The Rock
The Rock will be the next building in the new, dense city district 'Design City' near the waterfront of Kolding. Since a former juice station abandoned the site in 1970, it has remained undeveloped and evolved into a green self-grown plot in the heart of the city.
How to combine the existing nature of the site with a new dense building structure? How to carry over the fragile ecologic infrastructures already present and how to create a healthy urban environment? The Rock strives to do all these through simple design solutions. As the name implies, the rock, aspires to be stable and robust, yet natural and living.
The roof is the key to unlocking these ideas. A green landscape reintroduces the former ecosystem on top of the building. The roof landscape is augmented with solar cells to contribute to the energy need. To improve the efficiency of the solar panels, and to expose the natural green to the urban spaces, the roof is sloped towards south. This furthermore allows each storey to obtain a terrace in the lush roof landscape, with views over the adjacent Design Square.
The result is an expressive shape that finds equilibrium between the massive scale of the office structure and the human scale towards the adjacent urban spaces. This architectural strategy also creates a variation in the façade geometries so the buildings appearance and scale is differentiated on each side.
A mesh of windows and aluminum façade panels in different sizes are laid out as a pattern of squares which blurs the sense of storey’s and scale and gives the building a robust monolithic appearance. The different sizes of façade panels create variation in the façade surface, making each part of the building unique, like crevices in a cliff side.
