The new year-round ski centre that looks set to become the next global icon of winter sports and is set to open close to the Danish capital has been given a name but there’s no confirmed opening date for the slopes.
Christened ‘CopenHill’ the year-round artificial-surface ski slopes will descend the outsides of an almost complete waste-to-power plant known as Amager Bakke.
The complex, a huge structure clad in glass and aluminium and visible from many parts of the capital because of its size, will be, the Danes claim, the most efficient waste burning and energy-generating plant in the world. It will power and heat 160,000 households across Copenhagen.
A hoped for 2017 opening date appears to have passed and mid-2018 is now being mooted as a completion and opening date.
When it does open CopenHill expects to receive 57,000 visitors in its first year, most eager to see its ski slope on its 10,000 square metres of sloping roof, as well as the world’s tallest artificial climbing wall (expected to be 10 metres wide by 88 meters high).
“One of the biggest sports in Denmark is actually skiing, even though it is one of the flattest countries in Europe,” architect Jesper Boye Andersen told Quartzy. “It was obvious that we needed a ski slope, and that it was possible.”
