COBE

About – COBE is an internationally operating office based in Copenhagen and Berlin and founded in 2005 by the two principal architects Dan Stubbergaard and Vanessa Miriam Carlow. Since the beginning COBE has gained a reputation as an innovative company, by winning a number of high profile projects and prizes. Currently COBE is realizing major projects, such as the Nørreport Train Station in the centre of Copenhagen, The ROCKmagnet, Denmark’s museum of rock music in Roskilde, consulting the City of Berlin for the IBA 2020, and consulting the development of Nordhavnen, Scandinavia’s biggest metropolis development project. In 2006 COBE received the Golden Lion of the 10th Architectural Biennale in Venice for Magic Mountains as part of the Danish Pavilion.

Profile – COBE wants to contribute towards building more decent, equitable, beautiful and sustainable cities. COBE seeks to develop specific, innovative solutions for each assignment, with competences that include the physical realization of architecture, strategic urban planning, urban and landscape design, and research. COBE’s designs strive for the best combination of dense urban milieus, high-quality open spaces, and integrated sustainability. In COBE’s work sustainability is a built-in opportunity, and a design tool to develop holistic projects. COBE is convinced that teamwork, trans-disciplinary collaboration, the earliest involvement of clients and stakeholders in the design process, and participatory planning are essential for innovative projects. COBE’s approach to design, architecture and planning is to be visionary in the ambition, and responsible and sympathetic in the result.

Approach – If we want to build sustainable cities, we need to integrate the notion of space as a scarce resource into our work! There are still millions of undiscovered possibilities how – on the scale of architecture, urban and landscape design. Our ambition is to carefully consider the use of land - we will conciliate users and uses that seem mutually exclusive, we will densify our cities and therefore amplify their beauty and make it accessible for even more people, we will hybridize functions in one place and therefore invent building types and spatial configurations that are breathtaking, we will retrofit and therefore proudly not leave a footprint, we will flexibilize our environment – not in the sense of making it more generic, on the contrary – we will make it so special that our successors will want to use it.