BBP Arkitekter Adds a Seven-Sided Brick Tower to a 1918 Copenhagen Villa for an After-School Club

Tidsmaskinen, Danish for The Time Machine, is an after-school center on a street corner in Amager, Copenhagen. BBP Arkitekter, with Ebbe Wæhrens as lead architect, completed it in 2021 across 1,100 m². The brief could have produced a single extension bolted onto an old house. Instead the studio built an ensemble of three distinct buildings: a 1918 villa that once housed the school's headmaster, a new seven-sided brick tower, and a glazed greenhouse that links the two.

The architects call this "complementary architecture", and the name fits. None of the three parts tries to imitate the others or disappear behind them. The villa stays a villa, with small rooms that open into one another. The tower is something the neighbourhood has not seen before, but it is built from the same brick and tile language. The greenhouse is deliberately neither one nor the other. What interests us is how directly the project reads as a lesson in time for its users. Children move through a century of building in a few steps, and each era is left legible.

A Seven-Sided Tower on an Amager Corner

From the crossing, the tower reads as a cluster of steep gables, each with its own red-tile roof pitch. Seven sides means seven fronts, so the building has no back. On a corner site inside an urban block, that matters. The tower addresses both streets, the traffic junction and the garden at once, and it holds the corner with more presence than the low villa could on its own.

The glazed link sits lower and quieter beside it, which keeps the composition from becoming a single mass. You see two solid brick figures with a transparent gap between them, and that gap does as much compositional work as the tower itself.

Brick, Gables and Splayed Openings

Randers Tegl supplied the brick, and the tower's character depends on how it is handled. Round windows sit high in the gables under arched surrounds, while the ground floor opens through angular, splayed brick reveals. The splay thickens the wall visually and pulls light deeper into the rooms. It also gives the base a carved quality that contrasts with the flat, punctured planes above.

The vocabulary borrows from the area's existing heritage: brick, steep tiled roofs, round and arched openings. The geometry is what is new. A polygonal tower with radiating gables is an unusual typology for an Amager street, and the familiar materials let it arrive without fighting its neighbours.

Under the Folded Timber Roof

Inside, the tower is where the energetic program lives. Its polygonal rooms are sized for movement and gathering, the opposite of the villa's small cellular plan. One room steps down in tiered timber seating toward windows that face the lawn, an assembly space that works as well for sprawling as for formal sitting. Faceted ceiling panels carry the polygonal geometry overhead.

The top room is the payoff. Look up and the folded timber ceiling resolves into a star of ribs, ringed by disc pendants and bounded by brick. The architects describe these rooms as almost Gothic, and you can see why: the vertical pull, the ribbed vault, the light dropping in from high windows. For an after-school club this is a generous move. It gives children a room that feels important without being solemn.

The Villa Left Unrestored

BBP chose not to restore the 1918 villa to a period ideal. The studio converted it into classic en-suite rooms, each opening onto the next, and furnished them for the club's quieter activities. Panelled doors, a painted stair with turned balusters, parquet floors and school benches set the tone. Walls finished in acoustic plaster and stucco in varied colours give each room its own identity while keeping noise in check.

The cleverest technical move is invisible. Ventilation runs inside a thickened central partition wall, so ducts never drop below the ceilings and the rooms keep their full height. That is a modest detail with a large effect: the villa still feels like an old house with tall rooms, not a retrofitted institution. In the cloakroom, a house-shaped red shelf unit and a chequerboard floor add a dose of play without overwriting the building.

The Greenhouse as a Non-Space

Between villa and tower, the greenhouse is described by the architects as a modern non-space for transition. In practice it is a sensory corridor: planters of ferns and bird-of-paradise, humidity, warmth on sunny days and coolness on overcast ones, the sound and light of the street filtering through the glass. Steel mesh screens and an exposed brick wall make the materials plain.

A narrow steel and glass walkway under the pitched glazed roof completes the link, with ductwork left visible. We like that this piece is allowed to be lightweight and slightly industrial. It separates the two masonry buildings cleanly and lets each read on its own terms, which is the whole point of the ensemble.

A Garden Without Play Equipment

The former playground is now a garden based on the headmaster's original plan. Amager is famously flat, so the landscape adds small hills to give children terrain to climb, roll and hide behind. There is no play equipment. The argument is that ground, planting and enclosure can generate play more openly than fixed apparatus, and it is a position more schools should test.

Timber garden sheds painted green and red sit on a gravel yard, with board-and-batten cladding, diagonal bracing and clay tile roofs. Solar panels rest on top. They are small buildings, but they extend the ensemble logic into the garden: a fourth register, rural and handmade, set against the church spire beyond.

Part of the City Block

Seen from above, the site sits within a dense block of red-roofed brick buildings, streets lined with parked cars and green courtyards. The neighbouring school building shares the brick and orange tile palette. Against this backdrop, the tower is clearly new but never alien. Its roofs and walls belong to the same family as everything around it, even as its shape announces a different use.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan shows the triangular plot between two streets, with villa, tower and outbuildings spread through the planting. The ground floor plan makes the ensemble logic explicit: a long villa of connected rooms, a narrow glazed passage, and the polygonal tower set among trees. Each building keeps its own footprint, and the link is kept as thin as possible.

The elevations lay the seven gables out in a row and then unfold them around the tower's plan, revealing how square windows, round windows and arched base openings are varied from face to face. The exploded axonometric of the roof separates the timber truss, a radiating steel wheel and the folded ceiling formwork, showing how the star-shaped ceiling inside is built up in layers.

Why This Project Matters

Most additions to historic buildings pick a side: either they defer to the old fabric or they contrast with it as loudly as possible. Tidsmaskinen offers a third route. By treating the project as three complete buildings plus a transparent hinge, BBP Arkitekter lets the villa keep its intimacy and the tower claim its own identity, and neither has to compromise. The hidden ventilation wall and the decision not to restore the villa show the same discipline: intervene where it serves the use, and leave the rest legible.

It also takes children seriously as users of architecture. Small rooms for quiet, a vaulted top room for wonder, a humid glass passage for transition, a hilly garden with nothing prescribed: the center offers varied spatial experiences rather than a uniform, durable box. For anyone designing educational buildings, especially those inheriting older structures, this is a persuasive case that a range of atmospheres is itself a program.

Tidsmaskinen After-School Center by BBP Arkitekter (lead architect Ebbe Wæhrens), København, Denmark. Area: 1,100 m². Completed: 2021. Photography: Jens Markus Lindhe.

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