"There have been something like 67 attempts to build on this site since 1965," says Ellen van Loon, the OMA partner who led the design of BLOX, a 290,000-square-foot, extremely mixed-use, thoroughly modern glass building that opened this month on the harbor in Copenhagen's historic center.
The difficulty lay in the heavily trafficked ring road that cuts through the site. OMA's scheme goes under and over the expressway, with five stories aboveground and five stories below, including four levels of fully automated parking. “Not every developer is willing to pay the extra money it takes to do that, but this client wants to invest in the public realm,” says van Loon.
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