area 105 | artificial landscape

architect: BIG

location: Hafjell, Norway

How do you create a hotel and apartment house in the mountains that offers the same standards of accessibility, circulation and logistics as a modern hotelThe starting point of the project is a traditional hotel block. The building is manipulated and the apartments are stretched down over the mountain side, creating a structure that makes use of interior circulation of the hotel. All apartments are ensured sunshine and a view and the hotel staff has the possibility to move through the built-up area without having to move from building to building. By stretching the hotel block towards the mountain side, terraces spring up on the south-west side of the hotel’s façade. The corner of the building towards the new gondola lift is pressed down towards the ground creating a slope that can be used by hotel guests when heading for Hafjell Ski Resort in the morning. At the same time a connection is created from the terraces and the upper rooms of the hotel to the ski run. The entire hotel and apartment complex is connected by the slope that originates from the roof of the hotel and continues down through the building.

BIG is a Copenhagen based group of more than 50 architects, designers and thinkers operating within the fields of architecture, urbanism, research and development. BIG has created a reputation for completing buildings that are programmatically and technically innovative as they are cost and resource conscious. In our architectural production we demonstrate a high sensitivity to the particular demands of contexts and mixed use programs. By practicing what Bjarke Ingels likes to describe as ’programmatic alchemy’, BIG often mixes conventional ingredients such as living, leisure, working, parking and shopping into new forms of symbiotic architecture. The Mountain Dwellings which was completed in summer 2008, counts as one of the first realized examples of this practice. The project has been awarded several times, most recently as the “Best Nordic Architecture” by Forum Aid and as best Housing at World Architecture Festival in Barcelona. BIG House, a 62,000 sqm mixed-use project in one continuous loop of public space is expected to be completed in 2010. The 5,000 sqm Danish Maritime Museum respects its Unesco setting in Helsingør to create an invisible icon. BIG recently opened their first Danish solo exhibition: “Yes Is More” at the Danish Architecture Center in Copenhagen and has also won the competition of representing Denmark at the World Expo Exhibition in Shanghai, in 2010. These projects clearly represent BIG’s ongoing effort to free architectural imagination from habitual thinking and standard typologies in order to deal with the constantly evolving challenges of contemporary life.