Figure in a landscape - design of Danish Forest and Landscape Research Institute building - Copenhagen Culture

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 1996 by Henry Miles

Set in a beautiful, gentle, apparently natural terrain, the Danish Forest and Landscape Research Institute responds to its surroundings while providing a socially creative and functionally efficient working environment for high-powered research.

The Danish Forest and Landscape Research Institute is the most remote from the centre of the capital of the buildings considered in these pages, but Horsholm is very much part of greater Copenhagen, a mere 20 kilometres from the parliament building in densely populated North Zealand - though because of the excellent finger plan (p4) it seems almost to be in the middle of the country. In fact, the site is part of an interconnected series of parks that link the research centre's grounds to those of the local castle, the Hunting and Forestry Museum and the national arboretum. The wooded site undulates gently and the building is set on a bank that falls some nine metres down to the idyllic shores of a couple of little lakes, Springdam and Ubberod Dam, beyond which the enticing mysteries of the arboretum rise on the opposite bank.

The institute has a very simple basic parti. A central double-height top-lit communal space runs from west to east and is flanked by parallel thick service walls. These are the back supports of lightweight timber structures housing two storeys of offices and laboratories. A basement containing stores, washing and changing rooms (the staff do lots of field work) runs under much of the ground floor. It would be a workmanlike if rather dull arrangement if it had not been manipulated with great dexterity. The central part, where the walls are parallel, is only about a third of their length. At the ends, they are flanged out and carry on into the site, so that the west side of the building opens welcoming wings that focus on the glazed central entrance porch. To the east, only the south wall is inflected while the northern one carries straight on to frame a magnificent view of the Springdam and the arboretum.

The fundamental diagram is further enriched by the handling of the timber skins of the office and laboratory layers. The in-situ concrete service walls are allowed to dominate the whole composition and give the building its basic shape, but the wood planes, delicate and in comparison almost flimsy, are allowed to move in and out as bays at ground level, creating a series of small external spaces which, particularly on the north side, are intimately connected to the interior. (The south side must be subject to quite a lot of solar gain which the roof overhangs and the louvres are intended to mitigate.)

The interior is clearly a miniature version of the Scandinavian internal street building,(1) top-lit by skylights that spread luminance down the massive walls to encourage creepers to grow up them. The lightweight roof and the balconies which give access to the upper floor are supported on laminated timber beams and columns, for the client had quite naturally asked for as much wood in the building as possible.(2) A natural progression follows from the main entrance, past the reception desk and its associated administration, past the meeting room, lift and library down to the busily furnished cafeteria with its view over the lake. The side walls have an almost Roman gravity, with niches for mundane things like photocopiers, shelves, cupboards and tea kitchens. But when the creepers get going the massive structures will be emphasised. There will be a delicious counterpoint between the apparently age-old compressed solidity of the walls and the apparently newer, lighter, warmer, plainly more ephemeral balconies, columns and beams. In many ways, the building is a metaphor for the relationship (tension perhaps) between the very strong Danish Classical sensibility and the nation's romantic affection for its own landscape and the materials of which buildings are made. At the same time, it is an appropriate expression of the functions it houses.

1 Larger versions range from Henning Larsen's Trondheim University (AR September 1980), to Niels Torp's SAS headquarters in Stockholm (AR March 1989) and Ralph Erskine's World Trade Centre and bus station in the same city (AR December 1989).

2 So it is slightly surprising that the single-sided corridors at the east and west ends of the building are clad in metal and glass. (Though the spaces these skins enclose are very pleasant.)