Orestadt Design Competition

On returning from our trip to Finalnad and Denmark, we embarked upon a two week design competition for the design of a new spiritual and public gathering centre. Our brief was based upon a live compettion for the new urban development of Orestatd, located just outside Copenhagen city centre. The particularity of the site is its location on the edge between dense urban development and vast nature.

My design proposal was predicated upon the philosopher Heidegger's argument that modern humanity has lost the ‘nearness and shelter’ of Being; we are no longer at home in the world as primitive man was; truth is no longer revealed; thought is separated from Being and only a favoured few have any hope of recapturing oneness with Being. In response to this condition, the visitor's journey through my scheme proposal leads them from abstact and urban representations of nature to a release into a vast horizon and a spiritual reconnection with our natural environment.