Shopping spree - design of Copenhagen shopping center Gentoffe - Copenhagen Culture

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 1996 by Peter Davey

Most buildings in this issue are in Copenhagen's delicate inner city or the more well behaved suburbs. This shopping centre is the complete opposite, but it is approached with Danish architectural flair and determination.

Gentofte is not the most prosperous of Copenhagen's suburbs. It lies to the north of the centre, but too far back from the coast to be fashionable, and it is much cut about by motorways. So it is an ideal place for sheds: factories, warehouses and the like - a natural location for Ikea to build a discount shopping centre.

The great Swedish combine which has done so much to make cheap and (on the whole) well designed furniture and household goods available on a very wide scale is not well known for its buildings. But at Gentofte for once, the firm has chosen architects with the care it uses when choosing the people who design its fabrics or knives and forks. Tegnestuen Vandkunsten has for long had a reputation for witty and inventive handling of industrial materials which has been seen in many housing schemes 1 and in large sheds like the UNIPAC depot in Copenhagen docks (AR March 1993, pp55-59).

The touch has not left them at Gentofte. One difficulty with discount centres is that they are surrounded with acres of car parking and that they always seem a long way off. Vandkunsten has made a very fair stab at solving the problem by making the building two storeys high, with most of the ground floor given over to parking (a sensible and comfortable precaution in Copenhagen's rather severe climate). The move means that there is only a little open air parking between the road (Nybrovej) and the building, which is itself formed into a long-backed U that welcomes you in a cheery embrace, rather like one of the Danes you meet in the bar on the ferries to Sweden. The open parking is to be landscaped, and doubtless, once the trees grow a bit, the approach will be almost Baroque.

Well, not really, for the most dramatic parts of the building are the giant neon advertising hoardings that signal the entrances to the discount stores - not devices available to seventeenth-century architects. The slabs of signage are designed to read from the road at speed as well as being signifiers of entry. As Jens Arnfred says 'some of my friends call IKEA "Las Vegas" which I find is a very precise description. The whole thing has with "speediness" to do ... buy and throw away. The quicker the better...'.(2) He has indeed learned from Las Vegas, but the lessons are rather different from the ones Venturi came away with.

There is an underlying Danishness about the building. An honesty about the use of materials, the corrugated galvanised steel and fibre cement sheets (long favourite materials of the practice) that form the skin of the building. And there is a very clever manipulation of scale. The volumes are huge but, at least on the approach side, they are modulated by balconies and modest but energetic structural gymnastics. For instance, the main entrance travelator ramps are sheltered by a roof that is supported on abstracted trees made out of slender steel tubes, and for once, entrance to a huge discount market is fun and welcoming without being pretentious or pompous.

The building is completely different from the bare-toothed and/or saccharine products of American high capitalism (or even its Swedish little brother). Yet the complex can't be called uncommercial, indeed it is most vigorously so. But somehow, the architects have imbued it with tenderness and decency rarely seen in such a type and the client has had a most welcome change of approach to architecture from the one it adopts over the Sound and elsewhere in the world.

1 The aim is always to make the maximum amount of enclosed space with the cheapest possible decently organised envelope. See for instance the Boras housing (AR November 1993).

2 Letter 20 September 1996.