The Best House In The World Is Danish

09 Nov 2011

This year the world´s best residential house has been awarded to Copenhagen. For the second time in three years, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels has won the World Architecture Festival´s Housing Award for ‘8 House’ in the Copenhagen district of Ørestad.

The jury said: 'The 8 House is an exemplar project. It combines retail, commercial row houses and apartments in untraditional ways while its elevated street provides a new level of social engagement.'

‘8 House’ was built in 2010 and consists of 476 apartments, penthouses and small townhouses with gardens. The building is 60,000 m2 and has a number of special features including:
I500 m2 of communal facilities designed to give residents the possibility of getting together for social activities. More than one kilometre of internal and external pathways allow people to walk all the way round the building or enabling people to bike all the way from the ground floor to the top. And two sloping green roofs totalling 1,700 m2 help reduce the urban heat island effect as well as provide the visual identity to the project.

‘8 House’ has already won various prizes and was recently named as one of the most important buildings in the last decade by The Huffington Post.
Danish architect Bjarke Ingels also won the World Architecture Festival´s Housing Award in 2008 for his building ‘The Mountain’. His studio BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) is today considered one of the leading companies in the field of innovative contemporary architecture with numerous architecture awards from all over the world to its name.