The Opera Park -Extraordinary everyday in our urban living room

Centrally located in Copenhagen’s inner harbour, The Opera Park is a lush green oasis designed for recreation, calm, and contemplation. Conceived as The garden of the Opera, the park unfolds as an ever-changing stage — a living scenography where terrain, trees, shrubs, and perennials form foreground, middleground, and background, bringing nature’s vitality into the heart of the city.

Between the six themed gardens, generous lawns invite people to pause and enjoy the waterfront. As a centerpiece lies the Wintergarden, housing a café and subtropical planting. The Wintergarden connects directly to the underground parking garage through a planted atrium, allowing the vegetation to flow between the levels. This connection integrates landscape, architecture, and infrastructure into one coherent spatial and technical system.

Designed as an inviting, all-year-round public landscape, The Opera Park features 628 trees, 80,000 perennials and shrubs, and 40,000 bulbs from across the world. In total, 223 unique local and exotic species create a vibrant and ever-changing expression through the seasons. Robust materials, permeable surfaces, and innovative water management systems support the park’s living systems and resilience. Rainwater from the Opera House roof is reused for irrigation, while green roofs and rain beds manage runoff and provide habitats for urban fauna.

In this lecture, Maj Wiwe will focus on the process from design to realization of The Opera Park, highlighting how the park’s living green environment becomes a source of well-being in the dense urban context. Emphasizing the planting works and the craft of designing with living matter, she will share insights into how 628 trees and thousands of perennials were composed, detailed, and established to create a thriving urban ecosystem. The presentation explores how close collaboration with plants, technical precision, and interdisciplinary teamwork can transform a complex urban site into a resilient, sensory, and inclusive public landscape — creating the extraordinary in our everyday urban living room.