another painted house in Copenhagen

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Galerie Helth at Sofiegade 4, in the Christianhavn area of Copenhagen. I'm not sure how I would describe this colour scheme but obviously subtle is not a word to use.

Earlier in the year I wrote a number of posts about the long, well-established tradition of painting the exterior of houses in the Nordic countries. On this trip I spent a day at Den Gamle By, the open air museum in Århus that opened in 1909 and which has a large number of urban buildings from all over Denmark that have been saved, dismantled and rebuilt there. Many of the rooms in the houses are appropriately furnished but some areas are used for good displays about aspects of trades, craftsmanship and building techniques. There is an interesting display in one house about paint and natural paint colours and about paint brushes and methods of painting with paints based on linseed oil.

Information at the open air museum, Den Gamle By in Aarhus, about natural pigments used for historic paints

Over the years I have done a fair bit of decorating and have reglazed several windows but at Den Gamle By I learnt that I had been doing it the wrong way. It is fairly obvious that glass is held in a rebate in the frame of the window with small wire nails that are carefully inserted to keep the glass firmly in place and then putty, again made from linseed oil, seals the external gap to keep out rain driven against the glass. So far so good. But I had assumed that the putty would adhere better to the timber of the rebate if the wood was left untreated. At the museum I learnt that, in fact, the frame should be painted first with several coats of paint, up to six coats, and then the glass is pinned in place and the external angles filled with putty. This is because untreated timber absorbs moisture from the putty and makes it crack and break away: sealing the wood first with paint means that the putty stays soft and flexible and therefore weather proof for much longer.

The Colours of Copenhagen

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The Colours of Copenhagen by Bente Lange was published by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in conjunction with the School of Architecture in 1997. Generally, I will only review books here that are recently published or at least still available but this is a very important work that really deserves to be reprinted. 

It sets out the history of architectural colour in the city, primarily through the 18th and the 19th centuries, and explains why the city looks as it does. There are a large number of illustrations with photographs of existing buildings as well as drawings produced for the book with colour wash showing their original appearance and a large number of historic drawings - views of buildings that have gone or buildings that have been altered. These illustrations show clearly how the look of the streets and squares has changed with changes of legislation and building regulations after a number of major fires in the city and also shows how both fashion and growing prosperity influenced the appearance of buildings in Copenhagen.

Some of the evidence for these changes comes from the detailed analysis of samples of historic paint taken from the facades and the book includes chapters on sampling and sections on pigment and binders and some technical information about cleaning or restoring the facades of historic buildings.

This was not the first book written on the subject of colour for historic architecture - John Prizeman wrote a book on English facades, Your House the Outside View, that was published in 1975 and there are several publications from the States including Paint in America, the colours of historic buildings, by Roger Moss published in 1994 by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington and both cover similar ground in their respective countries - but the colour of the historic buildings is such an important part of the character and the quality of the street scape in Copenhagen that the work by Lange is of crucial significance.

The book puts the appearance of historic buildings in the city into a wider context of social history and explains why original colours are not just of academic interest but are relevant to the appearance of the buildings now and provides well thought through arguments and reasons for their preservation in the most appropriate and sympathetic way.


traditional colours for Nordic buildings

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Forge from Ørbæk, Funen rebuilt in Frilandsmuseet, the open-air museum north of Copenhagen.

For centuries buildings throughout the Nordic region have been painted to protect them from the weather. By tradition these colours have been dark, often deep reds or ochre yellow, although by the 18th century more ostentatious or more fashionable buildings were usually painted softer grey or buff colours to imitate expensive stone. Colour was used more and more as a signal of wealth and social status.

Many of these dark colours come from minerals including Swedish red or Falu rödfarg that is made with an iron oxide from copper with zinc and silica from the mines at Falun in Dalarna. This pigment was held in a starch binder (often rye flour) mixed with linseed oil that gives a matt but durable finish.

The paint protected timber cladding and framing and its infill and in some places it was popular because with white painted or inscribed lines it imitated high-quality brick - a much more expensive building material. 

Blue paints in particular, using ultramarine or Prussian Blue and later cobalt, were not only expensive but faded or reacted with the lime in mortar and plaster so the colour was used less often on the exterior. Chrome oxide and zinc were available for deep green colours from the early 19th century onwards but again these were expensive pigments and were not as common as red or ochre yellow.

It is deep dark red that is seen most on the outside of buildings throughout the Nordic region for farm houses, barns and summer houses and there is a Finnish expression - punainen tupa ja perunamaa - a red house and a potato field - said to suggest that that is all you really need in life to be happy.

Timber-framed buildings in a courtyard in Copenhagen

Timber-framed buildings on Grønnegade in Copenhagen

A single-storey building in Roskilde, Denmark

A row of small house in Ystad in Sweden

Traditional houses surviving in Oslo

Timber houses along Bryggen, Bergen. Image from Wikipedia - click for longer version of the block

A 17th-century timber-framed building in Køge, south of Copenhagen

Detail with the date of the house in Køge

Carved and painted framing to a house in Køge

Striking colour in Køge - note the benches with ornate stone ends that flank the doorway

Detail of a window in Køge

Mäster Mikæls gate, Södermalm, Stockholm. These houses were built after a fire in 1723 that destroyed an extensive area, but before regulations in 1736 prohibited the construction of houses in timber.

A row of houses in Södermalm, Stockholm

Darnstredet in Oslo

House on Store Strandstræde in Copenhagen showing that use of dark colours survived even in 18th and 19th-century buildings

19th-century buildings in a street south of the cathedral in Helsinki

traditional colours in Copenhagen

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In the historic centre of Copenhagen many of the buildings are painted in strong traditional colours. Timber framing, plaster render and stucco, brickwork and woodwork can all be painted. It is the variations of colour, within a relatively restricted range, that helps to create the strong sense of place.

Colours that were fashionable changed as architectural styles evolved. Højbro Plads illustrates some of those different styles, colours and materials. There is a substantial house that copies polychrome brick facades of the 17th century, houses in more restrained colours imitating stone, typical for buildings from the 18th and 19th century, and above is the natural unpainted brickwork of the church of Sankt Nikolaj. This photograph also shows the colour and texture of the most common traditional roofing materials for historic buildings in the city - clay pan tiles, grey slate and, for church spires and more important public buildings, copper. The spire of Sankt Nikolaj dates from 1909 and replaces a spire that was destroyed in the great fire of 1795.

 

Timber-framed houses on Grønnegade are painted the dark red that was common through the 17th century. These buildings were just outside the part of the old city that was damaged in the fire of 1728.

 

Here the timber framing was also painted red. The paints made from mineral pigments were oil based using linseed which gives a durable but matt finish. The house is on the corner of Gammel Mønt and Møntergade and was on the edge of the large area of the city lost in the fire of 1728.

 

Buildings across the south side of a square at Gräbrødretorv in an area of the city that had to be rebuilt after the fire of 1728. The traditional red colour has been used along with white window frames. It is important that the colours vary slightly in tone or hue for each individual property - but this is in part inevitable as colours change or fade over a number of years. A consistent colour across the whole group would be monotonous. Texture of the surface is also important effecting the way light is reflected - plaster is rough and brickwork under the paint often of poor quality.  Restoration or modern work that is too smooth and consistent can look lifeless in comparison.

 

A large 18th-century house showing that the use of strong colours continued. It is flanked by houses that were rebuilt or remodelled in the following century. 

 

Along with the deep reds, a strong dark ochre was also used. This is Magstræde looking east. The houses towards the junction are left as natural brick, much more common in this area that was extensively rebuilt after the fire of 1728.

 

Nybrogade, Copenhagen. The brick house on the left is typical of buildings constructed after the fire of 1728. The mansion in the centre was built in 1732 forJ Ziegler who was the Court Confectioner and the adjoining buildings to the right, one dated 1748, are typical of the grey and cream stone colours that were common in Copenhagen through the second half of the 18th and in the early 19th century.

 

Canal-side warehouses are usually robust and straightforward in their architecture but these examples show how important colour is ... particularly the strong colour but matt finish of the shutters.

 

Where high-quality building materials were used they were usually left unpainted. The window flanked by stone pilasters is on the facade towards Bredgade of Moltkes Palæ (mansion) completed in 1702 and the smaller, less ostentatious brick house on Nikolaj Plads appears to date from roughly the same period.

 

By the second half of the 18th century larger houses were given ornate plaster decoration including as here pilasters and cornices. In many, pilasters were painted darker buff colours to imitate sandstone. This house is on the Christianshavn side of the harbour on Overgaden Oven Vandet outside the area damaged by fire in 1795.

 

Houses immediately south of Vor Fruhe Kirke, that were almost-certainly built after the fire of 1795. Pale colours - white, cream and grey - came to predominate in the first half of the 19th century.

 

Apartments just beyond Østerport railway station. This area was just outside the city defences and building here was only allowed after the walls and gates of Copenhagen were demolished in the 1850s. Fine plasterwork or stucco and the pale cream colour imitates ashlar. White or grey paint remained fashionable in the city but by the late 19th century new apartments, for instance around Nørreport, were built in better quality red brick that was left unpainted.

 

colour in architecture 1

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These photographs of two streets in Copenhagen have been posted to show that it is difficult, if not impossible, to make hard-and-fast rules about the use and effect of colour in architecture. Each situation appears to be unique.

The first photograph is of houses and gardens in Brumleby, in the north part of the city, on the west side of Østerbrogade and south of Østerbro Stadium. The houses were built in the middle of the 19th century, were designated as a historic site in 1959 and were restored in the 1990s.

Clearly the original colour scheme, with an ochre colour for the lower level and pale grey above the sills of the upper windows, was retained - a decision presumably determined by the importance of the historic buildings. In exploring the site it appeared to me that the subdued colours helped to create a sense of unity for the close community living there. As I walked around taking photographs early one evening, people from various houses were sitting out in the gardens talking or eating and drinking outside with their children playing together.

The second photograph is of a row of houses in a street called Olufsvej. Here clearly there is no unified scheme of decoration … in fact the opposite ... with houses painted to express the individual taste and individual style of the occupants.

Yet here too, there were communal tables set out in the street right on the pavement where people could eat outside or sit and talk or children could play.

What makes it even more interesting is that the street is immediately south of Brumleby with the rear gardens of these houses backing on to the gardens of the earlier estate. 

It would seem that colour can influence but not determine the way that people use buildings.

Brumleby - or the Medical Association housing scheme - is important and of considerable interest in the history of public housing in Copenhagen. The estate was built as a direct response to a severe epidemic of cholera in the city in 1853 when, over a short period of only a few months, 5,000 people died. The reasons for the outbreak were clear. The city was still defended by a series of walls, ditches and gateways and for simple reasons of military strategy no building construction was allowed immediately outside the defences so, as the overall area of the city was fixed, a rapid growth of population in the first half of the 19th century led to massive over crowding and insanitary living conditions in some parts of the city. Contagious diseases were hard to control in such housing.

The immediate response to the crisis by a Dr Emil Hornemann was to propose building new houses for working families in an area just outside the city defences. A decision was made quickly and work on the new houses started at end of 1853 and over the first four years 240 housing units were completed. A second phase was built between 1866 and 1872. The finished estate with over 500 houses has four long main rows but with space for wide gardens between and community buildings included a kindergarten, a bathhouse and a meeting hall.

 

Architects: 

For the Brumleby estate the initial stage was designed by Michael Gottlied Bindesbøll and the second stage of work on the estate designed by the architect Vilhelm Klein.

 

colour in architecture 2

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Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen has a major collection of Greek and Roman antiquities that are displayed in a series of large, top-lit galleries that were added to the museum in the first decade of the 20th century.

Statues and busts, set on simple plinths, are carefully spaced so that each piece can be seen clearly from most angles and appreciated as an individual work of art.

Nearly all the sculptures are the soft pale colour of the original stone from which they were carved, although a few pieces are made from expensive coloured marble, and most have fine, intricate carved details. Any decoration in the architecture of the room would be a distraction so the walls of the galleries are plain but are painted in strong, dark colours with a different colour for each room - including a dark blue, a deep dull or sage green and a deep brick red.

Different colours are used for different periods or different countries and the scheme would not be as effective if the same colour had been used through all the rooms. However, two of the photographs here are duplicated in black and white to show that, in part, the success of the scheme is achieved by using colours that, although very different in hue, are close in tone to give some but subtle visual unity to the sequence of rooms and to allow for a consistent level of artificial lighting for the whole collection.

This is very confident use of colour in interior design - not only appropriate for the simple, architectural style of the rooms themselves but providing a good background for the statues. 

 

A fascinating part of the display includes a Roman bust of a young man alongside a duplicate that has been painted. The colours are accurate, recovered by careful analysis of fragments of paint that had survived in deeper under cutting in the carving of the original piece. This dark polychrome effect, imitating natural or lifelike colours for flesh, hair and, most striking, the eyes is initially a shock … our general preconception is that classical sculptures were, are and should be stone coloured. That originally many piece of classical sculpture were strongly coloured like medieval and 16th-century sculpture is a challenge because, with their colour restored, the works look as if they should date from the 19th century and look as if they come from a macabre wax works. It is as if our sense of good taste has been offended.

Of course, this research also has implications for our preconceptions about the overall appearance of the temples and palaces where these sculptures were originally displayed because since the classical revival, particularly with buildings from the 18th and 19th century, we have seen classical architecture as tastefully restrained - in effect we are seeing the Classical World through 18th-century eyes and 18th-century perceptions: the sun-bleached columns and pediments of pale limestone that we admire as tourists do not show the buildings as they would have been seen by the people of ancient Athens or ancient Rome.

 

Obviously this raises fascinating and broader issues about colour in modern architecture and design: for a start, should pieces of furniture only be made in the colours initially determined by the designer; should interiors be restored to original colour schemes even if that challenges modern taste or does a change of cladding material on a building or a new cover in a pattern or a new colour for a piece of furniture diminish the value and importance of the original design or simply make it more relevant for the present period? To what extent does what we see as accepted good taste now control how we see and appreciate art and architecture from the past?

The significant research work on paint analysis and original colour by the staff at the Glyptotek is to be marked by a major exhibition at the museum in the Autumn with the title The fourth dimension: colour in ancient sculpture. It will open on the 4th of September 2014 and run through until the end of November.

 

Additional notes:

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Dantes Plads, Copenhagen

Collection donated to the State in 1888 by Carl Jacobsen, son of the founder of the Carlsberg brewery. 

A new purpose-built museum designed by the architect Vilhelm Dahlerup opened in 1897.

Architect for the second phase, built between 1901 and 1906, was Hack Kampmann

Most recent additions and alterations to the museum are by Henning Larsen in 1996, by Dissing + Weitling around 2006 and then by Bonde Ljungar Arkitekter

colour in architecture 3

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In looking through images for posts about colour in architecture I came across these photographs of three staircases that in date are spread over a period of nearly two hundred years.

They are all in important public buildings and are all of their period and they demonstrate different approaches to the way that colour can be used in the design of interiors. The important point is that these should not be seen in terms of interior decoration, as in paint and wallpaper interior decoration, because these staircases, through the deliberate choice of materials, were given permanent colour schemes by their architects.

The first is the main staircase in a building in Oslo designed by Christian Grosch (1801-1865) and completed in 1830 for Norges Bank. It was restored at the beginning of this century and since 2008 it has housed the National Museum of Architecture.

This staircase is matched by a flight on the opposite side of the entrance hall giving a grand double access to an upper landing and to the board room of the bank on the first floor. The form of the handrail and its support is a stripped down classical style that continues the form of the facade which has a pediment over the centre. The impression created in the entrance hall is a sense of solid reliability: well built and built to last but not extravagant. The use of colour with the tile effect on the walls is restrained but confident.

The broad white staircase with a yellow floor is the main stair in the Sanatorium in Paimio in Finland - one of the first major buildings designed by Alvar Aalto and completed in 1933. 

Aalto designed not only the building but also fittings and furniture for the hospital and natural lighting and colour schemes were very carefully considered. The yellow on the stair is an original feature and gives a sense of it being clean without being starkly clinical. This was a tuberculosis hospital where patients were isolated, often for long periods, and spent much of their time on the balconies and roof terrace in the fresh air resting. 

The style of architecture and the concrete construction of much of the building relates it to contemporary work elsewhere in Europe including, most obviously, work by Le Corbusier, ten years older than Aalto, and the style, sometimes called the International Style, with plain white walls, large wide windows, often with metal rather than timber frames, and balconies, can be seen in works by Arne Jacobsen such as the Bellavista apartments north of Copenhagen completed in 1934. Jacobsen was ten years younger than Aalto.

Bright strong primary colours are found first in works from the Bauhaus group in Germany and the De Stijl group of architects and designers in the Netherlands and is a rejection of the use of heavy, rich or dark colour and ornate decoration in the previous century that was felt to be unnecessary. Colour, style and materials are all used to indicate a new start in this period after the Great War.

The concrete and steel staircase on the right is in an addition to the Royal Library in Copenhagen by Schmidt, Hammer & Lassen that was completed in 1999. The main way to upper levels from the main entrance to the building is by moving walkways or ramps so this is a secondary staircase but never-the-less it is of an extremely high quality in terms of both design and materials.

Concrete, glass and steel are robust and now of course common building materials and we tend to perceive them as “natural” colours.

In fact concrete can be coloured and glass for windows is invariably tinted - usually grey or soft blue or even light green. Clear glass is not only dangerous where people are walking around but it actually looks flat and lifeless - from the exterior sharply clear colourless glass can make windows look like blank holes punched in the facade - and from inside sunlight through very clear glass can be so bright that it is painfully unforgiving. 

Elsewhere in the stair halls and circulation spaces of the library, natural timber and high-quality leather are used to soften the design and add warmth but also reinforces this feeling of natural colour. The colours and tones of the staircase in the Royal Library were as carefully considered as the colour schemes of the other staircases.