Skin tight - design of E. Pihl & Son As headquarters in Copenhagen - Copenhagen Culture

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 1996 by Peter Davey

These new offices for a building contractor are a highly sensual yet functional interplay of craftsmanship and fine materials, reflecting a modern Danish sensibility.

E. Pihl & Son AS is a successful building contracting business, prosperous (and far-sighted) enough to commission its own headquarters from a very good firm of architects(1) as a three-dimensional advertisement for its skills. Pihl's intention was to 'produce an interplay of the whole, from the spaces to the details, combined with a high degree of utility, fine materials and good traditional craftsmanship'.(2) The result admirably fulfils the aim.

The site is in Lyngby, a low density suburb north of the old city centre. In the leafy surroundings, a three-storey modern office block could have been extremely intrusive, so the architects pulled the building back from the road-edge, made provision for a good deal of new greenery and broke down the mass into a form that did not loom over its neighbours. In essence, the plan is a pair of L-shaped single-banked office spaces joggled together to create a major space at the conflation of their internal angles.

The entrance from the road or car park to the south is a glass recession between the two Ls from which a long glazed slot in the roof draws you forward to the stairs and the triple-height space that is the formal and social hub of the place. But before going in, it is worth having a look round the outside first. From the start, the building seems intensely Danish. There are few other countries in which the quality of workmanship and materials would be such a cause for celebration, and none, I think, in which the tension of the skin would be so sensually explored. For most foreigners, Danish seventeenth- and eighteenth-century domestic buildings look rather strange, for their windows are virtually flush with the brick facades in which they are set. This may be a hangover from the tradition of timber-framed work, or it may be simply (as Danish architects now tell you) that there is a dislike of ledges on which water can rest and seep into the building. The tradition continued well into this century, and it is perhaps not too extravagant to suggest that it showed itself in a new guise in for instance the consummate mastery of the curtain wall by Jacobsen which he showed in the Royal Hotel and the Redovre Town Hall.

At Pihl & Son, the steel and glass walls are stretched as tightly as a glove over the interior spaces: and so is the skin of red brickwork. The smoothness of transition from glossiness to dark rough redness is extraordinary, allowing the architects to compose their elevations with almost the rectilinear freedom that Mondrian allowed himself in paint. The two elements (transparent and smooth; rough, red and opaque) are both extraordinary in themselves. The glass skin follows Jacobsen's example at the Royal Hotel of allowing openable windows in a curtain wall without their presence being obvious (when one thinks of the awful off-the-peg systems that offer opening windows in glass walls, it is clear that the architects have brooded over the matter with great finesse(3)). The brickwork is even more impressive. It is laid in fine Danish fashion with generous mortar bedding, but the stretcher bond(4) shows it to be plainly a skin. At last someone has had the courage to face up to this way of building and show it for what it is, and indeed give it a certain nobility, for the brick sheath is clearly manipulated in much the same ways as the metal and glass one and never tries to look seriously structural.

You come past the brick and glass walls to penetrate the interior through understated doors in a glazed bit of the facade that does not seem very different from the rest. As Jan Christiansen has remarked 'the entrance to the building can be difficult to find, as can be expected in a modernistic building'.(5) But, once you have worked out the puzzle and are inside, you are clearly in the presence of architectural sensibility of a major kind. Light from the slot in the roof directs you forwards to the stair which rises to the galleries that connect the largely open-plan offices across the void. All materials are handled with the greatest care and understanding. The path to the stair past the reception desk is in almost black Icelandic basalt, and the treads start in a sort of podium of the same material before changing to metal. The rest of the huge room is floored in the very best ash, the warm paleness of which was plainly chosen to contrast with the dark ice-coldness of the stone. The in-situ concrete columns have been gently washed with acid to bring out the nature of the aggregate. A large external pool to the south reflects shimmering light upwards against them and the ceiling.

Everything is very simple. But from time to time the architects burst into fits of constructional gymnastics that are extremely vigorous though not altogether in keeping with the calmness of the space flooded in light. The balustrade of the stair for instance is forged in an almost Deco angular frenzy as a three-dimensional structure, though the handrails are simple stainless-steel tubes which could have had much calmer supports. The roof slot is emphasised by similar graphite-painted muscular steel frames that hang down from it and are not quite clear in their purpose.