AceNik's Portal

Just like inner-city drug kingpins and high-seas pirates, architects also often find themselves eyeball to eyeball in deadly cutthroat fights. This time around, the Broken Bottle award goes to two firms trying to revamp the mouth of Copenhagen’s harbor with a crazy bridge-building. One team wants to make two towers with a pedestrian walkway between them, while the other designed a building that swoops clear across the harbor mouth, making bridge and tower one and the same. Here’s more evidence for your judgment in this death duel:

Steve Holl’s two-towers design met with serious criticism after it was chosen as the original winner of the “LM” harbor design. This spawned the response by 3XN. But before counting Holl out, you have to give the team props for coming up with some neat tech features. The buildings will have a solar-screen veil of photovoltaics, which, combined with the wind turbines that line the top of the 65-meter-high pedestrian bridge, would provide electricity for all the public spaces in the whole facility. Not bad.
The 3XN design, basically a rebuttal to Holl, has a proposal filled with yawn-inducing jargon like “complex,” “coherent,” “diverse,” “distinctive” and “flexible”, but when it comes down to it, the thing is just plain crazy. In a good way. The pedestrian bridge is still there, but it is hidden as part of the two support structures, a tall building and a short building. No word on the greenness of this particular build, but my guess is, this being Denmark and all, the thing is super green like Holl’s.

There you have it, a Danish architectural bitchfight. Can’t you just smell the rage?  [Design Boom - 3XN and Design Boom - Holl]