Freeze frame

Architectural Review, The, June, 1994 by Henry Miles

The European Film College is set in the gently rolling glaciated country near Ebeltoft in Denmark. The site is at the top of a more or less untouched dry green valley that runs northwards toward the sea and the picturesque little town which lies at the neck of its rural peninsula in Jutland. Everything is very Danish: gentle, kindly, laid back and pastoral. When Heikkinen-Komonen's scheme was picked for the college in a design competition held in 1991, many Danes were rather shocked. For a start, a Finnish firm had won a Danish competition (not very usual even though cultural links between the northern countries are closer than almost anywhere else). And the architectural approach to the site was very different to what the Danes might have adopted: their natural instinct would perhaps have been to work with the topography and gently enhance it.

Heikkinen-Komonen did just the opposite. Their approach is sublime, not beautiful: in Burke's famous distinction, the beautiful is to do with self propagation, (sex and the gentler aspects of life), the sublime is concerned with self preservation (the aesthetic pleasure to be obtained from the thrill of standing on a high ledge, or a thin bridge over a gorge). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sublime is little pursued in architecture today -- particularly in Denmark.

Heikkinen-Komonen rammed their main block from east to west across the top of the valley, just at the point where it joins the plateau. The move is almost brutal, but far from being without feeling for the site. The valley is suddenly contained by a force reminiscent of its origins; the great grey wall of galvanised steel which confronts the shallow curve is glacier-like in its implacability, but is pierced by a gap containing the shaft of a spiral stair. Through this chasm, the low winter sun shines from the south round the shaft in a way that recalls the great stone astronomical devices of pre-ancient man. A delicate bridge flies almost all the way along the facade, bringing visitors to the main entrance. The device is unnecessary, rather inconvenient (Denmark can get pretty dark and icy in winter), and not a little expensive, but goodness, it's dramatic; the perilous ledge brought to a late twentieth-century public building. As the architects say 'any association with vertigo a la Hitchcock is fully coincidental' -- though the experience of wandering above the valley with its idyllic views down to the sea is not perhaps quite as disturbing as they would have wished -- it is at least as beautiful as sublime.

The other moves in the ensemble are much dependent on the main dramatic gesture. The organisation is modelled on those splendid institutions, the Danish Folkehojskoler-residential colleges for young adults which act as social centres for communities. This Folkehojskole specialises in cinema and acts as a further education centre for film professionals. half the students are Danish and half from other European countries.

The programme therefore demands student and staff residences as well as the normal apparatus of a f i m school: studios, cinemas, teaching and common rooms, stores and offices. It is the normal apparatus that makes up the glacial wall, The student and visitor accommodation is arranged in a large quadrant reminiscent of the architects' residential quarters for their Emergency School in Kuopio (AR August 1 993), but at Ebeltoft, the curve is carefully orientated to capture delicious views over the landscape to north and west, while at the same time defining an area of gent y sloping grassland between itself and the south side of the main building that becomes a sort of informal campus for the whole place.

The campus is surrounded by a set of cheerful events that are intended to be in contrast with the glacial north front and its austere and forceful relationship to nature. From the curve of the reidential block, colourful double-height seminar-cum-common rooms project into the curve. The south side of the main block is completely different from the north. Only two stories high, it is finished in white rendering and is articulated by a series of events which at first seem to be but arbitrary accretions. But for instance the angle of the copper clad kitchen, which sticks out next to the dining hall, is carefully calculated to make a terrace which catches the south-west sun. The little ply-covered studio and the brick built store to the main big filming shed emphasise the cleft through which the sun shines through the glacier. All these curious happenings are, suggest the architects, intended to evoke the small-scale places and domestic buildings of Ebeltoft's vernacular pattern. Perhaps they do: the scale is certainly much more urbane than that of the north face. But they also evoke the atmosphere of a great film lot, with its collaging of sets, moods and arbitrary events; they are an interpretation of the ephemeral given tectonic substance.

As seemingly arbitrary as the disposition of the events of the south wall is the layout of the staff houses on the east side of the valley. These are tall thin rectangles, compactly and elegantly planned, and scattered to command views to the sea and sky over the green west rim of the declivity. In front of each house is a trellis, over which roses will grow to make a screen that from the inside will offer privacy, and from the outside will make giant rectilinear pieces of topiary in contrast to the bare grassy hillside which they crest: another set, commenting mutely on humanity's relationship to nature.