In a city scared of heights, in a country scared of the foreign, can we imagine a multicultural neighbourhood of extreme urban density?
The battery is a project about integration. It seeks to facilitate the cultural integration of Islamic and Danish culture, by incorporating the first mosque ever built in Denmark, in the centre of a complex consisting of housing, shopping, leisure, and sports facilities. It seeks to bring together the three disjoined quarters of Islands Brygge, Amagerbro and Ørestad in one overlapping urban activity centre. And finally it seeks to fuse landscape and architecture, the built and the “unbuilt” environment, into a unified urban topography of man made peaks, valleys, cliffs and caves. Architecture free from the stylistic straightjacket - free to create new associations from the architectonic spectrum. The Tower of Babel collapsed because of confusion between the different languages. The new peaks of the Battery will stand precisely because of the multicultural diversity of religion, activity and architecture.