The Harbor City

The residential apartment complex “The Iceberg” in Aarhus, Denmark designed by JDS Architects, Cebra, SeARCH and Louis Paillard has won the Mipim award for “Best Residential Project”. The award ceremony was held in March, in the main auditorium of the Palais des Festivals in Cannes. The MIPIM Awards did also attract a record number of entries with 175 projects from 46 countries competing. The project was the winner of the competition for the design of a residential complex in 2008. It provides an enormous opportunity for Aarhus, the second largest city of Denmark, to develop in a socially sustainable way by renovating its old, out-of-use container terminal. The area is meant to become a living city quarter and achieve a proper level of urban density, comprised of a multitude of cultural and social activities, generous amounts of workplaces, and of course, a highly mixed and diverse array of housing types.

The Iceberg has been designed in a way that provides it natural lighting and waterfront views into as many apartments as possible. The resulting open and sculptural block closely resembles an iceberg. The Iceberg Project seeks to locate itself within the goals of the overall city development. A third of the project’s 200 apartments will be set aside as affordable rental housing, aimed at integrating a diverse social profile into the new neighborhood development.

The project’s main obstacle is the density set up for the development, the desired square meters are in conflict with the specified site height restrictions and the overall intentions of providing ocean views along with good daylight conditions. The Iceberg negotiates this problematic, by remaining far below the maximum heights at points and emerging above the dotted line at other moments.

“Peaks” and “canyons” form; eliciting the project’s iconic strength while ensuring that all flats will be supplied with a generous amount of natural lighting and waterfront views.

With the Iceberg we get unique housing qualities as well as a city architectural expression of the highest quality.

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Materials provided by JDS Architects