Really makes you wonder whether this a late April Fool's joke? Looking at the renderings you'd think so.The tiny rural town set to host Western Europe's tallest skyscraper
By Annabel Fenwick Elliott
2 APRIL 2019 • 11:00AM
The Shard will soon lose its title as the tallest skyscraper in Western Europe to a somewhat unlikely candidate, in a town you may well have never heard of.
Danish fashion brand Bestseller has commissioned a 320-metre skyscraper to house its new headquarters in Brande, Denmark, population 7,000. So flat is the surrounding rural terrain of the Jutland peninsula, in the west of the country, that the gleaming tower will be visible from 40 miles away.
The building, dubbed the 'Tower & Village project' will stand 10.4 metres taller than The Shard in London, and will host offices, 30 stores, hotel accommodation and student facilities.
Bestseller's owner Anders Holch Povlsen, whose family founded the company in Brande in 1975, is the richest man in Denmark. The middle-market brand encompasses labels including Vero Moda and Noisy May, has 2,700 retail stories in 45 countries, and employs around 15,000 staff across the world.
More than 1,400 of them are located at the company's current far less imposing headquarters in Brande's Fredskovvej region.
The plans, approved by the local council last month, were drawn up by architects at Dorte Mandrup, a studio responsible for a number of other ambitious designs; among them the glacier-shaped Icefjord Centre above the Arctic Circle in Greenland, and a tower shaped like an origami sculpture on Denmark's Aarhus Island.
It was, claims the Guardian, difficult to find any Brande natives who opposed the project but they did hunt down one critic in Aarhus, 60 miles to the east. Architect Trine Kammer told the local paper: "People in Brande are so afraid to criticise Bestseller. It’s like a religion or something.
“Such a big building will make the world claustrophobically small. Why do I have to be reminded of Bestseller when I’m walking by myself in a quiet wood?”
The company's billionaire CEO, who is also the biggest shareholder in fashion retailer Asos, happens to be Britain's second-largest private landowner, too, with 12 Scottish estates that cover more than 220,000 acres. In 2018, Holch Povlsen, 46, announced his 200-year plan to rewild vast swathes of the Highlands - and to possibly reintroduce wolves, bears and lynx.
In a recent open letter addressing the people of Scotland, he stated his vision to “restore our parts of the Highlands to their former magnificent natural state and repair the harm that man has inflicted on them”.
He has also purchased land in Romania's Carpathian Mountains, with the same intentions of re-wilding.
The Bestseller Tower, while it will beat The Shard in height, falls considerably shorter than the tallest building in the whole of Europe, the Lakhta Center in Russia's Saint Petersburg which stands at 462.5 metres.
The tallest building in the world? That will be the 828-metre Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, which has held its title since 2008 but will be usurped when Saudi Arabia's 1,000-metre Jeddah tower is complete circa 2021.
The Telegraph UK
Cheers
P.S. The Guardian also has the story 'Like the Eye of Sauron': western Europe’s tallest building planned for tiny Danish town