A similarly stepped building is planned-and was recently approved for construction by the local municipality-for Rødovre, a suburb of Copenhagen. Facing fewer site restrictions in terms of lot size and adjacent buildings than OMA's tower, Sky Village-as the mixed-use building is being called-steps out in more than one direction. Designed by Rotterdam-based MVRDV and its Danish codesigners, ADEPT, the 380-foot-tall "stacked neighborhood" features a combination of apartments, offices, retail, and parking.

 

The basic design starts with a square grid of 36 units, or pixels, each two stories tall and measuring 251⁄2 feet wide by 251⁄2 feet long, a dimension arrived at for its flexibility for use as a suitable parking grid, housing unit, and office type. The four central pixels make up the core. Surrounding pixels are removed and stacked on top of each other in various configurations, though no single floor comprises all 36 pixels. The building gets "fattest" about a third of the way up, where floors contain up to 26 pixels. "We're very fond of Legos and use them in the office for conceptual designs," says Anders Peter Galsgaard, one of the Copenhagen-based engineers. "We try to build the same way."

Galsgaard also likens the structure to a Christmas tree, with a very stiff base, in this case consisting of two levels of underground parking, and a main trunk, the cast-in-place concrete core made up of elevators, stairs, and shafts. The pixels, which have a column at each of the corners and diagonal bracing on two sides, will hang from the core from steel trusses rather than cantilever in the traditional sense. According to Galsgaard, "Hanging the pixels this way creates a lot of compression in the core, so even under very high wind loads there is very little tension, which allows us to use steel more efficiently."

The shape of the 380-foot-tall volume-described by the engineers as "not exactly optimal in terms of aerodynamics, but not bad either"-was derived from a variety of considerations. Wind forces in Denmark are mainly from the west, and are also much stronger than those from the east. By hanging more units facing west, they are essentially leaning into the wind, thus optimizing the structural design.

	1. Underground parking 2. Plaza 3. Core 4. Pixel units