Ørestad's Mountain Dwellings: Suburban Parking as Habitat

Artificial Mountains in the Flatlands

Just south of Copenhagen's city center, where the Øresund Strait narrows toward Sweden, lies Ørestad—a district that was once little more than a windswept plain of grazing land and reeds. Begun in the 1990s as a Scandinavian answer to Amsterdam's Zuidas or London's Docklands, Ørestad was planned as a dense, transit-oriented extension of the Danish capital, threaded by a new Metro line. For two decades, its broad boulevards and glassy office blocks have been slowly filling with life, but the area has often felt more like a diagram than a place. Then, in 2008, a building appeared that seemed to defy the very logic of its surroundings: a parking garage disguised as a mountain, its south face cascading in a series of stepped gardens, each home perched like a villa on a hillside.

Mountain Dwellings, designed by the then-young firms BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) and JDS (Julien De Smedt), occupies a block between the Metro line and the Øresund Highway. On one side, it is a banal, perforated concrete slab—the kind of structure you'd expect to find in any industrial zone. On the other, it erupts into a terraced landscape of wood, glass, and greenery, as if a slice of the Norwegian fjord country had been dropped into the flat Danish farmland. The trick is simple and radical: the parking deck is not hidden underground or wrapped in a facade; it is the mountain itself. The car ramps ascend in a continuous spiral, and on top of each level, a row of apartments steps back, creating a south-facing terrace for every unit. The result is a hybrid—part garage, part housing, part topographic sculpture—that asks a pointed question: why must density be synonymous with monotony?

A Parking Deck as Topography

The genesis of Mountain Dwellings lies in a pragmatic problem. The site was originally destined for a conventional parking structure to serve the adjacent office towers and the new residential blocks nearby. But BIG and JDS, who had already collaborated on the nearby VM Houses (a zigzag of balconies and sharp corners), saw an opportunity. Instead of burying the cars underground, they proposed to lift the housing onto the roof of the garage, turning the necessary parking into a foundation for living. The parking deck is not merely a podium; it is the primary structural element, a massive concrete frame that rises ten stories on the north side and steps down to a single story on the south. The apartments are stacked along this incline, each one sitting on the roof of the car level below, with its own private garden terrace facing the sun.

This inversion of the typical Danish housing block—where cars are hidden in basements and balconies face a courtyard—creates an entirely new relationship between building and landscape. The north elevation, which faces the highway, is a sheer wall of dark metal and glass, punctuated by circular openings that echo the portholes of a ship. It reads as a monolithic, almost brutalist form, but it is also a clever sound barrier, shielding the terraces from the roar of traffic. The south elevation, in contrast, is a lush, stepped garden, each terrace planted with a variety of species—from birch trees to flowering shrubs—that soften the concrete and create a microclimate of shade and privacy. From a distance, the building looks like a slice of a hillside village, with each home possessing its own patch of nature, albeit one suspended fifty meters above the ground.

The parking itself is not hidden but celebrated. The ramps are painted in bold colors—yellow, orange, red—that spiral up through the core, visible through the perforated facade. At night, the building glows like a lantern, and the cars become part of a kinetic sculpture. This is a deliberate provocation: in a city that prides itself on cycling and sustainability, Mountain Dwellings embraces the automobile, not as a necessary evil, but as a component of modern life. The architects have said they wanted to create a building that "makes parking sexy," and in doing so, they challenge the assumption that car-centric development is inherently at odds with good architecture. Instead, they suggest that the problem is not the car itself, but how we integrate it—or fail to integrate it—into our living spaces.

Playful Density and the Art of Stacking

At the heart of Mountain Dwellings is a simple typological innovation: the terrace. In Copenhagen, where land is scarce and views are flat, a private outdoor space is a luxury. The typical apartment has a small balcony, often too narrow for a chair, and always exposed to the neighbors. Mountain Dwellings, by contrast, gives each of its 80 units a terrace that is nearly as large as the apartment itself—up to 90 square meters—and completely private, shielded by the unit above and the parapet in front. The terraces are also deep enough to accommodate a dining table, a hammock, or even a small tree, and they are oriented to the south, capturing sunlight from morning to evening. This is not a balcony; it is a garden, and for many residents, it becomes an extension of the home, blurring the line between indoors and out.

The apartments themselves are designed with the same playful logic. They are duplexes, with the living area on the lower level and the bedrooms above, connected by an internal staircase. The lower floor opens directly onto the terrace, so that the garden becomes a second living room in the summer. The upper floor, which faces north, has large windows that frame views of the city and the Øresund Bridge, but these windows are set deep into the facade, creating a sense of enclosure and protection. The interiors are finished in raw concrete, wood, and glass, with a minimalist palette that allows the architecture to speak. There is a sense of experimentation, of trying something new, that pervades the entire project—from the way the staircases are tucked into the corners to the way the kitchen counters are cast in place. This is not a developer-driven product; it is a manifesto in concrete and timber.

But Mountain Dwellings is more than just a clever stacking of units. It is also a commentary on the nature of suburbia. Ørestad is often criticized for being a sterile, car-oriented district, with wide roads and sparse amenities. Yet Mountain Dwellings embraces that suburban condition and intensifies it. The parking garage is not hidden; it is the very ground on which the houses stand. The terraces are not mere balconies; they are private yards, albeit stacked one above the other. The building thus offers a vision of suburban life—with its desire for space, nature, and privacy—translated into an urban form. It is a density that does not feel dense, because each home has its own domain, its own piece of the sky. In this sense, the building is a direct challenge to the single-family house, suggesting that the qualities we associate with the suburbs can be achieved in a multifamily building, if only we are willing to rethink the rules.

A Model for the Future?

Fifteen years after its completion, Mountain Dwellings remains a landmark, both for Ørestad and for the broader field of architecture. It has been celebrated in exhibitions and textbooks, and it has influenced a generation of designers who have sought to create housing that is both playful and practical. But its legacy is not without controversy. Critics have pointed out that the building is, at its core, a parking garage with apartments on top—a celebration of the car that seems out of step with climate concerns and the push for car-free cities. Others have noted that the terraces, while beautiful, are expensive to maintain and require constant irrigation to keep the plants alive. And yet, the building's popularity with residents and visitors alike suggests that there is an enduring appeal to the idea of a mountain in the city, a place where you can park your car and climb to your garden.

The deeper significance of Mountain Dwellings may lie in its refusal to accept the tired opposition between density and quality of life. In an era of rapid urbanization, when cities are grappling with how to house a growing population without sacrificing livability, the building offers a model—not a perfect one, but a provocative one—of how to stack living spaces in a way that feels generous and humane. It reminds us that the problem of housing is not merely a matter of square meters, but of imagination. By turning a banal infrastructure into a landscape, BIG and JDS showed that architecture can transform the most ordinary of programs into an extraordinary place. And in a district like Ørestad, which is still finding its identity, that is no small achievement.

Why It Still Matters

Mountain Dwellings matters because it asks us to reconsider what we value in our built environment. It is not a perfect building, nor is it a solution to the housing crisis. But it is a bold experiment that expands the palette of possibilities for residential architecture. It demonstrates that density does not have to mean uniformity, that parking does not have to be a blight, and that even in the most unlikely of places, we can create habitat—for plants, for people, and for the imagination. As cities around the world struggle with the challenges of growth and sustainability, we need more such experiments, more willingness to invert conventions and to see the potential in the mundane. Mountain Dwellings is a reminder that the future of our cities will be shaped not by the grand gestures of masterplans, but by the small, unexpected moves that make us look twice and think anew.