The , m residence includes units of public housing to be built for Billund Housing Association, elderly care homes for Billund Municipality, and rental apartments for development group Kirkbi. The building forms a gentle curve along the corner streets of Vejlevej and Hans Jensens Vej, rises to the height of the building on the opposite street, while the corner ends are pressed down to meet the scale of the neighboring buildings.
The building’s structure is designed as a stack of two volumes, or rectangle ‘blocks’ two per floor with each pair rotated degrees from the floor below. On the interior, each individual volume is expressed as a rectangular wood-clad truss on the long edges, and as a floor-to-ceiling glass facade on the shorter sides. The continual rotation of each floor creates a sky-lit, central atrium at the heart of the building that provides direct views into classrooms and research spaces from all levels.
The roofscape is one of the most important components that shapes the spirit of the Cloud Valley. It allows for an abundance of nature to co-exist with the office programs, thus preserving the wild landscape experience that’s traditionally difficult to access within the city limits. The green roof also embodies an ecological cohesive coexistence between human, nature, climate, and technology. To display the ultimate gesture of nature meeting technology, the green roof carpet shaping the valley and the mountain turns into the largest digital display in China at night.
A continuous public path stretches from street level to the penthouses and allows people to bike all the way from the ground floor to the top, moving alongside townhouses with gardens, winding through the urban perimeter block. Two sloping green roofs totaling , m are strategically placed to reduce the urban heat island effect as well as providing the visual identity to the project and tying it back to the adjacent farmlands towards the south.
The first stages of project development at BIG always involve a careful study of the site and the programmatic requirements. In the case of the Escher Tower, the site was an orthogonal intersection of an east-west highway and a north-south subway line, populated by a department store and a medical business. The program was identical hotel rooms with the only interesting activities to be placed in a single floor at the ground.