Great Danes - Copenhagen as Europe's cultural capital

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 1996 by Peter Davey

Copenhagen is the cultural capital of Europe this year; unusually for cities so celebrated, it has already managed to complete some buildings (and initiated many more) to celebrate its status. This issue looks at the texture of the uniquely fine Danish capital and reviews the major completed projects.

One of the remarkable things about Copenhagen is how young it is. Almost all the fabric we now see was made in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, though the structure of the centre is like a palimpsest, with much of its pattern made on the ruins of previous buildings and streets. Like a partly scraped parchment, this is a modern city that often reflects immemorial traces, with here and there a fragment of the eighteenth century (and even earlier times) left intact after the fires and bombardments.

Even more curious is the fact that most of the texture of the city, right out to the motorway ring at Rodovre and Gladsaxse, still has a scale based on horse-drawn transport and the railways. There was no massive destruction in the Second World War, and perhaps as a result, none of the dreadful '60s tabula rasa planning mania which sorely afflicted the so many old European towns ranging from Britain to Finland. Of course, the city has come to terms with the internal combustion engine, and in many ways does so well. But there has been no kowtowing to the unrestrained demands of the car by making urban motorways which rip cities apart, or parking lots which bomb the corner sites off the blocks. This is the almost universal pattern of late twentieth-century development which has been adopted by cities as poor as Cairo and as rich as Tokyo - and to a limited extent (to their great disgrace) by cities with fragile inherited structures like Paris and London.

The delicate scale of the city that derives from the repeated overlayering of pedestrian and horse-drawn routes has been preserved by the railways and their careful integration with the city's development. The 1947 finger plan was a brilliant riposte to the conventional notion of the ever exploding concentric city. It remains one against the now fashionable poly-nucleated conurbation, which results when centres collapse and edges become fuzzy. The finger plan itself may be becoming a bit blurred, but the essentials remain, and the rail arteries that serve the communities in the fingers have not been complemented or replaced by urban motorways.

If a contemporary city is to retain coherence as an interlocking lattice of places rather than being an undefined mess, its first requirement is for an effective and responsive public transport system that reduces dependence on the individual car. In this respect, it is encouraging that the plan for Orestad, the proposed new city sector (AR June 1995), starts with the notion of the red line of the metro down the long green strip on Amager, connecting the linear suburb to the centre of Copenhagen, with social nodes formed round its stations and growing out into the parkland. I hope that Orestad will be built, if only to reduce development pressure on the green webs between the fingers of the city that stretch out to the north and west.

Orestad is one end of a very broad spectrum of the city's consciousness of the importance of the public realm which runs from city planning to the design of street furniture and public open spaces. I must confess to no longer being a whole-hearted fan of Stroget which, when it was first created, was quite outstanding - the most distinguished pedestrian street in Europe. Many of the fine individual shops that used to line it have been replaced by branches of multi-national chains with their cheap universal signage and vulgar products. The once quite unforgettable aroma of flowers, good coffee and kringler can only occasionally be caught in a Proustian moment. Now, Stroget is permeated by an almost universal Euro-pong, a blend of popcorn, hamburgers and cheap scent. But a few of the well-loved commercial landmarks remain, and so of course do the public ones, and here the municipality has set an admirable model in its renovation and reworking of the street and its associated squares with new paving and very carefully chosen street furniture. This excellent programme - which attempts to restore to pedestrianised central Copenhagen a sense of being in a series of places, rather than a tatty chewing-gum covered open-air shopping mall - promises to culminate in the redesigned Radhusplads which brings that rather isolated public place back into the more general conversation of the city, and by its references to Nyrop's original design gently reinforces reminders of debts to Siena (p98).

Between pedestrian space and infrastructure in the spectrum of urban creativity are the buildings, and Copenhagen is most unusual as a contemporary affluent capital in having a family of buildings in which (on the whole) members plainly respect each other. This must be partly to do with height restraint. From a distance, it is the spires and towers of the ancestors which dominate. Just as the modern city respects and enhances its inherited urban spaces, so the skyline is preserved and gently added to. The famous and notorious exceptions of the two SAS hotels, the first a splendid example of Jacobsen's late work and the other a product of '70s international vulgarity must, if the city is to retain its character, remain aberrant. But now, some of the tall developments further out from the centre than the second SAS hotel, places like Bellahoj and Hoje Gladsaxse, can be re-evaluated, and seem to a foreigner to be models of high-rise social housing. Perhaps Orestad could be a proving ground for experiments in the type which could be as challenging in our time.