Just a short ride from Copenhagen City Hall Square, Amager Nature Park, a 35 km2 landscape park offers protected nature, open spaces, and an unhindered stretch of coastline. Completed over the past year, ADEPT (buildings) and LYTT Architecture (landscape) have re-thought the park’s identity, including the completion of a series of visitor points that stages the overall experience of landscape, water, and biodiversity. 

Concentrated in a series of easily accessible visitor points, a new design strategy makes Nature Park Amager - from the plains in the north to the south coast of Amager – more appealing to its users. With nature as it’s central focal point, the unique landscape habitat is reactivated through a homogeneous architectural vocabulary emphasizing the park’s qualities, outdoor life, and social activities.

The design enhances the park’s DNA in a clear landscape narrative and an easily recognizable yet subtle architectural language. The project elements draw upon existing landscape qualities by adding a layer of experiences in a new framework for more diverse and inviting nature activities. One of the main design goals is to ensure that experience and protection supplement each other, so that the untouched nature remains intact when existing and new users engage themselves in the visitor experience.

The completed visitor points are strategically located throughout the park to highlight the park’s unique character, and to underline certain elements, views, or programs of the individual location by facilitating the meeting between man and nature, built and grown, building and landscape. 

The visitor points consist of both built volume and landscape elements. Each destination is tailored to its specific location, and each design emphasizes natural focal points and functions in the park with minimal interference of the protected landscape. All destinations are placed in a transition zone from city to nature or from land to water to frame the contrast between the landscape and the surrounding city. Each visitor point creates unique opportunities for recreation, nature experiences, play and learning by breaking down the large scale of the landscape into human scale activities and narratives.

The individual building designs are founded in the same architectural vocabulary with visible wooden structures, distinctive roof shapes and dark-burnt shingles that clearly mark a place in the landscape without disturbing the experience of it. The buildings and visitor points are complemented by a system of ‘tracks’ or boardwalks that highlight routes in the landscape with a focus on accessibility and wayfinding in the park. 

Facts: Nature Park Amager

Lead consultant / landscape architect: LYTT Architecture

Building architect: ADEPT

Year: 2019-2024

Client: Municipalities of Copenhagen, Taarnby and Dragoer; the Danish Nature Agency, By & Havn

Collaborators: SYSTRA Danmark, BARK Raadgivning, JAC Studios

Area: 35 km2

Photographer: Morten Aagaard Krogh