Copenhagen’s last working shipyard has built its first public building, with Krohns Bådbyggeri applying the same timber slipway techniques once used to launch Royal Danish Navy ships to a 230-square-metre floating Douglas fir community space designed by Arcgency and MAST at the artificial island of Christiansholm.
That is according to Mads Møller, founder of Copenhagen studio Arcgency, who revealed that the project was designed to belong to the water. Bedding 1 is the first of three floating timber buildings planned for the canal-side development locally known as Papirøen, or Paper Island, with two further structures, a network of piers and a floating garden to follow under Cobe’s masterplan.
Anchored in the Arsenalgraven canal where the Royal Danish Naval Shipyard once stood, Bedding 1’s angular Douglas fir frame echoes the timber slipways once used to launch new ships from the site. Wood Central understands that Krohns Bådbyggeri remains the last active shipyard in central Copenhagen, carrying the construction work for Bedding 1 using techniques drawn from the same Danish shipbuilding tradition.
“Bedding 1 was conceived as something that belongs to the water,” Møller said.
Organised across two storeys totalling 230 square metres, the upper deck is level with the quayside and houses a single flexible community space designed to host events and gatherings. A metal staircase from the quay descends to the lower level, where two apartments provide accommodation for guests of the island’s residents and open onto a covered timber terrace with mooring for boats and kayaks.
Framing the long sides of the structure, angular Douglas fir supports recall the slipway scaffolding historically used to ease ships into the water, with the cabin-like building pulled back behind them and clad in horizontal Douglas fir planks for privacy. White walls and pale timber carpentry fill the interior, with large windows framing views of the surrounding canal and the Paper Island development beyond.
Cobe developed the masterplan for the Paper Island redevelopment, with Bedding 1 anchoring a wider canal-side scheme that will eventually include two further floating buildings, a network of piers and a floating garden. The Christiansholm work follows a wider Copenhagen push into timber neighbourhoods, with the Danish capital advancing all-timber housing and public space schemes as part of a citywide low-carbon construction agenda.
It comes as MAST’s floating residential masterplan for a disused Rotterdam dock advances through the Dutch planning system, with the Danish studio targeting 100 cross-laminated timber homes in the Spoorweghaven basin, which would become Europe’s largest floating housing district. The Copenhagen and Rotterdam projects mark a growing northern European turn toward timber as the material of choice for canal-side civic and residential architecture.
