Ørestad Part 2

Continued from part 1

The first thing you notice when you arrive at Ørestad City--by bike, at least--is that it's difficult to tell that you've arrived.  After entering the site from the west I found myself in an ambiguous space surrounded by parking lots, a few department stores, and the rear ends of apartment buildings.  In the hour I spent criss-crossing the site, I never found the "100% corner."  I don't think there is one.  Not yet at least.

What I did find were some classic urban design blunders.

The elevated Metro line slices through the center of Ørestad from north to south, creating a ribbon of these shadowed interzones through the development.  While they've been spruced up with landscaping and water features, they still feel like smaller versions of the Alaska Way Viaduct: okay during the day, perhaps, but spooky at night and lacking in street life.  I'm not going to blame the designers of Ørestad for creating the problem.  I doubt the planning of the Metro was under their control.  But it is unfortunate that the physical center of this town is a series of underpasses.

Just up the street I found a much less forgivable condition.  Get a load of this facade.

There is no excuse for such an antisocial frontage in a dense, urban area--especially on a main drag.  In a city like Copenhagen this comes across as surprisingly inept.  I wonder how the development regulations missed it.  By the way, notice that utility cabinet.  After only a few years in this unwatched space it stands dented and vandalized.

Under the train tracks, on the east side of Ørestad City, we have the only collection of leased street-level commercial space I found during my visit.

You feel like you're about 2 feet tall while walking along this streetwall, thanks to that cladding that extends, unvaryingly, from the top of the entranceways to something like 50' up.  That's beyond your peripheral vision when you're looking straight ahead, so you get the sense that it continues up forever.  The outdoor seating is right there in the walkway, no awning, alcove, or ropes to give you some psychological separation from the public way.  Compare this to an image I took of the streetwall along the main drag of Greenville, SC (my sweetie's home town).  Where would you choose to sit to drink your cup of coffee?

There are things I liked about Ørestad.  All the residents are within walking distance of a Metro stop.

Between that and the long term plan for the town, which calls for a mix of shopping, employment, and housing, the vehicle miles traveled for Ørestad residents (and, consequently, their carbon emissions) will probably be low.  I couldn't read the Danish-language promotional materials, but I got the impression that the area uses advanced wastewater treatment techniques.  I'm sure the buildings are built to high environmental standards.  And then there's that wind turbine we saw in the previous post.

I liked the look of the buildings, generally.  They were fresh without any Gehry-like absurdity.

In other positive impressions, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the central green.  It's a large space, surrounded by apartment blocks.  Here's a model of it that I spotted at Denmark's exhibit at the Venice Biennale, so you can get a sense of the scale.  North is toward the upper left.

 And here's a photo from the ground level.

I was prepared to dismiss it as Radiant City folly; Corbusier's "towers in a park" scheme was the inspiration for some of the most tragic and alienating urban planning of the 20th century.  Maybe it was because the sun was shining that day, or maybe it's because this area is new and entropy hasn't set in, but I thought the grassy area was quite pleasant.  There were families using the playgrounds.  Mounds--like you see on the left of the above photo--divided up the space into more manageable pieces, so you never felt overwhelmed. If I had to improve it, I would only add commerce to the center, maybe some food vendors, to give people a reason to visit and to create a hub for people watching.

...

Ørestad is struggling.  Many of the commercial spaces are empty and there aren't many people walking around.  That's especially disappointed considering how much I want places like this to succeed.  On paper it's doing the big things right.  It's got the density.  It's oriented around transit.  It mixes uses.  This is what we must do as a society if we're going to tame climate change and rebuild our cities.  Maybe Ørestad's slump will pass in time.  Maybe more residents will trickle in, and businesses will follow, and you'll have more people on the street than I saw.  But even if it fills up completely, you've got irreversible damage at the street level.  It's just not a pleasant place to walk around.

For example, look at the ground floor of the building to the right.  How could a sucking void like this have been constructed here?  Street-level garages like this one are banned along Eastlake Ave, a comparable street in my old neighborhood in Seattle.  Seattle's pretty progressive when it comes to urbanism, but I wouldn't expect it to outperform Copenhagen.  And yet here we are. 

I think part of the problem has to do with the way Ørestad was created.  A handful of architectural firms were given design control over individual portions of the development.  They each had a blank slate.  In that vacuum, with no context to draw upon, they all built monuments.  Nobody built the ordinary buildings that form the fabric of a city.  Don't get me wrong, I like monuments when appropriately spaced.  But a town that's entirely monuments is like a party guest who begins every sentence with the word "I."

The experience of visiting Ørestad got me thinking about a book I read recently, The Timeless Way of Building.  In it, author Christopher Alexander encourages the architecture and urban design communities to seek common languages of design, or "pattern languages."  Users of a pattern language are free to innovate within commonly understood limits.  For example, some communities might reach a consensus that the right height of its buildings is four stories, but that the colors should be up to the owner.  Like the syntax of a spoken language, a pattern language might also mandate that some classes of design features must be paired with others; buildings must have sidewalks or pedestrian pathways, for example. 

In Ørestad can you see what happens when builders lack a shared language of design.  Instead of a city you get a collection of buildings.  I don't know all of Ørestad's backstory, or who did what job.  But I hope as the city continues to develop the area it attends to this problem. Short of a consensus among architects about what constitutes good urbanism, we need someone overseeing these projects whose job it is enforce some basic constraints.