Great Danes - Copenhagen as Europe's cultural capital

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 1996 by Peter Davey

Decent conversations

In the centre, height restrictions have ensured decent conversations between buildings of many different ages: Anton Rosen's 1907 Art Nouveau office block sits happily with its earlier neighbours in Frederiksberggade (Stroget), as does Jacobsen's daring Modern Movement Stelling Building (1938) in Gammeltorv. The parallel in our time is Henning Larsen's delicious, delicately veiled little corner for Berlingske Tidene in Kristen Bernikows Gade (AR June 1995). Apart from the latter, it is difficult to single out any new commercial work in the centre - though there is interesting work in the suburbs, for instance the offices for E. Pihl & Son by KHR at Lyngby (p34), and Tegnestuen Vandkunsten's Ikea at Gentofte (surely the most memorable and architecturally enjoyable emporium in the Swedish empire - p46).

Back in the centre, the public sector seems most important, with many new projects for the state, the municipality and institutions. The scale of investment in such buildings suggests comparison with the Paris of the Mitterrand era. Both societies have been prosperous, culturally confident and concerned to project their sense of well-being to citizens and visitors alike. But in Paris, the Grands Projets were mainly intended to celebrate the sometimes autocratic reign of the president the French nicknamed the 'last of the Pharaohs'. The results were certainly large and monumental but have not been very successful in adding to the quality of Paris. Perhaps the most tragic example of Mitterrand's grandiosity was, by coincidence, designed by a Dane, poor Otto yon Spreckelsen - his Grande Arche at La Defense is a monument without meaning, made out of an office block which is remarkably unpleasant for its users. Celebration of nationality, culture and civitas has been approached in a much more sure and democratic sense in the Danish capital. The effort has gone not into just a few great and showy buildings but a large number of works which range from the House of the Architects by 3x Nielsen (p54) to the extension of the Royal Theatre by Sverre Fehn (perhaps the most contentious of all the new projects, but far less aggressive or ostentatious than any of the Paris monuments - and the competition entry that best fulfilled a very demanding brief). One of the most important aspects of the new work is how much of it adapts and extends old buildings. Perhaps the pressures of height restriction and having to work with a large number of buildings which are preserved by law has distilled a special sensibility in architects who build in Copenhagen - not one that makes them deferential to the past, as the Prince of Wales would like British architects to be, but an attitude which is sympathetic to the work of the ancestors without feeling the need to copy their forms. Henning Larsen's jewel casket extension to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (p28) is one of the most splendid examples of interaction between old and new in which neither is compromised, but both respect each other. There are many other instances of this approach: the city is a treasure house of creative examples of relationships of ancient and modern.