signatures.

Nevertheless, plenty of room remains for native talents. Perhaps the most prominent and spectacular building to rise recently is the Copenhagen Opera House, Ekvipagemestervej 10, (45-33) 69-69-69, www.operahus.dk. Designed by the veteran Danish architect Henning Larsen and opened in January, it sits on a small island in the harbor, its glass facade bulging beneath an enormous cantilevered roof. Mr. Larsen, however, doesn't mind the new competition, saying, "I think it's very inspiring, and brings in new thoughts."

ARIC CHEN writes frequently about design and architecture.