The gatehouse, monument by Forum
Collage of model cast and site photograph
The gatehouse that inhibit the gap between two townhouses in the dense cityscape, exists both for the residents moving in and out of their courtyard, and for the workers moving up and down the tunnel infrastructure. The small artefact is monumental as being the uppermost part of a large construction that reaches deep beneath the tangible layer of the city. It is one of the infrastructure’s technical buildings that preserves the void, the pause in the city between these two townhouses.
THE NEW ARCHITECTURAL MONUMENT
Seven monuments along one of the new cloudburst flooding tunnels that run beneath the city of Copenhagen.
As the consequences of climate change increases, the efforts of hiding away the growing body of infrastructure needed to keep our cities safe seems to intensify. This dichotomy creates a large void between our way of living, and the consequences it has on our surroundings.
The project examines the relation between the city and its infrastructural layer. Is it relevant to mend the gap between life in our cultural protected sphere and the mechanisms that facilitate it - should these mechanisms also have a presence in the cultural layer of our city, rather than being covered up and hidden away under sewage caps.
The architectural monument, which relevance almost been lost and outdated might here see a new meaning.
Marking the locations for shafts leading down flood water to the tunnels, these monuments create a presence of the new infrastructure - crucial for the future mechanism of the city but without representation in the present cultural cityscape.
As a monument, they symbolize an uncertain future that we face as a collective population. As part of an infrastructure, they are technical constructions. As part of the urban fabric, they also meet their individual context with a specific function, giving a new space and thoughfulness back to the life in the cities.