concrete and steel in the 1930s

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The Deutscher Werkbund - the German Association of Craftsmen - held an exhibition in Stuttgart in 1927 that included houses and apartment buildings - the Weissenhof Estate - designed by German architects but also by architects from Belgium, France and the Netherlands. New construction techniques for domestic buildings were shown … here an open steel frame infilled with concrete blocks for an apartment building designed by Mies van der Rohe

 

Arne Jacobsen at the SAS building during construction with Copenhagen City Hall in the background

Until the 20th century, the main materials for building construction in Europe were natural … so stone as a strong but usually expensive walling; timber for wall framing, roofs and architectural fittings including windows and doors. Natural materials were not of course always used in their found state but were modified or transformed by builders so sand for glass; plaster for covering internal and external surfaces; clay fired for bricks and roof tiles and, of course, lime for mortar and for cement. Perhaps the biggest change to the structural form and then, as a direct consequence, to the appearance of buildings in modern Denmark came with the more and more frequent use of concrete and steel … not just for industrial buildings but for housing and apartment buildings and for new large building types and particularly where high or wide and open enclosed spaces were wanted that were unencumbered by walls or internal supports.

The use of concrete and steel are now so common for building that we rarely stop to consider that both can be used in many different ways. Someone might say “… oh it’s a glass and steel block …” but that’s about as useful in helping to conjure up an impression or mental image of a building as saying that a meal was meat.

In the 1920s and 1930s steel was not always used for a complete frame of a building but could be used as simply a reinforcement for lintels and supports for wide openings but with traditional building materials for the wall itself and similarly concrete could be used for piers and frames to support large open floor spaces or it could be used poured into shuttering for panels for walls that could support considerable weight or concrete could be used cast in moulds for building blocks, used with mortar like stone or brick, or used for ornate features that could be reproduced easily and much more cheaply than when previously such features of a building were carved in stone. Above all, in terms of how the appearance of everyday buildings changed, reinforced concrete can be used with minimal support or can be cantilevered out from the facade for thin canopies or for balconies.

Arne Jacobsen’s own house in Ordrup should be seen as an important building at a pivotal stage in house design. Completed in 1929 it appears to be a modern and ground-breaking house with plain smooth white walls in the International Style that was then becoming fashionable but in fact, at that point, Copenhagen regulations did not allow concrete to be used in house building so the walls are actually built in brick and were then rendered and even the apartments at Bellavista completed in 1934 - perhaps the most iconic representation of the modern style of the 1930s in Denmark - are again brick rendered with plaster. 

Jacobsen did use concrete in the Mattsson riding building just north of the apartments - also completed in 1934 - to roof over a wide high space and concrete became more and more important in his work in housing but more frequently for the industrial and commercial buildings he designed.

There is an amazing photograph taken of Jacobsen with others at an upper floor of the SAS Hotel in Copenhagen looking out over the city before the tower was clad in glass. The impression of the building now, for most people, is of a light and thinly elegant block but the outside cladding and the internal fittings cover the underlying structure and this photograph and photographs of the tower under construction show clearly a massive and robust concrete structure. 

With potential problems with transport and access to the site, the concrete parts were not formed in a factory and brought to the city centre - a later and the more usual method - but the floors and cross walls were cast on site.

One obvious benefit from this substantial sub structure and the substantial internal supports is that there are no corners to the building … or rather the corners are formed by the windows and panels of the adjoining fronts being abutted to form a thin and almost invisible corner.

 
 
 

​when we get to the future

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In 1927, the architects Arne Jacobsen and Flemming Lassen - exact contemporaries and old school friends - won a competition to design a House of the Future which two years later was constructed for the Housing and Building Exhibition at the Forum in Copenhagen. 

The exhibition hall itself was then a new building that had been completed in 1926 with the design by the architect Oscar Gundlach-Pedersen. He was sixteen or seventeen years older than Jacobsen and Lassen but, although he had trained at the time when national romantic architecture was fashionable and his first works were in that general style, he was interested in new materials and new building techniques and as early as 1922 published an article where he talked about buildings that use these new materials “that are not encumbered with tradition.”

Radiohuset - immediately opposite the Forum - is another key building of the period. Designed by Vilhelm Lauritzen, it was the radio studios of Danish Radio but there was also also a large concert hall. It is now the Royal Danish Music Conservatory. Building work there did not begin until 1936 and it was not finished until 1942.  

Lauritzen was eight years younger than Gundlach-Pedersen so eight years older than Jacobsen and Lassen. He had graduated in 1921 and in the following year started his own office. Of the four architects, he was the only one to visit Stuttgart in 1927 to see an important exhibition there of modern houses - the Weissenhoff Exhibition - that was organised through the Deutsche Werkbund but coordinated by the architect Mies van der Rohe with buildings from seventeen architects. Most were from Berlin, with two buildings designed by Walter Gropius, but there were also houses by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Josef Frank. This major exhibition really marked the crucial point of change for modern European architecture when the terms Futurism and Functionalism were broadly adopted for houses that were designed for what was seen as a very different society and a very different style of living. 

Many of the buildings had metal-framed windows in long horizontal strips, balconies with metal hand rails, simple plastered external walls - usually white but some painted in strong colour - and there were flat roofs used in housing rather than for industrial buildings. These were all features that were to be adopted by Danish architects through the 1930s and 1940s … in fact, all features that are accepted as normal in designs for housing today.

In 1929 Jacobsen was in his late 20s, having recently completed his studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and recently married. Both he and Lassen, as ambitious young architects, had a pretty clear and a confident idea of what should be possible in their work in the future and it is generally accepted that the House of the Future, one of the first buildings by what was to be called the Functionalist School of architects. was the building that launched Jacobsen’s career. 

The plan of the house was a ring of rooms around a central living room that were set out to take advantage of natural light as the sun moved round. There was a flat roof to the house where the owner could land in his helicopter and a garage for a car that appears in the drawings to be a swish sports car with a drop top. At the bottom of the building, that was set by the water, was a boat house for a stylish if not very streamlined speed boat. 

The vision of a bright future for all or just wishful thinking for the few? 

The garage door opened automatically as the car approached; there was a mat at the entrance where suction removed dirt from the visitor’s shoes; windows dropped down with the turn of a handle, like the windows in contemporary cars; there were built-in typewriters; a pneumatic mail system and curiously the kitchen was relatively simple as it was assumed that meals would arrive ready-prepared from a central kitchen.

Within ten years, most of Europe was caught up in a war that put the future on hold. Some of the houses at the Stuttgart site, unlike The House of the Future, designed and built to be permanent, were damaged or lost and in 1943 the Forum itself was destroyed by the Danish Resistance as an act of defiance against the German occupation and it was not rebuilt until 1947. By then the future was over or at least the Functionalist Movement in Architecture had moved on but these architects had left an important group of building around the city - including town halls, office buildings, department stores and large blocks of social housing and apartments that had been built through the 1930s and those buildings set the standard and established the style and used new building techniques that we would now accept as truly modern.

 

a series of posts on the architecture of Arne Jacobsen

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The National Bank of Denmark, Havnegade 5, Copenhagen - winning design in the closed competition of 1961, built in two phases and completed in 1978

 

Arne Jacobsen was the most important and the most innovative Danish architect and designer of the 20th century. Certainly he has a well-established International reputation but perhaps some do not automatically associate the work of Jacobsen with the idea of innovation, in part because many of his buildings are well-known and familiar and probably half the homes in Denmark have at least one Jacobsen chair but also because we are all now so used to seeing buildings that are taller, bigger, more exciting or more dramatic. That is unfair … obviously it's not, to use an English phrase, a case of familiarity breeding contempt but his buildings have to be seen and judged in the context of the period through which he lived. It is then that you can see just how innovative and important his buildings and his furniture designs really were. 

Jacobsen trained as an architect in the 1920s, established his own office in 1929 and continued to work on major projects through to his death in 1971. Born in Copenhagen at the very beginning of the 20th century, the buildings of his child hood were cluttered middle-class apartment buildings and grand new, or then relatively new, public buildings in red brick that piled together motifs from Renaissance Germany, French palaces and Danish buildings from the 17th century. At the end of the road where he grew up was a new dock, the Free Port opened in 1904, that had huge warehouses and administrative buildings that owed more to pattern books of bits from north European baronial halls than to anything we would now see as appropriate for industrial buildings yet little more than 20 years later, as an ambitious and recently-qualified young architect, Jacobsen was designing a house “for the future” that was circular with a garage on one side - at a time when few owned a car - and with a boat house on the other side for a swish motor launch and a landing pad for a sort of helicopter, an auto gyro, on the roof. A fantasy of sorts - a winning entry for a competition organised by the Federation of Danish Architects in 1928 - but actually realised if only for a short time in 1929 for an exhibition on housing at the Forum in Copenhagen.  

Through the 1920s and into the 1930s Jacobsen trained with and then worked with the young Danish architects who were looking at architecture in a much more rational way - the Functionalists - building new and better and more practical versions of all those apartment buildings of the late 19th century but trying to improve the quality of mass housing. Many of those buildings, despite many ‘modern’ features seem rooted in the 1930s but Jacobsen developed a sharper, cleaner aesthetic - a remarkably refined use of new technologies and new building methods that exploited and developed to the full the relatively new combination of concrete and steel and he made the use of standard windows and doors and fittings, produced in a factory rather than on site, into a positive and strong characteristic of his buildings. In essence he designed modern buildings that from this view point, well into the 21st century, look good but nothing special but when they were built must have been astounding. Perhaps, in a curious way, Jacobsen’s building look less significant than they really were because we have finally caught up with him.

 

Housing for young couples, Ved Ungdomsboligerne, Gentofte 1947-1949

And he designed a remarkable range of buildings from a large number of compact family houses, mostly in brick, larger villas, apartment buildings, theatres, factories and town halls, buildings for sport and leisure, including an indoor riding school, and what was, at its completion, a groundbreaking hotel and air terminal for SAS in Copenhagen, along with major international commissions and of course his design of the National Bank in Copenhagen, one of his last works. 

He was and is equally well known for his furniture - many of the designs still in production - and that is where you begin to see the intriguing contradictions in his work. It seems difficult to reconcile, as the work of a single imagination, the elegant but flat, almost-mechanical and certainly graphic and strictly geometric design of the exterior of the SAS hotel, the product of precise lines on a drawing board, with the sculptural boldness of the Egg Chair and the Swan Chair designed for the same building and then see the same hand, let alone the same design aesthetic, in the water colour drawings he produced and the floral wallpapers he designed when he was in exile in Sweden in the mid 40s … just a few years before he designed the hotel.

 

3316, The Egg, designed for Fritz Hansen in 1958 and displayed here at their showroom at Pakhus 48 in Copenhagen

What is also remarkable - in a period when major architects seek and win commissions all over the World - is that Jacobsen remained in Copenhagen, the city where he was born, and so, within a relatively small area, it is possible to see a large number of the buildings he designed. He worked on the town hall in Århus, designed factories in Germany and designed a complete college in Oxford but even for those projects he had a small team in his office and they worked from his studio in his home, first in Ordrup, on the north side of Copenhagen, and then after the war, less than 2 kilometres away, in a new house that was one of a row that Jacobsen designed just above the beach and overlooking the Øresund at Klampenborg.

With relatively good weather and the sharper light of the Spring, this seemed like a good time to look at and photograph a number of Jacobsen’s buildings in and around Copenhagen and to produce a number of posts for this site and also a pretty good excuse for the first trip of the summer to the Bella Vista beach.

 

Over a period of a month or so, it was clearly not possible to do a lot of detailed or original research for a series like this but a good time to look and think and the advantage of an online format is that it’s possible to present a lot more images than in a magazine article or a book and, if it is possible to get access to more buildings or return to buildings in better weather or different light, new photographs will be added to these posts.

all in the detail … geometry and proportion in buildings by Arne Jacobsen

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Towards the end of his life, in an interview that was published in Politiken in 1971, Arne Jacobsen explained that “the main thing is proportioning. Proportioning is what makes the beauty of old Greek temples classical. Like great blocks from which the air is literally carved out between the columns. And whether we look at a building from the Baroque, from the Renaissance, or from our own time the ones we wish to look at, the ones we admire - they are all well-proportioned: this is what is decisive.”  1

It is a comment that reveals much about an underlying aesthetic principle that was at the core not only of his architecture but also his designs for furniture and interiors … an aesthetic that can be seen in major works of this late period of his career such as St Catherine’s College in Oxford or his last major commission for the National Bank in Copenhagen. Not just buildings designed with elegant proportions but buildings that are calm and monumental in a way that is closely reminiscent of the best classical buildings.

 

 

That vivid and evocative description of “air carved out between the columns” provides one key to understanding buildings like Søllerød town hall but, equally, carefully resolved proportions are elemental to the design of small houses, in Jacobsen’s designs for gardens and as a key characteristic of his furniture.

He clearly saw the design of an elevation - the arrangement of doors and windows, their relative size and their spacing with an appropriate balance between the openings and solid wall - as an opportunity to use a rational grid as the underlying framework and he used geometry and mathematically determined proportions, not just for the overall outline of a facade but also for the features or the constituent parts of a design.

To some extent, the use of standard and repeated units for the elevations of large modern buildings and regular and equal floor heights repeated up the building would have created a grid pattern in any case but Jacobsen applied a system of proportions to the facades in buildings through the 1930s and then on into his post-war works, trying different arrangements for each design but becoming more complicated with each project.

 

 

Nyropsgade 18, Copenhagen  building for A Jespersen & Son,    completed in 1955

 

The City Hall, Rødovre Rødovre Parkvej 150 1956

 

SAS Royal Hotel, Hammerichsgade 1-5, Copenhagen 1960

 

A careful use of geometry and proportion is less obvious in smaller brick houses simply because, when compared with the front of an office building like the Jespersen block, the use of a design grid is clearly less pronounced but in the design for his own house at Gotfred Rodes Vej, the plan of the main room on the ground floor has the proportions of a golden rectangle and although ceiling heights are not given on the plan used for writing this post, a height of 2.5 metres, which is quite reasonable for a house of this size, would mean that it is possible that heights and therefore the volume or space within the house were also determined by golden proportions. The side block of that house, including the staircase, kitchen and dining room on the ground floor, is certainly a golden rectangle externally, and interlocking with that space, the staircase, the entrance hall and the small room to the right of the entrance in their overall dimensions define another golden rectangle so, at the very least, the starting point for the plan of his own house in 1929 was a geometric framework based on the golden section which was then developed into the final design even if every room and every feature did not fit precisely into a proportional straight jacket.

Jacobsen’s later home at the east end of the row at Strandvejen is even less obvious as a design based on geometry because there rather than the simple blocks and flat roofs of the first house, obvious geometric blocks, his post-war house is in a terrace or row and has a long narrow footprint and sloping roofs but even there the starting point appears to be a grid based on golden rectangles. The main part of those houses is a long block running north south and, starting with the width of that block, then it’s length is two golden rectangles set end to end and the main room on the top floor has the proportions of a golden rectangle. In Jacobsen’s own house in the terrace, because it is at the end of the row, it has space for an additional block on the east side that contains rooms on all three levels and that is based on a square with the dimension that is the starting point of the two golden rectangles of the main block.

For larger buildings such as the SAS Hotel in Copenhagen, Jacobsen was clearly aware that with the industrialisation of building construction, where you use a large number of components that were made in a factory and assembled on site, including all the windows, then to get the proportions of a single unit wrong would mean that that potentially ugly or disproportionate elements would be multiplied along the length of the facade or throughout the building to compound a poor design: it was essential that each part had to be not only well made but also well proportioned.

In fact, for the SAS Hotel in Copenhagen, not only was the design of the elevation based on geometric proportions but the basic window width of 60 centimetres, or multiples of that dimension, was used by Jacobsen for standard furniture and fittings for the rooms, including bedside tables and bed headboards so that furniture and fittings could be used in different positions and different combinations but still relate to the basic proportions of the space.  

Jacobsen trained at a time when both classicism and functionalism were dominant in Danish architecture and surviving drawings show that he studied classical buildings on trips to Italy …that included visits to Paestum. 

Nor is Jacobsen alone in using not just proportion but specifically the golden rectangle or golden proportion at this time.

In Norway the academic Frederick Macody Lund (1863-1943) was involved in a long-running dispute about the restoration of Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim where he contended that the design of the medieval building had been based on the Golden Section and argued that geometry should be the principle control for any new work. The controversy this created was published in 1915.

In 1920, just before Jacobsen began his training at the Academy, Ivar Bentsen (1876-1943) produced designs for a new Philharmonic Building in Copenhagen where the fenestration was based on the Golden Section so the upper windows were square 5 by 5, the windows below that 8 by 5, then below that level windows13 by 5 and the lower row of openings was 21 high by 5 wide … in fact a ground floor and mezzanine. The dimensions of the windows are a progression based on golden proportions but presumably that was not immediately obvious even to someone interested in geometry.

That is part of the problem with using geometry: it is a useful tool as a starting point but if applied slavishly can produce a design that at best is mechanical and at worst is seen as something esoteric or downright obsessional when the geometry is pointed out to most people … even to many architects.

That is not to suggest it has no value. For thousands of years, artists and architects and designers have realised that certain shapes and certain lines are seen as more attractive or even as more beautiful than others and actually most people can appreciate that difference. As soon as you say that something looks a bit thin or something looks rather squat then you are making a judgement about the proportions.

Steen Eiler Rasmussen discussed this in his general work on architecture, Om at opleve arkitektur, published in 1957 and published in English as Experiencing Architecture in 1959.

In a chapter on Scale and Proportion, he talks about mathematical relationships and compares music and architecture … talking about composition and harmony.

“The truth” he explained, “is that all comparison of architectural proportions with musical consonance can only be regarded as metaphor … that scale and proportion play a very important role in architecture is unquestionable. But there are no visual proportions which have the same spontaneous effect on us as those which we ordinarily call harmonies and disharmonies in music.” 2

In that book Rasmussen also gives a very clear explanation of how the Golden Section is constructed and discusses how it was used by Le Corbusier in the 1920s as part of his system of subdividing or creating a series of related parts described as “Le Modular.” 

A return to simple facades with no or with much less decorative detail and a general return to symmetry and the rejection of designs that copied or adapted decorative details from earlier periods but applied them to distinctly new building types was a reaction against Romanticism. Young architects questioned why it was appropriate to use features taken from mediaeval architecture for a railway station. In 1954 the architect Kay Fisker explained bluntly that “… through a deliberate work with proportions and metrics, it was possible to reintroduce the concept of order after the individualistic chaos of the Nyrop era” … Nyrop being the architect most famously of the City Hall in Copenhagen that was completed in 1905.

Of course classical architecture, looking back to ancient Athens or Rome, for inspiration was equally used as a source of features from historic buildings whose original function had little to do with 20th-century buildings but, at least, stripped back to elements of construction then it is possible to argue that a system of vertical supports and horizontal beams - columns and lintels - the basic elements of classical buildings - created more appropriate and more practical spaces than arches and vaults and buttresses.

For Arne Jacobsen symmetry rather than asymmetry and clear honest construction used to create clean well proportioned spaces - rather than a building having a veneer of pattern that was more to do with nostalgia and romanticism than it was to to do with the real structure underneath - appealed to his own taste for clarity and for rational architecture that was essentially linear and graphic rather than sculptural and decorative.

 

 

 

Notes:

1 Quoted by Carsten Thau and Kjeld Vindum in their definitive work Arne Jacobsen (2002) page 16 

2 Steen Eiler Rassmussen, Experiencing Architecture (1959) page 105

 

all in the detail … office building for A Jespersen & Son

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The office building for A Jespersen & Son was designed by Arne Jacobsen and completed in 1955.

Just a few streets from the SAS Hotel, this is an elegant and beautiful building but its apparent simplicity is deceptive because all the details of the facade, the proportions of the separate parts and even, what was then, the very advanced engineering underlying the construction were all very carefully considered. 

Through a precise and exacting process to refine the design, Jacobsen worked hard to get a building that looks so simple and so right by a process of reduction and simplification for not just the overall design but also for all the individual elements.

It is an important building because, at a remarkably early date, it exploited complex and novel engineering methods. With a cantilevered concrete frame, Jacobsen overcame exacting planning stipulations; made possible an open plan inside the building and allowed him to design an incredibly stripped down and elegant and sophisticated facades on the exterior.

This is not a brutal building but concrete construction at its most subtle and sophisticated.

The building is in an interesting part of the city that has a complex history. 

Nyropsgade, running north south, is between the main railway line to the east - the line that heads out of the main station to first Vesterport Station and then on to Nørreport - and, to the west there is Sankt Jørgens Sø - the southernmost of the lakes on the west side of the city.

This is a curious part of Copenhagen - close to the station and close to Tivoli and the busy area around the city hall - but most cyclists and most car traffic use the busy roads to the east and west or cut across the north or south end of Nyropsgade so many may not realise that Nyropsgade opens out at the centre to a long but well-proportioned square.

The Jepersen building is at the top or north-west corner of the square with the front facing you if you approach Nyropsgade along Dahlerupsgade.

Until the middle of the 19th century this area was outside the city defences and the lakes to the west were then larger with more irregular outlines. In the late 19th century, after the defensive walls and embankments of the old city were dismantled, the main railway station for the city was in this area, on the north side of Vesterbrogade - approximately in the position of what is now the present Vesterport suburban station - and there were railway sidings and what appear from the maps to have been water works between the station and the edge of the lake. 

 

A new main railway station, the present building, was built on a new site a block south of Vesterbrogade and was finished in 1911.

The route for rail tracks in and out of the station were altered. Whereas, the earlier station was a terminal with all lines heading out to the north over the lakes by what is now Gylensløvesgade, after 1911 the main line headed out south and curved below Vesterbro and a new rail line, connecting the present station to Østerport, previously a terminal for trains from the north, was completed in 1917 with the tracks set down in a deep cutting that followed the line of the main streets of Nørre Voldgade and Øster Voldgade.

With the construction of a new city hall, finished in 1905, the area to the north of the city hall square and Vesterbrogade became an important new commercial district but the area between the old station and the lakes developed relatively slowly.

A very large apartment block, Vestersøhus designed by Kay Fisker, was completed in 1939, with a long narrow courtyard behind it, but further building work in the area was delayed by the war and Nyropsgade with its office blocks dates mostly from the 1940s and later.

 

Nyropsgade from the south

That long courtyard behind the Fisker apartments actually dictated the form of the building that Jacobsen designed for Jespersen & Son. The new office building was designed to bridge its relatively narrow plot so that space and, more important, traffic could flow underneath to provide access to the courtyard and to provide a route from Nyropsgade, acroos the courtyard and to an archway opposite … an archway through the middle of the apartment building, that was and is still a relatively popular way to cut through under the apartments to the lakeside road.

The solution was to place a narrow block for the main staircase and services, just 4 metres wide, along the north side of the plot with just two main, widely-spaced piers on the spine axis of the arch that support a cantilevered concrete floor system that spans the rest of the plot that is nearly 24 metres wide, with no cross walls running front to back, other than the wall of the main staircase, and no vertical supports on the front or the back wall of the building.

 

For the facades above the archway Jacobsen used a curtainwall design that was primarily glass within a grid of thin metal framing.

The main entrance into the building is from the archway into the centre of the stair block. The only other feature to cut through the ground-floor arch, apart from the two piers, is a second staircase from the basement to the first floor that is set in a glass tube, a circular staircase with a diameter of 2 metres, with its structure reduced to an absolute minimum.

At the first floor, each of those two piers is divided into a front and back column of concrete with a spine corridor running between them. 

With toilets and the lift in the narrow service block of the main staircase, the rest of each floor, on either side of this central corridor, is open plan. There are no structural cross walls or piers on either facade … the fronts are reduced to that elegant grid of large plain, undivided windows with panels below in green/grey with the same reflective qualities as the window glass. 

On the top floor there was a canteen across the street frontage and, on the courtyard side, the outer wall was set back into the building to form a long open terrace.

The cantilevered floor beams are tapered on the underside so they are much thinner on the outer wall line than they are over the central piers but even so they are not expressed and therefore are not visible on the facades … the division between floors is marked simply by a bevelled metal frame between the window below and the panel of the floor above that has the same dimensions and the same profile as the frame between the windows. There is no lintel or marked horizontal to indicate any sort of structure or support over the arch itself. The panels of the curtain wall drop just below the ceiling of the arch for the practical reason that this creates a drip course … otherwise rain in heavy storms would run down the front and then cut back under onto the ceiling of the archway.

However, although there is no lintel or beam over the archway, you can see the slope of the ceiling as it follows the taper of the cantilevered beams and the ceiling slopes down by 500 mm between the outside edges and the lowest part at the centre. Again this is a clever and subtle visual trick as the ceiling, in shadow, just gives an emphasis below the facade that might otherwise look thin and weak.

Light and shadow through the archway are also used effectively - with the light of courtyard beyond the arch and then a patch of light of the passageway through to the lake-side road - that add an element of drama to the design.

Looking across the courtyard and under the Fisker apartments to the lake beyond

From under the Fisker apartments looking back across the courtyard to the Jespersen building

 

Window glass and the panels below the windows were replaced in a major restoration about 2013.

The opaque panels below the windows are now a consistent and regular colour but photographs from before the restoration show changes of colour between the different panels that was, presumably, just degradation over time rather than being part of the initial design.

Although the panels below the windows reflect light in much the same way as the glass of the windows, the darker tone of the panels gives a horizontal banding to the front.

 

Dull dark grey/green polished stone was used to clad the narrow service block on the street frontage and this was taken through the ground floor within the arch but concrete blocks of the same size were used on the courtyard side. 

Overall, the simplest glazing arrangement possible, with single pane and no subdivision, means that the proportions are crucial.

The only modulation to the design is the use of a thicker metal frame to the parapet and the south edge of the windows on what would be the line of the party wall between the Jespersen building and the office building to the south. Again, because this thicker frame is set back, it achieves its effect by creating a slight shadow … almost like the line of shadow from the cut of the inner edge of a mount for a framed print.

 

This graphic quality to the design can be seen in the rational use of proportions that are a strong if understated part of the design of the facade. Stone facing tiles on the staircase block are slightly less than a double square set vertically with three panels to each floor and eight across the width of the staircase bay.

These panels on the staircase towards the courtyard are in cheaper concrete but are the same size and the stair windows, lighting intermediate landings, are exactly the same height as the panels.

The panels below the windows on the front and back facades have the same double square proportions so the whole design is fitted within a carefully proportioned grid.

 

From the Fisker apartments, looking across the courtyard to the back of the Jespersen building and through the archway to Nyropsgade beyond.
Note the roof terrace and the arrangement of the windows of the staircase fit precisely within the grid of the concrete blocks.

 

note:

for an analysis of how Jacobsen used proportions and geometry see:
all in the detail ... geometry and proportion in buildings by Arne Jacobsen