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

 

The office block for A Jespersen & Son was designed by Arne Jacobsen and completed in 1955. Just a few streets away from the SAS Hotel, this is an elegant and beautiful building but its apparent simplicity is deceptive … all the details of the facade, the proportions of the separate parts and even the what was then very advanced engineering underlying the construction were very carefully considered. Through a process of refinement, Jacobsen worked very hard to get a building that looks so simple so right by a process of reduction and refinement of the overall design and of the individual elements.

It is also an important building because, at a remarkably early date, it exploited complex and novel engineering methods with a cantilevered concrete frame that was used to overcome exacting planning stipulations but also made possible an incredibly stripped down and sophisticated design. This is not a brutal building but concrete construction at its most subtle and sophisticated.

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