Seeing the light: adding a new dimension of urbanity, Copenhagen's new metro brings light to guide passengers deep underground

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 2002

Copenhagen is unusual as a prosperous European city in that it has not had, up to now, a metro system -- particularly so, as the Danish capital is one of the most civilized places on earth, at least in its centre. But now, the first lines have been built, and they make a modest, decent contribution to the city, adding, without flash or ostentation, a literally new dimension.

KHRAS were the architects responsible for design coordination, and they had an overriding preoccupation: to make the stations legible and reassuring, easy to use and find direction in. The stations in the old city have been formed with cut and cover techniques in up to 22m deep concrete boxes, and progress from street to train and vice versa had to made as clear as possible.

One of the stratagems was to make each station have only one entrance, so there are no possible confusions when you want to meet someone at for instance the one in Kongens Nytorvet or Norreport. Then there was an imperative that the route to the trains should be as calm and orderly as possible to encourage people unused to underground travel to use the metro.

So a 5.5m modular order obtains in both stations and trains, in which architects and mechanical and civil engineers have worked together to co-ordinate sense of place from streets to platforms. They, of course, are in the modern fashion, with glass walls, the doors of which open exactly at the moment when a train pulls up opposite.

The most important dimension of the aim of bringing directionality and orientation in taking the metro is the way in which daylight is brought down into the chasms. KHRAS were determined to get daylight down to the lowest levels. Pyramidal rooflights allow views of sky and city as you go up and down the escalators.

On top, the pyramids make graceful, modest contributions to the cityscape, acceptable even in the precisely elegant Neo-Classical Kongens Nytorvet. Underground, the sky can be seen from quite unexpected places. But the best bit is the way in which the pyramids, through prisms, translate sunlight to small rainbows projected into the depths of he earth.

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Project team

KHRAS Arkitekter, Virum

Nille Juul-Sorensen, Erik Sorensen, Jesper Lund, Tom Mose Petersen

Lighting

Louis Poulsen