Global Design New York University: Spotlight: BIG - "Amagerforbrænding Waste-to-Energy Ski Resort"

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Spotlight: BIG - "Amagerforbrænding Waste-to-Energy Ski Resort"

The new Amagerforbrænding Waste-to-Energy plant is an innovative model in the fields of waste management and energy production. It will be complete in 2016, just three kilomet
res from downtown Copenhagen. It will be the single largest facility of its kind in Denmark, costing 500 million Euros.

This remarkable plant seeks to change the way waste management and energy production is understood. Rather than hiding drab industrial processes, the plant hopes to re-connect the Danes to the issues behind waste management. The architectural concept by the Danish firm BIG, will convert the plant into an artificial landscape, drawing the people of Copenhagen in. The public roof of the new Amagerforbraending will be a 31.000 m2 park, and include a snow slope for skiers of all levels.

Amagerforbrænding Waste-to-Energy Ski Resort

BIG Vortex - A Building-Site Art Installation by realities:united for Amagerforbrænding, Copenhagen from realities:united on Vimeo.

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MISSION

Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is "as close to the beyond as to things near" when we evoke "our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere."