Sculptural street - design of Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen - Copenhagen Culture

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 1996 by Peter Davey

Inside, the treasure chest is a warren of small rooms which serve excellently to set off their Beautiful contents. A good gallery stands back and allows you to study the pictures on the walls without itself trying to compete with them. This is exactly what these interlocking spaces do. They are painted in rather muted colours which allow the paintings to speak from their frames: Pompeian red, slate blue and grey, and a rather dusky raw Siena. They have a big white cornice, and a stone edge runs round the oak floors; openings are framed in white marble. The whole effect is grand domestic, and the pictures can be enjoyed as they were painted to be seen: at eye-level and rather close to.

The collection starts with the rooms at entrance level where pictures from the Barbizon School to Manet are hung. In the middle floor are Impressionists and a great collection of Degas bronzes. The top floor (which has rather subdued daylight as well as the artificial illumination used in the lower galleries) houses the Post-Impressionists-particularly the museum's outstanding array of Gauguins, the climax of the entire magnificent collection.

I was there a month ago and everything worked magnificently, but I have doubts about what might happen at the height of the tourist season. The rooms are absolutely right for the artworks they contain, but can they cope with jostling crowds in the height of summer? A queuing system may have to be set up so that the place does not get too congested.

The new piece has been slipped into its court with such grace that the Kampmann galleries that surround it have not been compromised in any way. In particular, the vaulted spaces to the north-east must receive as much light as they ever did: Kampmann's gentle and delicious Arts and Crafts plaster reliefs of daffodils and lillies of the valley, roses and honeysuckle are shown as he intended them to be, but with perhaps a little more clarity because of the horizontal component of light reflected off the polished face of the treasure house.

The Glyptotek is such a complex building, with the plans of Dahlerup, Kampmann and now Larsen interlocking in a sometimes confusing three-dimensional maze, that it is easy to overlook the new Egyptian galleries on the ground and first floors which are reached from the old Egyptian collections. Here, Larsen has created a stepped tunnel to the mummies which is intended to evoke the claustrophobic experience of entering a burial chamber. In the galleries, everything is austere with none of the touches (like oak flooring) which give the French spaces a feeling of grand domesticity. In the Egyptian department, the powerful artefacts are dramatically spot-lit against the dark walls between plain stone floors and white ceilings.

In a sense, the new work at the Glyptotek sums up in microcosm much of what is good about contemporary Copenhagen architecture. It daringly and inventively inserts a major chunk of new building into a well loved setting without compromising either; it provides a new way of looking at the world, and it uses contemporary science and craftsmanship to the full, as did Dahlerup and Kampmann in their time.