a double skin … rather than a thick skin

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Wall systems with an inner and an outer face and a gap between the two is one type of facing or cladding system for more recent buildings that is not always obvious from the outside. In traditional systems, panels that form the outside wall - glass, metal, thin blocks of stone or whatever - usually have some form of insulation behind and sometimes integral systems for services such as wiring for power or even pipe work for fresh air or heating - although these services are more often set within a floor structure, hung from the ceilings or taken up through internal service ducts - and then there is an internal face of plaster or panels of wood or some form of composite but together these form a single integrated wall panel that is fitted between the floors or hung from the beams that form the roof. 

However, in some buildings, there is actually a substantial gap between the external face and an internal surface. Sometimes, this is because a façade was remodelled or upgraded and that space is necessary for a system that supports the outside wall and fixes it to the earlier building or the gap can be for an enhanced thermal barrier or a sound barrier or can be for an extensive system of beams or wires or ties whose structure allows thin internal and external walls, for instance in glass, but spanning a very wide opening or an opening rising up to a considerable height with little of what appears to be solid support.

 

to clad or to cover …..

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DR Koncerthuset, Copenhagen by Jean Nouvel 2009

 

Cladding, the general term for the external skin of a modern building, comes from the word to clothe - to clad - and with that meaning can be traced back in written English to the 1570s but the use of textiles or, more specifically woven materials, is conventional for clothing but on the exterior of buildings is still relatively unusual in European architecture.

Of course textiles are used extensively inside buildings to control how much sunlight comes into a room or to cover windows for privacy, to stop or at least restrict people outside from looking in, and textiles are used for heat insulation and to dampen down sound, particularly in a large space, but it is less conventional and less common, for some fairly obvious reasons, to use woven materials on the exterior.

Robust canvas is used for temporary structures such as tents or large marquees and for awnings but for more permanent use, throughout the year, then synthetic materials are better at resisting water, should be less susceptible to mould and should have less problems with shrinking or stretching or fading in bright sunlight.  

A summerhouse in Jørlunde, designed by Dorte Mandrup 2004, has terraces within the overall outer shell of the building and these can be closed off with large sliding screens or panels of synthetic textile for privacy or for shade or to form internal but unroofed spaces so these are like external curtains or blinds. 

But in some buildings woven materials have been used on a larger scale in what appear to be more structural ways.

DR Koncerthuset - Concert House - at DR Byen to the south of the city centre in Copenhagen or rather at the north edge of Ørestad, is one of four large new buildings for the Danish national broadcasting corporation. Designed by the architect Jean Nouvel, it was completed 2009.

 
 

It is a substantial and complex building with concert halls and a large entrance hall but it is encased in a striking and visually simple blue box of PVC coated polyester mesh. With an extensive metal framework, the woven outer face is supported well in front of windows … in fact so far forward that there is a walkway between the outer box and the walls of glass of the building itself. This woven outer cover shields the interior from direct sunlight to reduce heat gain on sunny days and prevent glare. There is a view out from the inside but during the day the mesh obscures the view into the building from outside. On this scale it might be assumed that the woven outer box would be held taut but actually sections can be raised like giant Roman blinds giving the building a slightly domestic feeling - be it on a giant scale - but at night there is real drama as the raised sections create patterns of bright light and sections of the facades can be used for the projection of images. 

 
 
 

Frederiksberg immediately to the west of Copenhagen, has a large shopping centre - Frederiksberg Centret or FRB.C that was completed in 1996 as one of the first major buildings that were part of an extensive new development on the site of railway yards and also part of the construction of the new metro. Around 2000 a broader area plan was drawn up by the Copenhagen architects Henning Larsen. That initial shopping centre, in brick, faced directly onto the main street Falkoner Allé with service roads on the north and south sides but was rather lower than adjoining buildings in what is a fairly densely built-up street scape and, in that intervening period, the shopping centre has become part of a more extensive pedestrian area of squares to the west with major new or remodelled civic buildings including a school or Gymnasium, the remodelled main library and, most recently, new law courts and, further west, new buildings for the Copenhagen business school.

The shopping centre has been extended and remodelled by the architectural practice of Krohn Hartvig Rasmussen with the work completed in 2015. The long north and south sides have become much more important, the south side in particular with surviving buildings from the old railway station on the site and the external steps down to the metro station and connects Falkoner Allé to the east with the civic buildings and squares to the west. The shopping centre has been raised in height and new shops added and the exterior of the two long sides have been covered with a taut membrane that is tensioned over a frame to create bold faceted geometric shapes that project out above the ground floor. That structure would not have been possible in more rigid materials because of weight but, as it also covers existing windows to staircases and offices, it has to be in part transparent.

The shapes project out from the original facade to form a series of shallow triangular canopies and the area of the long narrow public space will be used for outdoor markets and other events.

 
 
 

street view from Google recording the construction of the woven panels that now screen the upper part of the shopping centre

why don’t we talk about architecture more?

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extension to the museum at Ordrupgaard by Zaha Hadid

 

Relaxing with friends - maybe when sitting around a dining table at home or sitting in a pub or in a restaurant - people discuss music or talk about food or fashion at length. If the conversation becomes animated it can reveal high levels of interest, often a fair bit of enthusiasm and frequently strong opinions expressed with partisan conviction that suggests a reasonable level of knowledge. At the very least, most people can distinguish rock from pop, classical from jazz; most will have an opinion on the latest restaurant to have opened or talk about the different beers brewed in their city and - even if men say they don’t know anything at all about fashion - they have clear preferences for one make of jeans over another and can explain precisely why. 

But rarely does there seems to be an equivalent interest or general knowledge when it comes to architecture and yet we all live in buildings and all, or nearly all of us, work in buildings. We visit large, expensive, modern buildings, that might be well-designed or badly-designed, when we shop or to go to a concert. Most of us walk along streets every day and architecture impinges on almost everything we do.

If pressed, nearly everyone will go as far as to say that they like or don’t like a particular new building and will talk about an amazing building they visited on a holiday trip but it’s usually a brief or passing reference … so rarely many detail or much analysis. 

Sometimes a modern building gains a curious notoriety … a new Guggenheim or if there is controversy over a design from the star architect currently being featured in the magazines … and then people might express an opinion.

Presumably, but only in part, this is because architecture and the built environment is rarely taught in school. Major historic buildings might have been mentioned in a history class if a castle was besieged or if there was a major fire but that is about it.

Is it that architecture seems to sit on the other side of a dividing line? Furniture, design, interiors and graphics on one side are accessible, straightforward, everyday - and architecture along with painting and sculpture on the other side of the line - are the territory of the experts?

Yet curiously, at a fundamental level, we all understand and read buildings well even if we don’t realise that that is what we are doing. Architects actually make use of that to direct and control how we use buildings and control how we respond to them … we are all predictable enough that most users or visitors to a building can be directed and manipulated by the architecture. 

Some types of buildings are so distinct - such as cinemas or railway stations or swimming pools - that even on a first visit we can find our way around, without needing too many signs or instructions, simply because we know how buildings like that should be laid out and and how they should function. Good examples are department stores and large hotels … often very large and very complicated buildings but generally we know how to use them without asking anyone for help. 

 

Grundtvigs Church by Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint ... nave, font and pulpit

Churches are another particularly good and fairly straightforward example of this. Fewer and fewer people attend churches regularly but on entering a church most people understand the arrangement, as long as it is relatively conventional, with an axial approach from the entrance door to the furthest point - the business end around the altar - and the arrangement of seating and any divisions between congregation and clergy vary but show clearly the way worship is conducted. Most visitors can see how light, or shadow, and impressive height and a high-quality architecture are all used to inspire or manipulate emotions. Different parts of a church are arranged in specific ways to allow for different functions so there are often areas and fittings with clearly defined uses … fonts are given space because people stand in a group for that part of the service for a Christening and seating varies so there are usually seats that are obviously for general visitors with a different form and arrangement of seating for a choir and often special seating for anyone with clear status - so a bishop or a monarch - so most people understand where they should or should not sit. 

So looking at the design of churches is a good starting point for looking at how architecture reflects and respects function and tradition and conventions and status but actually the same form of dissection and analysis can be used to assess a football stadium or an office block. It’s often simply a matter of looking at how it works or, even better, looking at how and why it doesn’t work.

When talking or writing about buildings there is a relatively straightforward check list of obvious things to cover so usually up at the top are the name of the architect and the date of the building and of course its function. Then materials are important because, in a curious way, people have preconceptions that can help create a picture of the building even when there is no photograph … so to say that a building is a steel and glass office block is clearly very different to talking about a brick house with a tiled roof and so, without having to point it out, the reader or listener probably adds to their image picture a flat roof to the office building and by convention a house has a pitched roof, or at least in northern Europe it does, and the mention of tiles confirms that so curiously, in talking about architecture it is the differences or exceptions that should come higher up the list … so even 10 years ago it might have been important to point out that a new railway station did not have a ticket office whereas now it might be more usual to express surprise that a new railway station has a traditional ticket office.

Describing the general appearance of a building and talking about its function is relatively straightforward but it’s quite difficult to take that next step … architecture has a complex vocabulary of terms that can form a barrier between the curious but interested outsider on one side and the professional … an architect, an engineer or a planner …  on the other. But then understanding the difference between an open cantilevered stair and one with a closed string is nowhere near as difficult as deciding if a double monk-strap boot can be worn with a formal suit or if milk or lemon or neither is best for Earl Grey tea.

 

good proportions and a sense of scale

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the dome of the Marble Church in Copenhagen

Understanding how architects use proportions and scale … or rather looking at how good proportions, used properly in a design, and the construction of buildings with an appropriate scale … is essential in trying to appreciate architecture. 

Appropriate proportion and scale are not just just significant in the design of an individual building - having a strong impact on how good or how bad, how attractive or potentially how ugly, the facades are in isolation but proportion and scale are important in the relationship of the building to its setting … and not just for building in an urban streetscape but also for the way a building relates to its setting in a garden or in a natural landscape.

 In part, this is because we seem to respond instinctively to the scale of a building and can decide quickly if it looks wrong or looks right. Often this comes down to judging a building against our own human scale and normally that means deciding if it is right or wrong depending on if we feel comfortable or uncomfortable with the size of the building. 

It’s a difficult balance to get right. We can easily feel overwhelmed by a large building but we can also feel that a building is mean and too small if it’s not an appropriate scale for its function, particularly if its a civic building or a building of wider national significance. 

And what is right or wrong, in terms of the scale of a building, depends on its actual location - so a multi-storey car park, however useful, is wrong when it looms over a shopping street of historic buildings but usually quite acceptable in among office blocks.

We also have expectations for the size of buildings so many like the idea of a small cosy holiday home but we expect rich or important people to live in big houses and we are surprised or curious if they don’t. Consciously or subconsciously we make a calculation that balances scale against status. 

If scale is something we judge intuitively then an appreciation of proportion might seem rather more esoteric or at least rather more intangible. 

At its simplest, proportion is about both height and width and their relationship and also of course depth and therefore the proportions of volume or space, feeling right and appropriate whatever the size of the building and again our judgment of a building or of urban spaces is often judged against human proportions. 

But scale and proportions also have to be appropriate to the function of the building … so, for instance, in a busy airport a corridor might well be wide enough to take all the people passing through but if the ceiling is too low, little more than the height of a normal room, then it can feel crowded and noisy and unpleasant - simply because the proportions are wrong. The opposite can be true where, for instance, a high atrium at the entrance to a building can make visitors feel lost and insignificant and, of course, banks or government departments can use that effect quite deliberately in their buildings to keep people in their place. Buildings that are overbearing are often like that for very clear and specific reasons.

But proportions have a more important role when it comes to aesthetics … when trying to decide why a building is beautiful or ugly. Again it is something that we seem to respond to instinctively, even if we can’t explain exactly why it is that something doesn’t look quite right if the proportions are wrong, meaning something is too narrow for its height or the parts of a facade or the features in an interior appear to be badly related to each other in terms of their shape and their size. 

Look carefully to see why a beautiful 18th-century facade looks beautiful and it is often possible to discover an underlying geometry that determines the shape of windows and doors - the height related to the width in each - but also often a carefully set out relationship between the openings and the amount of solid wall along with the grading of features … so less important floors are lower in height but the windows, although smaller, can still relate to a grid of invisible construction lines across the whole facade.

Where it becomes more complicated is where scale and proportions that work for a building seen straight on and approached on the main axis will almost certainly not work for a similar building set in a street, only seen at a sharp angle from the side, and as well as the angle of the view, proportions have to take into account the overall height of a building … so features that appear to be quite reasonable in their proportions at ground level, if repeated higher up a facade can look squat because of the sharp angle of view.

A really good example of how these problems have to be resolved by an architect is when a building has a dome. The profile of a dome that works well inside - often something approaching a half sphere - would look too low on the outside - as if it is sinking into the roof - while a dome that looks elegant and well-related to its drum and the building below, when seen from the outside, will appear to be too narrow and much too high - almost pointed - from the inside. Normally, the solution is to build two domes - one inside, to be seen from below, and an outer dome, related in scale and proportions to the facade, with often a considerable gap between the two. It’s always interesting to find out if people looking up and admiring a dome above them realise that actually it is not strictly the dome they looked up at as they approached the building.

Of course deciding on an appropriate scale and designing something with good, basically pleasing, proportions is equally important in the deign of furniture, interiors, ceramics and glassware.

And for the clever designer, subverting what is generally seen as right for scale and shape can be made part of an intellectual game by designing buildings that challenge convention or shock the user into seeing the work in a different way. 

There are no hard-and-fast or easy rules about scale or proportion. The examples here - buildings and spaces in Copenhagen - were in part chosen because they seem to defy or at least play with ideas of scale and proportion and they also show just how easily the eye is deceived when we try to judge scale. That’s maybe the irony. Scale appears to be simple … just how big or how small something is … but curiously our eyes are often deceived whereas proportion seems all a bit theoretical and and a matter of taste but actually our eyes quickly work out if a shape is oddly squashed or elongated or just not quite square when it is meant to be and people respond instinctively to a beautifully-proportioned classical portico or the soaring spaces of a medieval cathedral where the masons used geometry to set out their work and to ensure the stability of its structure even if that geometry is not obvious when you are standing in the building. 

 

the Armoury ... the naval store built for Christian IV in the early 17th century close to the castle in Copenhagen. This is one of the most amazing spaces in the city. From outside the brick building looks large but not exceptional among other large buildings along the harbour but inside this space on the first floor is amazing ... simple in architectural terms but well built, in part because of the loads the floors had to carry with supplies for the navy, but an absolutely incredible size ... the black speck against the wall at the far end of this aisle is actually an adult and this photograph was taken from about a third of the way from the north end. Scale can be difficult to judge.

 

 

Grundtvigs Church in Copenhagen by Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint completed in 1940. Again an absolutely amazing space where again the scale is so impressive but here, unlike the Armoury, the proportions are vertical ... virtually all horizontal lines that might divert the eye are removed so there are no bases or capitals to the piers ... nothing to distract from the height, the light and the important diagonal views through the space as you walk down the nave or, here, down the aisle of the church. It is only the people that give a real sense of the height of the building

 

 

another image chosen to show how the eye can be deceived when judging scale ... this is a building on the new university campus in Copenhagen south of Christianshavn on Amager. It is difficult to judge the size of the stone blocks ... they could be bricks ... until you realise that the figure at the bottom is a student ... a student of average height ... sitting in the sun with his back to the wall to read  

 

 

Israels Plads in Copenhagen ... stone steps at the south-west corner of the recently remodelled square. The blocks read initially as a staircase until you see the figures in the distance. The risers of a staircase are normally around 15 centimetres high whereas these blocks are 36 centimetres high

 

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

 

Golden Section and Golden Rectangle

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adjustable dividers used to set out or measure golden sections and golden rectangles

Over the last year, several articles on the internet, and the comments that they have generated, have been scathing about the use of the Golden Section or Golden Rectangle as an underlying geometric system for designing a building or designing a piece of furniture or for setting out the main elements in a painting as if it was either just an odd intellectual game - and therefore obviously suspicious - or something that was so malleable that it has hardly any real meaning.  

However, it was only with developments in both mathematics and in engineering following the work of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, that architects and engineers have been able to calculate momentum and force with ever greater accuracy to determine if a building will stand up under the weight of the structure itself and will cope with thepressure from weight loaded on the floors or withstand the pressure of weather … so heavy snow on the roof or strong gale-force winds or worse blowing against the walls. 

Architects and masons in the medieval period and through the Renaissance understood that weight had to be carried down to the ground and tall thin walls, if not self-supporting, had to be propped up … so a buttresses is primarily a support for the structure and decorative only as a bonus … but they could not actually calculate loads or force. Admittedly, that hardly inhibited what they built when you look at the dome of St Peter’s or the spire of a great Gothic cathedral. 

But when architects and builders in the past wanted to push the limits - to build bigger or higher - or if they wanted to undermine the strength of a wall by inserting large doorways or windows or load the walls with a heavier form of roof or ceiling structure - there were two arguments that could be used to convince unsure clients: architects cited either precedence … something similar had been built somewhere else and it was still standing … or they used geometry by using a shape or underlying arrangement of parts that appeared to be inherently stable … so, for instance, by using an equilateral triangle as the basic element of a cross section.

From the Renaissance onwards, but actually derived from Greek and Roman theories of beauty, there was a third way to justify a design and that was to relate the proportions and the geometry of a design to the human form … preferably the perfect human form … so, Leonardo da Vinci demonstrated the underlying geometry and therefore the beauty of the human body by drawing a man, hands stretched out, fitting both within a circle and within a square. This is not the place to extend the discussion to the ideas of Divine Beauty or of God making man in his own image but it was certainly part of an attempt to analyse and categories and define what makes one shape or one building or one body beautiful and another not.

The clear and rather more practical advantage that came from using geometry or a grid to design plans and elevations was that builders, masons, brick layers or carpenters, could produce a plan or design using known geometric shapes and proportions and then lay out their work using ropes and pegs rather than using a unit of measurement.

Using a Golden Rectangle as the primary geometric control for a design has considerable appeal, in part because it is the expression of a proportional relationship but it can also, again in a very practical way, be set out with dividers or compasses on the drawing board or laid out on the ground with ropes and pegs without using measurements.

Expressed as a proportional relationship it is where a line that can be of any length is divided into two parts so that mathematically the larger part divided by the smaller part is equal to the overall length divided by the larger part.

 

When the Golden Section is used to form a rectangle by taking a Golden Section and making the shorter side of the rectangle the same dimension as the larger part of the Golden Section to - a Golden Rectangle - the subdivisions seem to take on almost magical properties because if you start with a Golden Rectangle and then divide it into two by drawing a line between the long sides to form a square then the rectangle in the other part is itself a Golden Rectangle and that can be divided again into a square and an even smaller Golden Rectangle and so on and so on down to smaller and smaller squares and rectangles. You can go in the opposite direction, expanding outwards, so by adding a square to the side of a Golden Rectangle you form a larger rectangle of exactly the same proportions … so another Golden Rectangle.

This trick of drawing a series of larger or smaller rectangle that are directly related to each other by their proportions is something that appeals to architects and designers but that same precise relationship … the larger part divided by the smaller part being equal to the whole divided by the larger part … is also found in a mathematical progression or sequence first published in 1202 by the Italian Leonardo Fibonacci in his book Liber Abaci. 

 
 
 

Arne Jacobsen was certainly not the only architect in Denmark in the 20th century to use the Golden Rectangle as a tool when he was drawing out a design. The garden designer G N Brandt divided his own garden in Ordrup - a garden Jacobsen living nearby must have known - into areas with the proportions of a Golden Rectangle and in 1925, in his design for the grounds of the Cathedral School in Viborg, Brandt set out the large area of grass below the main building with the proportions of a Golden Rectangle.

Drawings by the French architect Le Corbusier - fourteen or fifteen years older than Jacobsen - show that he used the Golden Rectangle to determine rational subdivisions of height and width for a modular system for architecture, for interiors and for furniture - and that was work that was certainly known about and discussed at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen by Kaare Klint and his pupils. And, perhaps even less obvious in the finished work, Charles and Ray Eames in the United States used a Golden Rectangle to determine the proportions of their LCW Chair from 1945/1946 so when seen from the front, the height of the seat is the same as its width, fitting tightly within a square, but, overall, the width and the overall height of the back define a Golden rectangle.

Geometry, proportion and scale were and are useful tools for the rational designer.

 

all in the detail … frame and plane

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City Hall, Rødovre (1956) - the east front and entrance porch (top) and from the east with the north wall of the later Library

 

 

Through the 1950s and 1960s Arne Jacobsen experimented with different types of curtain-wall systems for glazing and not just for office and commercial buildings but also for houses and apartment buildings. The term curtain wall is here used in it’s broadest sense to mean a building where cross walls or internal columns or piers carry the full weight of the floors and roof so that large frames that do not carry any load can be constructed to form walls with large areas of window glass. At the summer house at Strandvejen in Tisvilde on 1956 one whole wall onto a long balcony on the first floor was glazed; at Munkegård Elementary School in Søborg, completed in 1957, large areas of glass with minimal frames were used for corridors and classrooms and, even more dramatically, a curved wall of glass was constructed in the house completed for Leo Henriksen at Odden on the north coast of Sjælland in 1956.

 

 

Nyropsgade 18, Copenhagen (1952-1955)   offices built for A Jespersen & Son

detail of the frame and panels shows its simple chamfered profile. The recessed aluminium channel between the curtain wall and the adjoining building masks the line of a cross wall ... note floor levels and the position of dividing walls internally are not expressed on the elevation. The wider metal channel is set back from the window line and is taken across the top but not down the right side, against the stonework of the staircase block and nor is it used across the bottom of the windows, above the arch, giving some emphasis to the wall of windows but not framing it.

SAS Hotel, Copenhagen (1960) 

the north-west corner of the tower - there is no post or thicker element to mark the corner - frame and panels are reduced to a simple grid

 
 

houses in Bellevuekrogen in Klampenborg (1954)

 

Jacobsen encouraged manufacturers to produce thinner and thinner metal profiles for the frames, at first in timber that was clad with aluminium but then with aluminium or steel profiles, and he used geometry and proportions to design complicated arrangements of glass with closed panels below and above the windows in various materials including enamelled metal sheet, in concrete, reinforced with fibre (asbestos) and then painted, or in opaque coloured glass.

For houses and apartment buildings from the 1930s, such as the Bella Vista apartments in Klampenborg, Jacobsen used a vocabulary of architectural features that were then fashionable such as balconies and long horizontal runs of windows but with substantial areas of blank wall that give the structures a solid mass closely related in their style to works from the architects of the Bauhaus in Germany but after the War Jacobsen seem to have deliberately rejected this more robust look to create buildings that are crisply box like and in the linear compositions of their facades closer perhaps to graphic design.

The City Hall in Århus, completed in 1942, was the first major building where Jacobsen used a thin, amazingly thin, framework rising through three full floors with all the panels with glass to bring light right into the centre of the building.

When buildings have windows with metal frames and large areas of glass, an obvious challenge was to provide insulation and even, in some designs, air circulation to reduce condensation. At the City Hall in Rødovre Jacobsen experimented with steel verticals that appear from the outside to be thin fins that project beyond the front face of the window frames but are in fact T-shaped in section with the back cross piece holding in place insulation panels below the windows. Photographs of the interior in the City Hall also show power points for electricity set into these lower panels so that the thin internal cross walls, that formed individual offices, could be repositioned without having to worry about moving power and services. 

 

City Hall, Rødovre 1956 

- detail of the corner of the building showing the thicker steel upright at the ends of the facade (top) and the window frame with pivot and the frame of the panel (above) with the thin steel 'fins' between the windows.

 

the main staircase for the office range is in the south part of the entrance hall and rises through all three floors. Closed panels were omitted and the stair and entrance hall is completely glazed through the full height of the building - reminiscent of the walls of glass at the City Hall in Århus but with the metalwork forming a simpler and even more rational grid. The single-storey corridor links the entrance hall to the council Committee Chamber to the west.

 

 

 
 

Larger and larger sheets of glass were manufactured, particular after 1959 when the British company Pilkington, perfected the production of float glass. When used in windows that opened, these large sheets of glass caused some problems because of their weight.  Every other window along the fronts at the City Hall opens with robust pivots at the top and bottom corner of the frame and at the houses in Ornegårdsvej the large opening windows had pivots towards the centre of each side to form what are sometimes called tilt- or later tilt-and-turn windows. 

 

 

 

Sløjfen and Ørnegårdsvej, Gentofte (1957) houses built for A Jespersen & Son, 

 

These post-war facades can look elegant although, compared with current designs, possibly rather thin and flat but Arne Jacobsen used recession or projection, in many cases very slight, to create shadows or highlights that define the divisions of these geometric grids.

Of these designs for curtain walls, the most restrained and the most elegant is for the Jespersen office building in Copenhagen and the most complicated frameworks of glass, metal and stone panels was for the National Bank in Copenhagen, one of Jacobsen’s last works and completed after his death but a commission where there was sufficient funding to realise the design with few compromises.

For the piers at the upper level the stone cladding could have been mitred to form a neat sharp corner - see the treatment of the corners of the stone-clad end walls of the City Hall in Rødovre - or the panels of stone might have been butted up to each other with the stone of the front overlapping the stone running back into the return but the tiles of stone cladding actually meet at their inner corners forming a thin and very subtle but important vertical line down the outer corners. The same trick was used in the window bays where any form of corner element or post is omitted from the metal framing for the glass and the front and side frames of the windows appear to meet at their inner corners to create a line down the edge of the bay with a crisp precision … almost no more than using a slightly thicker pencil to emphasise the edge on a drawing.

The National Bank of Denmark, Havnegade 5, Copenhagen (1961-1971) - the front towards Niels Juels Gade (top) and from the west looking over the single-storey block (above) and the south-west corner of the main range (below)

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

 
 

all in the detail … Bispebjerg Bakke

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Plan from Arkitekturbilleder, Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademis Skoler for Arkitektur, Design og Konservering

 

It would be difficult to find two more different buildings in Copenhagen than the Jepersen office block by Arne Jacobsen and the apartment buildings at Bispebjerg Bakke from the partnership of the Danish artist Bjørn Nørgaard with the architectural practice Boldsen & Holm but what they have in common is that both designs depend absolutely on their focus on every detail of the design … not simply plan and elevations but the profile of window frames, the careful choice of the right finish and exactly the right colour for materials on the facades, the details of unique, custom-made staircases and so on.

Although the apartment buildings were completed in 2007, the initial idea for Bispebjerg Bakke went back many years before that to a conversation between Nørgaard and the chairman of the Association of Craftsmen so, from the start, an important aspect of the scheme was to have a strong link between an artistic concept and its execution with a very high level of craftsmanship.

Nørgaard made an initial model in clay so the design was organic rather than a building, like the Jespersen block, that was primarily about, what was for its date, very advanced engineering. Bispebjerg Bakke is about fluid lines and the potential for architecture to take sculptural form while the Jespersen building is about bringing to reality the beauty of a mathematically precise design. How you view the two buildings; how you experience the two buildings and how you move around and through the two buildings could hardly be more different and yet both depend on understanding completely the building methods that they exploited and both, with huge confidence, play games with forms and with styles that can only be achieved with the support of a client, willing to go with designs that were far from conventional by the standards of contemporary buildings.

Curiously, what the buildings also have in common is that the starting point for both designs was determined by their site. This might not be as obvious for the Jacobsen building, which appears to be suitable for any urban site, but the plan had to take as an unusual starting point, set by the planners, a stipulation that contact with the ground had to be reduced to the minimum as the space had to flow through from the street to the courtyard behind.

Bispebjerg Bakke could not be more different. It is absolutely and completely grounded on its landscape and follows a complex sloping site. To the west is the public road, Bispebjerg Bakke, that runs down the hill with the grounds of a large hospital opposite, and to the east of the narrow plot is a suburban railway line in a relatively deep cutting. The land drops down from the narrow north end but the road curves away to the west and the railway line curves sharply away to the east so the plot widens out as it slopes down to the south and east.

The landscape includes mature trees but it also means that the changing light as the sun moves round and views across the site and through the buildings are crucial as all the apartments have been given a dual aspect but few can benefit from direct sun from the south.

There are 135 apartments in the complex with a main building that has a sinuous line following the road, well over 400 metres long, and with a smaller second building, just under 90 metres long, to the east where the plot begins to widen out as the railway curves away. The arrangement of the apartments is in some ways quite conventional in that there are separate doorways giving access to a main staircase with just two apartments at each level, a single apartment to each side of the staircase, and the apartments run through from front to back of the block … to provide that dual aspect.

Each “block” or section is self contained with footpaths or roads between, linking the public street and path with an internal service road, with two entrance doors in each section but the roof is continuous down the length of the long building running across each pathway or road that cuts through the building. Each break is the full height from the pavement to the underside of the roof which adds considerably to the drama as the sections vary in height from three to eight storeys, the tallest section is at the north or uphill end, and the upper apartments in each section have mezzanines so have windows rising up through two tall or even two very tall floors.

The main staircases, two in each section, rise around an oval stair well and the apartments have curved walls and curved balconies so again the design appears to be organic although there is actually a strong and logical conceit in the use of materials on the different sides of the buildings that gives an interesting rationality to the design. In traditional apartment buildings from the early and mid 20th century in Copenhagen, in districts like Nørrebro, the blocks were built with what was then more expensive and more fashionable red brick on the street side and yellow brick towards the courtyard. In the city, an apartment building might be part of a longer row, forming just part of a city block, or might be around a complete block so often the junction between red and yellow brick is not visible or not particularly obvious. At Bispebjerg Bakke it is made into a distinct feature. Red and yellow brick meet at a vertical join half way through each archway and the join is emphasised with bricks projecting at a slight angle and interlocking to look almost like overstitching used on blankets or leather work.

 

There is a further game with the colour of brick used on each side of the buildings: vertical runs of window and balconies have brick columns or piers between them so, on the red-brick facades, the piers are in yellow brick and tiles, used for the sills and for the parapets of the balconies, are pale yellow but on the sides using yellow brick for the main walls, those piers are in red brick and the tiles - for the sills and balconies and for the surrounds or frames of the main entrance doorways - are red … a deep ox blood red.

Initially, on first seeing them, the doorways and balconies appear to be sculptural - rather free and organic - more Barcelona and more Gaudi than anything normally seen in Copenhagen - but then the effect depends on the very Danish precision and skill of the bricklayers and other craftsmen. Details like rain hoppers, the precision of the construction of the copper roof, the regularity of joints in the roof and the precisely shaped and coursed brickwork are all very carefully executed.

Windows are framed in jacoba wood and given a sinuous profile and inside the rails of staircases are bowed out. 

 

 

It seems odd to describe the roof as flat or even as mono pitch when in reality it swoops and twists across the building but it is certainly not pitched in the conventional sense because it does not have a ridge with inner and outer slopes. In terms of challenges, the main roof must be the most impressive part of the construction as the placing of joins in the copper sheeting must have required very careful design because there are surprisingly shallow and unobtrusive baffles and lipping to direct rain water, which can be torrential in Copenhagen, to run down the slopes to hoppers and down-pipes rather than simply cascading over the edge.

 

The curved lines of the balconies are interesting. Balconies are on the party wall and there is a central dividing pier on the line of the partition between one flat and its neighbour. The front line of each balcony curves back to the main wall line, forming a bowed, almost semi-circular front to each pair of balconies and the windows curve in from the front line of the wall to the partition to create what is, in effect, triangular balconies but with curved rather than straight lines to the front and window. Note window frames are curved but double glazing units are flat simply for practical reasons, primarily economic.  

On their web site Boldsen & Holm describe Bispebjerg Bakke as a building “where art, architecture, workmanship and technology melt into each other, in an equal and even interaction. The organic shape originates from the character of the area …”