Amager Resource Centre review – green energy goes off-piste

If you look out from the summit of Copenhagen’s new-made alp, you see a landscape of artifice – wind turbines, the bridge to Sweden, the sea canalised into old docks and harbours, the city itself, all set against a level horizon with which the thing on which you are standing is, at 85 metres high, in notable contrast. Around is ex-industry awaiting regeneration. Diggers are clawing at the bulky wreck of a nearby decommissioned waste-to-energy power station, its replacement being housed inside the aforesaid aluminium-clad and concrete-framed alp.

Below you a slice of replica Swiss meadow swoops steeply down, then veers left and out of sight. Its grass grows through a green plastic mesh, the brush-like finish of which gives the same coefficient of friction as snow. Which means you can ski down it, even when it’s verdant. Knobbly concrete tracks, for people who like running up and down mountains, wind through vegetation, with flues and extracts popping up here and there. An external climbing wall rises the full height of the main structure. A glass-walled lift, for those who like to take the easier route to the top, offers glimpses of mighty machines inside.

This is the long-awaited £485m Amager Resource Centre (ARC) by the architects Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG. It’s a work that revels in its own contrivance, a condensation and celebration of the surrounding artifice, a creation of what might be called hypernature. It is at once an energy facility, converting refuse into electricity, and a ski slope. It is arresting and striking. It’s an emblem of a culture of why-not and because-you-can that currently pops up in a number of modern cities: twisting towers in Toronto by the Chinese practice MAD; the Dubai palm-islands and sail-shaped hotels that are by now almost historic.

ARC has been a signature dish of Bjarke Ingels, ever since BIG won the project in a competition in 2010, its virtual image consumable online, in publications, in TED talks. It was, said Architectural Digest, one of the most anticipated buildings of 2018. It is not entirely finished even now, but it did start generating power last year and it was officially opened to the public last week.

Over the same period Ingels, now aged 45, has risen from noisy upstart to global brand, presiding over an empire of about 550 employees in offices in Copenhagen, New York, London and Barcelona. He is designing, in collaboration with Thomas Heatherwick, headquarters for Google in both London and Silicon Valley. He operates with a kind of genius in the intersection between architecture and PR, interviewed times without number, offering memorable morsels to the maw of social media. He does audacity. He does wit. He does projects-with-a-twist – a habitable warped pyramid on Manhattan, for example. They are multistorey haikus, likes-factories, machines for generating “aha” moments in their viewers, journalistic readymades.

He learned the power of shock from his former boss, Rem Koolhaas, without the scent of intellectual and psychological complication that major clients sometimes find off-putting about the latter. He presents himself as a seer, intoning about the future he means to shape, about the “world-changing power of form-giving”, but a cheeky one.

In Formgiving, an exhibition on BIG at the Danish Architecture Centre, you are greeted on the stairs by a life-size talking image of the spiky-haired Ingels, who somewhat portentously situates BIG’s work in the context of both the big bang and the singularity that will end the universe. But the pomp is then knowingly deflated by a room full of models created by AFOL (Adult Fans of Lego), who have ingeniously replicated BIG’s buildings with the renowned child’s brick.

He is a sort of anti-Dane, an exception to the Scandinavian rule of not talking yourself up, his rambunctious architectural style the opposite of the careful tending of timber and daylight that characterised Danish modernism. At the same time he has latterly acquired an attraction to Danish icons – in 2017 he completed a building for Lego that looked like giant Lego, and he has recently finished a new home for the world-famous restaurant Noma. His Copenhagen office is in an old factory that used to make bottle tops for Carlsberg. I am told that the best thing he did for his standing in his homeland was to start living in New York: it turned him from a troublesome boat-rocker to a treasured export.

ARC is bidding to be another icon, a post-industrial Little Mermaid, its form even having something of her statue’s upward twist from kneeling to vertical. Probably the best power-station-cum-ski-slope in the world, you might say. There’s every reason to think it will succeed. It’s an appealing idea realised with a pithy composition, a wedge clad in aluminium boxes that look like shiny giant bricks, surmounted by a tall grey cylinder of a chimney. This does not, as Ingels used to promise it would, blow smoke rings into the air – it turns out that this would require a quantity of vapour at odds with the plant’s environmental aspirations – but it is still a memorable object.

The power station is also rooted in a kind of logic. The client’s ambition, at the time of the design competition, was to make the plant accessible to the public, which could easily have meant a somewhat generic rooftop garden. BIG wanted to create a place to which people would keep returning. They noticed other activities that had grown up in the half-abandoned surroundings; go-karting, a park for cable-towed water-skiers. They noted that Danes will travel a long way to ski.

They also noted that the processes of the plant, from trucks delivering waste, to the turbines, to the treatment of gases, require spaces that ascend from low to high, which can therefore be arranged under a slope. They then developed these concepts into the design of a building, with the help of a few more tactical decisions – the choice of cladding, for example, is to unify what is a disparate concrete construction underneath, sometimes solid and sometimes open. And so, with a kind of theatrical functionalism, a creative algebra of A+B+C = Z, they came up with the solution now on the Copenhagen skyline.

The quibble with BIG is that they can be bit flashy and a bit trashy, that a slick gimmick is not enough to sustain the sometimes rather large zones of city life that they now create, that the charm of the big idea is not followed through into the detail. There’s a rough-and-ready feel to ARC, plus the impression that, with its delayed openings, its realisation was less smooth than its conception. Then again, this is a work well matched to its architects’ strengths.

Nicety is not really the thing in this robust location; a compelling idea is. Plus a dollop of chutzpah. Subject to caveats on questions that will only become clear in use – that it really works well as both ski slope and power station – this is one project that lives up to the hype.