The Niels Bohr Building
THE NIELS BOHR BUILDING
Christensen & Co. Architects
ARCHITECTS
Christensen & Co. Architects
LEAD ARCHITECT
Vibeke Lydolph Lindblad, Christian Egedius Bendtsen
PHOTOGRAPHS
Adam Mørk
AREA
55000 m²
YEAR
2024
LOCATION
Copenhagen, Denmark
CATEGORY
Research Center, University
English description provided by the architects.
The Niels Bohr Building is an iconic home for the Faculty of Science at the University of Copenhagen. The building provides the university with highly specialized research facilities and community-building spaces.
Here, students, professors, and researchers come together in a non-hierarchical research community.
The architectonic concept of the Niels Bohr Building is inspired by the heritage of the well-known Danish scientist Niels Bohr and the international science scene he created in Copenhagen in the 1920s and 1930s.
The Niels Bohr Building was created to continue the spirit and work in the new state-of-the-art facilities.
Today, the science building houses different disciplines of science such as biology, chemistry, physics, geography, geology, physical education, computer science, and mathematics – but also modern multidisciplinary professions such as molecular biomedicine, nanotechnology, and e-science.
BUILT ON THE PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL CONNECTIONS
Given the wide range of disciplines housed within the Niels Bohr Building, it is designed to be a social center for all users.
The heart of the building is the Troposphere, an open atrium shaped like an infinity symbol, where researchers and students can meet in a vibrant and engaging environment created for innovative, interdisciplinary collaboration.
The building includes various social facilities to promote knowledge-sharing, enabling students from different disciplines to exchange and seek new knowledge from each other. Here, no one sits alone in ivory towers.
There is space to research and delve deeply into studies, but just as important, there is space to connect and be together.
This is visible in the large atrium, which belongs to everyone, in coffee spots designed for interactions between all users of the building, and in the six courtyards where there's room for breaks or for gatherings.
HIGHLY SPECIALIZED
The Niels Bohr Building is a state-of-the-art facility designed to support research and education across a broad range of natural science disciplines.
It accommodates specialized areas such as astrophysics, nanophysics, and quantum physics, necessitating a wide variety of laboratories, research facilities, study spaces, and auditoriums.
The building itself is divided into two structures connected by a skywalk over Jagtvej. The heavy traffic on this road generates consistent vibrations that could disrupt sensitive research equipment. To counter this, the basement was specially designed as a vibration-free "dead area," ensuring that experiments can be conducted without interference.
Within the building, there are numerous advanced facilities, including technical laboratories, ice labs, chemistry labs, synthesis labs, GMO labs, isotope labs, and robotics labs.
In addition to these, it features specialized spaces like wet rooms and clean rooms with varying classifications of 100,000, 10,000, 1,000, and 100 (ISO 8, 7, 6, and 5), designed to meet the stringent requirements of different research activities.
