Wave-shaped apartment building completes in Denmark

Nordic countries know how to build a landscape-inspired building. Consider: The Faroe Islands town hall that serves as a bridge. Copenhagen’s timber hill that blends into a national park. And now you can add this wild wave of a building to the list.

Photo by Jacob Due

Danish architecture firm Henning Larsen recently completed the final stage of the Wave apartment complex in Vejle, Denmark, and it looks exactly how it sounds. The sprawling, nine-story complex sits on the shores of Vejle’s Bay, its five wave-shaped structures cresting into the air like a tsunami. The 150,000-square-foot building contains 100 apartments.

Photo by Jacob Due

The ambitious building has been in the works since 2005, when the architects won a competition to design a new apartment complex in Vejle. Its development was stalled in 2009 amid the global recession, after just two of the waves had been built.

Photo by Jacob Due

Construction on the last three waves got underway in 2015 and were recently finished, resulting in a five-crest design that’s meant to mimic the surrounding hills and rippling water. It’s quite a sight.