The Timber House

• 13,300 sq m, 430 parking spaces
• Direct Orientkaj metro connection
• Recycled aluminium pixel facade

Why Real-Time Visualization Fits a Facade Like This

A note on sourcing: aec+tech lists Enscape as the tool associated with this case study. Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects has not published a tool-specific account of The Timber House, so what follows explains why a real-time rendering workflow suits this kind of design problem rather than describing a documented step-by-step of the project's own process.

A facade that only exists in three dimensions

The entire architectural idea here is depth. Pixels sit either on the face or 300 millimetres back, and the building reads completely differently depending on where you stand and where the sun is. That is precisely the class of design decision that orthographic drawings cannot resolve: an elevation flattens the relief into a pattern and loses the effect. Judging the pixel size, the depth of the setback and the density of the perforated plates needs moving views under changing light, which is what a real-time renderer produces cheaply.

What Enscape provides

Enscape is a real-time rendering and virtual reality plugin that runs inside Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, Archicad and Vectorworks. It renders directly from the authoring model rather than an exported copy, so a change to a panel module or a setback dimension shows up immediately in the view. Walkthroughs, panoramas and VR review come from the same model, and later versions add asset libraries, animation and Enscape Impact for environmental analysis.

Competition work rewards fast iteration

This project began as an open competition entry. Competition timescales reward teams that can test many facade variants and produce persuasive imagery from the same model without a separate visualization pipeline. A plug-in that renders live inside the modelling environment collapses design study and presentation image into one activity, which is worth more in a competition than in almost any other phase of work.

A building type with a bad reputation

Multi-storey car parks are usually treated as pure infrastructure and end up as blank concrete decks that deaden the streets around them. In Nordhavn, a district being built new, that would have been a serious urban failure. The design challenge was to make 430 parking spaces contribute something to the public realm rather than subtract from it.

Giving a utilitarian volume a legible identity

The building had to read as architecture without pretending to be something other than a car park. The answer was to root the facade in the site's own history as a timber port, which gives the pixelated relief a reason to exist beyond decoration.

Encouraging people out of their cars

Placing a large car park next to a metro station risks simply generating more driving. The plan had to actively hand drivers over to public transport through direct metro access and a Kiss-and-Ride zone, so the building reduces car journeys into the district rather than inviting them.

Durability and material choice

A facade of many small components on an exposed harbour site has to survive salt air and weather with minimal maintenance, which drove the use of recycled aluminium for the pixel frames and hardwood only at the protected lower levels.

The conventional route would be to model the facade in the authoring tool, export it to a standalone visualization package, and render each option offline. Depth and light studies on a relief facade would then either be produced as a small number of expensive still frames, or approximated with physical models and hand studies.

Both approaches work, but they ration the number of variants that can be tested. On a facade whose whole performance is a function of one dimension, the 300 millimetre setback, the ability to test many values quickly is worth more than the ability to render one value beautifully. Real-time rendering inverts that trade-off.

Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects has not published the visualization workflow used on this project, so the comparison above describes general practice rather than the firm's documented prior process.

No time or cost savings have been published against any specific software tool for this project, so no ROI figures are claimed here. The outcomes that can be verified are the project's own, and on a building of this type they are worth stating precisely.

Parking consolidated for a whole district

The building provides 430 spaces across 13,300 square metres in a single structure. Concentrating parking in one shared building rather than distributing it into the basements of surrounding blocks is significantly cheaper per space, frees the neighbouring sites for occupied floor area, and avoids excavation costs on a reclaimed harbour site where deep basements are expensive.

A car park that supports the metro

Direct access to Orientkaj station and a Kiss-and-Ride zone convert the building into an interchange. For the city, that is the commercial argument: the asset absorbs car trips at the edge of the district and hands the last leg to public transport, which is a measurably different outcome from a car park that simply delivers drivers to their destination.

Recycled material in the primary facade

The pixel frames use recycled aluminium, which lowers the embodied carbon of the most repeated component on the building. On a facade made of a very large number of identical parts, a material decision at the component level scales across the whole envelope.

Reputational return

Winning the open competition and later being voted Archello Parking Garage of the Year in 2024 is a real return for both the architect and the client on a building type that rarely attracts any recognition at all.

Project credits

Architect: Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects. Client and developer: By and Havn, City and Port Copenhagen. Landscape: STED, By og Landskab. Location: Orientkaj 2A, Nordhavn, Copenhagen, Denmark. Size: 13,300 square metres over six storeys. Capacity: 430 parking spaces. Completion: 2022. Procurement: open design competition. Award: Archello Parking Garage of the Year, Public Vote Winner, 2024.

A note on the name

The Timber House is a car park, not a mass timber building. The name comes from the facade's reference to stacked sawn timber and from the site's history as part of Copenhagen's Freeport, where timber was landed and stored. Readers searching for a cross-laminated timber or glulam case study should be aware that the primary structure here is concrete and the facade frames are recycled aluminium, with wood used in the expanded panels at the base.