The Danish Agency for Culture's competition asked for a national archive of water: flood records, tide tables, harbour surveys and the drawings of the country's dykes and sluices, gathered over three centuries. The archive has to keep paper and film stable for generations, and it has to stand on the harbour it records. Our entry, prepared in 2026, proposes 14 800 m² on a site of 12 000 m².
Half sunk
The entry proposes a single concrete monolith, half sunk into the harbour. The lower half, below the waterline, would hold the stacks: dark, cool and stable, with the harbour water around them acting as a thermal mass. The upper half would hold the reading room, the public hall and the staff floors. Holm Bridge & Shell developed the structure as a watertight concrete box held down by the weight of its own walls, sitting in the harbour bed like a caisson rather than standing on piles.
Section A–A (S-301) shows the waterline cutting the building in two. Like the rest of the drawing set, it is withheld until the jury reports.
Granite and bronze
The concrete would be cast with granite aggregate from the harbour dredging, so the archive is made partly of the ground it stands on. Ground and polished inside, the walls would show the stone. Left as cast outside, they would weather with the quay.
Fig. 03Granite aggregate from the harbour dredging.Visualisation: Monolith Studio
Bronze would be used for doors, rails and a row of flood marks set into the wall of the public hall, one for each recorded high water, each at its true height. Visitors would walk past the oldest floods on their way up to the reading room.
The slot
The monolith has one opening: a 60 m slot at the reading-room level, facing the water. From inside, readers would see the harbour at the height of the records in front of them. From outside, on a winter evening, it would be the only lit line along the quay.
Fig. 02One opening: a 60 m slot at the reading-room level.Visualisation: Monolith Studio
Kader Acoustics worked with us on the reading room, one long space under a heavy roof, quiet enough to hear the water against the wall below. Field Office Landscape proposed a granite quay edge that floods and drains with the tide.
We modelled three centuries of water levels before we modelled a single room. The section is set by the floods the archive records.
Kwame Mensah, computational designer
Awaiting the jury
The jury has not yet reported. Until it does, the entry exists as a set of boards, a model and a drawing set we cannot yet show. If the entry is chosen, the next step would be a year of testing the concrete mix with the dredged granite, ending with a full-size panel cast on the quay.
Fig. 01Competition visualisation: the monolith from the harbour.Visualisation: Monolith Studio
Fig. 04Visualisation: winter evening.Visualisation: Monolith Studio
Fig. 05Visualisation from Krøyers Plads.Visualisation: Monolith Studio
Competition · under embargo
Drawings withheld until jury results — 21 days
The competition rules keep the entry anonymous until the jury reports. The plans, sections and elevations go up here the day the results are published.
