Swiss practice Herzog & de Meuron are converting the Gasholders in Stockholm’s Ekoparken into an event space and residential tower.
Dubbed Gasklockan, the two gasometers are part of a late-19th-century industrial complex designed by Ferdinand Boberg, currently the world’s first National Urban Park.
Boberg’s original brick gasometers will remain untouched, but two later 20th-century gasometers (built on an adjacent hill) will be redeveloped as part of the scheme, developed by Oscar Properties.
Says the Herzog & de Meuron: ‘The smaller gasholder is of cultural value, with a steel façade that blends from reddish to greenish recounting almost 100 years of gasworks history, and will be maintained.’
The bigger, 100-metre-tall gasholder – built in the 1930s – will be demolished to make way for a 300-apartment residential tower, whose cylindrical form and façade will evoke the shape of the ironwork structure it replaces. Herzog & de Meuron’s modulated plan will create ‘V’ shaped dwellings with bedrooms on one side, and living spaces on the other.
Its ‘folding façade’ will feature ‘slightly shifting facets that will create an iridescent image of the original gasholder tower’.
Gasklockan tower is scheduled for completion in 2019, and will rise to 90 metres. Because of its unusual floor plan, apartments – and even balconies – will vary in size.
Dutch landscape designers designers Piet Oudolf and LOLA Landscape Architects meanwhile will create a public park and plant wildflower meadows around the skyscraper and events hall, which will include a sculpture park and care. An 88-metre-long bench will curve around the edge of the gardens.
The Stockholm industrial projects are the latest in a long line of gasholder projects. Among them are the gasholders in London’s King’s Cross, which are becoming apartments; Vienna’s gasometres, converted by Jean Nouvel, and Moscow’s Arma Gasworks.
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