By Duncan Geere, Wired U.K.
Danish architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group has unveiled a design for a waste-to-energy plant that features an artificial ski slope on the roof.
The building, which is named Amagerforbraending, was the unanimous winner of an international competition to replace the 40-year-old plant that currently exists on the site. It'll
occupy 95,000 square meters, 31,000 square meters of which will become ski slope, totaling 1,500 meters of green, blue and black-diamond ski runs.
The center of the building houses a massive smokestack, which lifts run alongside to ferry skiers up to the top. The inhabitants of those lifts can see inside the plant while they ascend. The smokestack belches a 30-meter-wide smoke ring into the sky every time a tonne of CO2 is released, so that locals are able to get "a gentle reminder of the impact of consumption".
Even better, at night those smoke rings will be illuminated by heat-tracking lasers, which will project a pie-chart onto the smoke that displays a quota of fossil-fuel CO2.
The proposal reads: "Most of the recently built power plants are merely functional boxes wrapped in an expensive gift paper. We want to do more than just create a beautiful skin around the factory. We want to add functionality!"
It continues: "Instead of considering Amagerforbraending as an isolated object, we mobilise the architecture and intensify the relationship between the building and the city, expanding the existing activities in the area by turning the roof of the new Amegergorbraending into a ski slope for the citizens of Copenhagen."
There's plenty of lovely shots of the building in the full proposal, and there's also a gallery of them here. If you want, you can even explore the proposed building in Google Earth.
Image: Bjarke Ingels Group
Source: Wired.co.uk
