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    • 10 December 2015

      Designing Copenhagen's "Future Roofs" With Solar Cells

      Henning Larsen has collaborated with Gaia Solar to win the competition for Copenhagen’s future roofs. The winning strategy integrates solar cells into the city’s tile roofs in an architectonic and appealing way.

    • Copenhagen’s future “Climate Roof”, as the strategy has been named, does not just effectively manage environmental and climate related problems such as scarcity of resources, water accumulation and limitation of floods and CO2 emissions. The roof also fits well into the townscape in a natural and complementary way.

      The “Climate Roof” is developed in response to an architectural competition organized by Kuben Management in association with Solar City Denmark.  The purpose of the competition was to develop a scalable solution to integrate solar cells onto apartment buildings that are undergoing roof renovations. In its first application, the winning proposal will be implemented in the cooperative housing association A/B Landsdommergården.

      Henning Larsen Architects’ proposal therefore works with one or more panels of solar cells that are integrated into the existing geometry of the roof. The panels are produced in measurements and colors that relate to standard red roof tiles, and are assembled with an overlap in order to avoid the typical flat solar cell geometry. Moreover, the small angling of the panels’ surface reduces glare for the surrounding facades.

      Henning Larsen Architects sees a larger potential in the strategy, which could easily be adapted to other renovation projects and thereby increase value for homeowners and the rest of the city. For this reason, Henning Larsen Architects’ proposal specifically addresses a turnkey contract project for the Landsdommergården, but with an eye to delivering the solution as a more general strategy for the Municipality of Copenhagen’s use of the “Climate Roof”.

      The competition is supported by Realdania and the Municipality of Copenhagen’s urban renewal funds. Morten Kabell (EL), Mayor of Technical and Environmental Affairs of Copenhagen declared after the announcement of the result:

      “Copenhagen should be the world’s first CO2-neutral capital in 2015. Regarding this, solar energy also plays a major role. Now we are ready with a solution that fits well into the red tile roofs that we have so many of in Copenhagen.

      The announcement of the result took place at an event at the Danish Architecture Center.