Our Urban Living Room

The young Danish firm Cobe is already one of Copenhagen’s established architects and urban planners, who have had a significant impact on the city, not least with their neighborhood developments and striking square designs. From January 18 to April 29, 2020, the Aedes Architecture Forum will be hosting an exhibition dedicated to the Copenhagen-based architecture firm.

Architectural firms generally start with smaller commissions and, if they are successful, follow a steady growth path in terms of the size of the commissions and the number of employees. The Danish office “Cobe” is one of the exceptions, those that become prominent in one fell swoop with a large commission. Almost, anyway. Dan Stubbergaard founded Cobe in 2005 together with Vanessa Miriam Carlow; and the office name was formed from the first letters of the two architects’ home cities, Copenhagen and Berlin – which immediately brings to mind the post-war artists’ group Cobra, still popular in Denmark, whose name was derived from the three city names in English spelling, Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam.

Stubbergaard had already worked at MVRDV during his studies at the Danish Academy of Fine Arts and after graduating as an architect together with Bjarke Ingels in the “Plot” office before founding his own office four years later. He began by working on the Danish pavilion at the 2006 Architecture Biennale, which showcased a joint Danish-Chinese project and was awarded the Golden Lion, but did not yet bring the office to the attention of the public.

This happened two years later, when Cobe won several competitions in Copenhagen. The most important one – and the one that determined his future work – was the international competition for the Nordhavn urban development project. It was about nothing less than planning an urban quarter for 40,000 inhabitants – not only on the existing site of the Danish capital’s northern harbor, which was still in full operation at the time and was to be relocated piece by piece, but also on newly reclaimed land in the open sea.

You can read the full portrait of Cobe and an article about one of their projects – a charging station for electric cars – in B2: Verfertigung oder die neue Freude am Seriellen.

Exhibition at the Aedes Architecture Forum

Aedes Architecture Forum Berlin
Cobe, Copenhagen
Our Urban Living Room
January 18 – April 29, 2020

Further information can be found here.