Visions for the future. Los Angeles architect Christophe Cornubert visited Nordhavnen, the Northern Harbor in Copenhagen, with counter plans to the conventional urban planning and guerrilla improvisations on the recently concluded ideas competition for the harbor's future. Nordhavnen as an urban laboratory
Artificial islands in Copenhagen. Illustration from Christophe Cornubert's workshop, in which Nordhavnen at the top of the photo is united to Refshale Island and the Opera at the bottom BY HELENE SCHYTTER THE JOURNEY to Nordhavnen's landscape of containers, wilderness idyll and spectacular industrial icons follows the railway track and the coastal line northward around the city. The stretches are long and wind-swept, signposting pointing to exotic destinations such as the Orient Basin and the Ocean Club, and at the end of everything, a hazy view directs the gaze towards Sweden. It is here, on the edge of Oresund that CPH City & Port Development in collaboration with the Architects' Association of Denmark and the municipality of Copenhagen plan to build the city of the future. For four months, urban planners, architects and interested citizens have had the opportunity to participate in the debate and the competition for a spatial concept and a general structural plan for this the most northern part of Copenhagen's water front. And while future visions for a sustainable, attractive city district with harbor baths, bicycle routes and varying residential buildings have gradually built up the area at a conceptual level, the still raw and uninhabited harbor terrain of real life has been the venue for several cultural events over the summer. These have included this year's Metropolis Laboratory, a cross-artistic biennale and urban think tank, under the heading !The City as Stage – The Stage as City’ arranged by Copenhagen International Theatre, in which the American architect Christophe Cornubert participated with his unconventional workshop. Cornubert has not taken part in the ideas competition for the future of Nordhavnen; his workshop has, however, been inspired by Nordhavnen's future development, while concurrently considering this through the urban think tank of the Metropolis Laboratory in order to explore alternative and cross-disciplinary strategies for urban planning in general and Nordhavnen in particular: “In many ways, the workshop has taken its starting point in Metropolis' general idea of bringing together artists, performance
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groups, architects, planners and cultural institutions in order to develop alternative development strategies for urban space and the creative city,” Cornubert starts. He has previously worked with Rem Koolhaas in the Netherlands on the experimental university building “Educatorium” in Utrecht, and today he has his own award-winning architecture office, PUSH, in Los Angeles. “I have also focused on the ongoing development of Copenhagen, while experimenting with the conventional ways in which we perceive, navigate, map and read the city. It is about seeing our environment anew and challenging preconceived planning practices,” he explains, as we look around the terrain vague of the northern harbor, which both Cornubert's Metropolis workshop and Copenhagen's current development plans have revolved around over the summer. * THE STARTING POINT for Cornubert's workshop exploration has, however, not been a sterile raised view over an increasingly empty industrial area. For five days, he and his group of architects and architectural students have practised a guerrilla research, investigating in particular the more inaccessible, deserted and closed zones within the harbor's topography: “We have been exploring, taking pictures, climbing over fences and drifting through unfamiliar, abandoned buildings and landscapes in order to document Nordhavnen as if we were the first explorers on the North Pole,” Cornubert explains while he unfolds the photo material from the workshop's urban explorations and points to the area's position in relation to historical Copenhagen. “Nordhavnen can be seen as an isolated and overlooked appendage, hooked onto the edge of the city. It is quite possible to have lived your entire life in Copenhagen without ever having set foot out here, as it feels like quite a long way and a difficult journey for a lot of people. In this way, you may talk about borders at several levels in connection with the Nordhavnen peninsula. Some are physical and geographical, while others are psychological and related to people's mental image of Copenhagen. So for this workshop it seemed to make sense to try another method, to supplement purely analytical and demographic data by mapping other less-definable properties and potentials of Nordhavnen. This on-the-ground contact and direct engagement has also tested a more intuitive technique for uncovering and reclaiming some of the area’s secret spaces, to re-establishing these places in the collective Copenhagen consciousness,” says Cornubert. The workshop's tactile “guerrilla research” and reconstruction of the lost and hidden Copenhagen can clearly be traced back to the avant-garde movement !Situationist International’, which towards the end of the 1950s went exploring the obscure and marginalized Paris. The incentive that sparked the situationists' nomadic mapping at the time was to challenge the capitalized space and uncover an everyday oriented, illogical and more authentic city behind the commercial codes. The goal was to revolutionize society by rethinking architecture and changing routines in the urban space. The situationists initiated spontaneous walks across urban boundaries and coincidence games in the public space to create social and artistic situations as well as to gather material about the city's contrasts, disparity and hidden layers. And although situationist leader Guy Debord would probably turn in his grave by any non-revolutionary adaptation of situationist guerrilla strategies for the current hegemony, the avant-garde's experimental mapping has still found its way to Nordhavnen via Cornubert: “The derive could almost be characterized as a scientific method for uncovering inaccessible or lost urban spaces. A fresh adaptation seemed an interesting approach to start our investigation here, where, as in many other cities, a central theme is to rediscover and reimagine these derelict post-industrial and waterfront areas. There is also the idea that the city is seen as a dynamic series of spaces, streets, flows, and experiences that unfold and change over time, as opposed to a static geography inscribed by a plan. The workshop has borrowed from the situationists' strategies as a sort of template with Nordhavnen as laboratory. Not in order to run conventional planning completely off the field, but in order to generate an alternative mapping, a different layer to the master plan,” Cornubert explains. * At several levels, THE MASTER PLAN has been the methodical wall against which the workshop has tried to play, and which it has tried to modify. The workshop's alternative mapping could be seen as a direct criticism of the development that has taken place in the southern harbor of Copenhagen, Sydhavnen, which in the same way as Nordhavnen may be characterized as a post-industrial waterfront: “The limitation I see at Sydhavnen is that the master plan – or wall-to-wall planning, as we say in Los Angeles – has not left any kind of openness, neither literally nor on a conceptual level. Each square meter has been thoroughly designed, analyzed and functionally divided. But what if you wanted to open a jazz club, or needed some space for an internet start-up? Unless you live there, you have no reason for going there. The result is the emergence of these anomalies in the midst of the city that have a very high density yet the static and detached qualities of suburbia,” Cornubert explains. On the basis of the workshop's work, he proposes a more open infrastructure instead: “Rather than using the term !master plan’ we have been working with the concept of !counter plan’. Instead of calculating how to fill up Nordhavnen, we have tried to strategize how the place can be kept open. The ‘open infrastructure’ can be interpreted literally as collective urban spaces, parks and green areas. But this is also a question of creating urban reserves for future development, future architectures, creating choices for the next generations. Finally this idea should be understood as a program for folding creative, temporary events into the life of the city, what happens when cultural and entrepreneurial activities drive new urban development. It is actually an open question: How can a new master plan model accomodate the more dynamic and changeable urban future?” Cornubert asks, flicking on through the workshop's collage-like solution proposals and innovative intellectual experiments.
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* THE WORKSHOP'S illustrations show both the savannah-like nature of Nordhavnen and documentation on abandoned industrial buildings as well as proposals for future city beaches and artificial islands. The fact is, that open infrastructure and counter planning are not merely a question of not building. “Architecture is all about creating possibilities,” Cornubert stresses, and therefore the workshop has focused on both development and preservation in relation to the qualities and potentials of Nordhavnen: “I think anyone who visits Nordhavnen will see the possibilities of the site. To the north, you are confronted by the sea. It's just you and the open sea, which is kind of raw nature experience that you won't find anywhere else in Copenhagen. On the eastern side, you have a view of historical Copenhagen and Refshale Island. And if you venture out to this edge, the city draws so close that you could walk to the Opera, if you were able to walk on water. Being here, you realize that by simply making a series of new connections possible you could transform the dynamics of this place– and Copenhagen - completely,” says Cornubert as he reveals the workshop's idea of an artificial island as a green connecting point across the harbor entrance. “Think of it as a bridge. With one gesture you overcome the isolation and disconnection of Nordhavnen, Copenhagen can develop as a continuous ring around the inner harbor.” Another of the workshop's improvisations on the development of Nordhavnen is demonstrated in a series of colorful variations on the container: the container as a sculptural icon, the container as a architectural event, and the container as building blocks for temporary architecture and utopian full-size cities. “The containers are a ubiquitous part of the landscape of Nordhavnen, and have their own peculiar beauty. We were inspired to use them as a means to stage events, ” Cornubert explains. He points down towards the culture boat MS Halfmachine, which has been moored in Nordhavnen during this year's Metropolis Laboratory as part of the urban think-tank. “Halfmachine is an excellent example. The boat was originally designed for cable-laying at the bottom of the sea, but today this serves as a floating platform for performances and art events. Similarly, we have played with the idea of cultural events as driver of urban transformation, and used the containers as building blocks for architectural experiments. What if you transformed the enormous container yards of Nordhavnen into event-machines where you could create temporary structures and environments? Like testing an airplane design in a windtunnel, with a rapid staging of events and creative experiments you could test different architectural and urban possibilities, and the best performing structures could be realized in the long run,” Cornubert explains with his hands full of colorful container diagrams. “They should be seen as possibility fragments. The workshop's wasn’t meant to be another case for design. On the contrary, we have attempted to develop some techniques that would show how little you need in order to transform a place on the basis of the event as program, and how this knowledge can feedback into new urban development,” he clarifies, with the converted Halfmachine and the heaving traffic of Oresund as his backdrop. The temporary urban space already seems omnipresent precisely at Nordhavnen, where gigantic cruise liners dock from time to time as temporal and monumental apartment complexes in the harbor scenography. * FUNCTIONAL CHANGES based on the existing Nordhavnen have generally been a consistent aspect of the workshop's work on guerrilla strategies and open infrastructures. Above all, Cornubert and the other workshop participants have fallen in love with the area's largest building and the artificial nature area behind, which was established in connection with the pre-fabrication of tunnel elements for the Oresund connection. “It's a very different and exciting spatial experience, when you step into the enormous hall that you can see hulking over the Nordhavnen skyline. It must be one of the largest rooms in all of Scandinavia. You get the sensation of being in an industrial cathedral - even the light has a sublime quality. And although the place was built entirely according to its function, it expresses an uncanny beauty,” says Cornubert, who considers the factory space ideal for concerts, exhibitions, and conferences – or even refit for offices for start-ups. “It is crucial for the life of the city that old and new are allowed to coexist. In terms of building and architecture, what used to be great about L.A. is that we didn’t have the burden of history. Unfortunately history has recently been discovered there,” he stresses. Behind the grey hall, the artificial landscape starts. An open, green savannah-like surface with birds, frog habitats, and ruin-like concrete remnants from the tunnel construction where enormous fabricated elements were taken from the factory to the sea via a system of locks and canals: “The area behind the hall is remarkable. Its thick with vegetation; there are pools and canals alive with fish. You feel that you are in the middle of a wild landscape, although everything is completely man-made. But nature is busy claiming the area.If this kind of raw space was folded into Copenhagen a series of new urban nature experiences would surface, which would render a new set of layers, choices to what it means to be a Copenhagener. And if open spaces were re-claimed for the city at Nordhavnen, you might even be able to justify that Sydhavnen looks as it does,” says Christophe Cornubert, who stresses the importance of not just looking at the area as an independent district in connection with the development of Nordhavnen, but that you also focus on how the place can complement the city as a whole. *
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We have covered practically the entire scale of the industrial wilderness of Nordhavnen. The workshop's final future scenarios show a manipulated image of the Roskilde festival's temporary urban space superimposed on Nordhavnen's grass areas, and a long, public Rio de Janeiro style urban beach with cranes and concrete silos in the background. “The future of our environment will be shaped by pressing need for sustainable practices, but also the Darwinian competition between cities in this global society. Change is survival. Future urban space will reflect this. At Nordhavnen there is a chance for Copenhagen to reinvent itself,� Cornubert concludes from his workshop laboratory on Nordhavnen, which in the light of today's ideas competition deadline has moved one important step closer to the upcoming transformation process. It will still be a while before the sustainable urban spaces of the future are realized on this new focal point of Copenhagen, but even this fall, it will be possible to see a glimpse of the future transformations. The th rediscovery of the hidden Copenhagen takes off in earnest on October 9 , when the official competition visions are published in Warehouse 53, Nordhavnen. www.nordhavnen.dk www.pushla.com www.cph-metropolis.dk 2164 words
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