Tingbjerg housing scheme was designed by the Danish teacher, writer and architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen with the landscape designed by C Th Sørensen.
Building work started in 1956 and was completed in 1971 and, by then, there were 3,000 homes here with most in apartments in blocks that are three storeys high - over half basements containing service rooms - although there is also one tower block and a line of single-storey homes along the west edge of the scheme.
Workers' houses on Sverrigsgade were built on a narrow and oddly-shaped strip of land between Hallandsgade and Brigadvej that had been owned by the veterinary school but, shortly after they moved to Frederiksberg in 1858, it was sold at auction, in part to private buyers and in part to LP Holmblad the manufacturer of candles, soap and paint.
A new road, then called Nygade - New Street - was laid out with two sharp angles along the length and Holmblad built houses and a school at the far end of the street on the north side of which two pairs of houses survive.
Land on the south side of the road was sold to the engineering company Burmeister Wain and they were responsible for the building of the rest of the workers' housing.
There is a drawing in the national archive - Danmarks Kunstbibliotek - of an initial scheme designed by the architect Henrik Steffens Sibbern and dated 1866.
The row houses in Lyngbyvejskvartet / Lingbyvej Quarter were built by the Workers Building Association between 1906 and 1929 for workers from Burmeister Wain and the architect was Christen Larsen who had replaced Frederik Boettger as architect to the association.
Lyngbyvej - the King's highway - is an important and historic road that runs out north from the city to Lyngby and from there on to the royal castle at Frederiksborg.
The housing is about 4 kilometres from the centre of Copenhagen. In a modern city this might not seem far but until the city defences were dismantled around 1870, the historic core of Copenhagen, on this side of the harbour, was confined to an area little more than a kilometre from the wharves to the north gate and around 1.5 kilometres across from the east gate to the west gate with remarkably little building outside the defences …. so this was quite a long way out of the centre for workers employed at the engineering works of Burmeister Wain on Christianshavn on the far side of the city or for men working at their ship yards at Refshaleøen.
Trianglen in Østerbro is a busy triangle-shaped public space immediately to the east of the new metro station and the south entrance to Fælledparken - the large public park in Østerbro.
This is where two main roads in the city cross at an angle rather than at 90 degrees and it illustrates well how a dynamic townscape evolves over what is often centuries through a combination of factors including, of course, topography but also military and strategic history, wider patterns of roads and transport - so where people are travelling to or from either away from the city or within the city - and inevitably ownership and property boundaries and, in many cases, the direct involvement of a monarch, a city council and - from the 20th century onwards - planning authorities and transport companies.
Oh … and as much as anything it’s often about the way people use a space or even how they cut across corners that over time ends up fixed in the position and line of roads, pavements and buildings.
read more
This is one of the more extraordinary buildings in Copenhagen.
It is at the east end of Trianglen on the traffic island and was a tram car stop with a kiosk; a room for a traffic controller and public toilets and with benches not only in the recessed spaces on the east and west sides but also around the outside where people could wait if they had to change trams at this busy interchange.
The architect was PV Jensen-Klint and it was commissioned in 1904 by the Østerbro Grundejerforening or Landowners Association to replace a wooden hut on the same site. A number of designs were presented before a final design was approved and the building was completed in 1907.
It has a sort of exuberance and delight in playing with variations of shape and form that is associated with Art Nouveau architecture but here the columns on each side with strong entasis - the bowing out in the middle - and the almost Baroque elements with curved shaped heads to windows and doors picked up in the line of glazing bars makes it more robust and strongly architectural than buildings you would find from the same period in Paris or Brussels.
The oval shape of the building and its copper roof meant that it was soon given the nickname of the Super Terrin or Terrinen although it is also known as Bien from the name of the kiosk here at one stage.
Through the 18th century this was a large area of open land outside the city walls and beyond the lakes but by the late 19th century new buildings had encroached on the open land, particularly along the south and east sides. Mayor Jens Jensen was the prime mover for protecting what remained of the open area for public use by creating a park here. The first trees were planted in 1909 and the park was completed by 1914 with Edvard Glæsel as the landscape architect in charge.
Since 1620, there has been a bridge at the centre of Copenhagen harbour. Knippelsbro was constructed to link the old city to what was, in the 17th century, a new and prosperous settlement of Christianshavn that was being built on land claimed from the sea and - from a new south gate of the city - there was a way across and on to the island of Amager.
Over the centuries the bridge was rebuilt several times but these all crossed the harbour at the level of the quay so there was restricted headroom for boat traffic to pass through unless the bridge was opened. This became a problem in the early 20th century as the wharves and quays south of the bridge dealt with more and more goods so more and larger commercial shipping was coming through the harbour and as the number of people use the bridge to cross backwards and forwards increased with the building of large new apartments blocks along Islands Brygge and south of Christianshavn with new housing in Amagerbro and then in Sundby.
A new bridge - the present Knippelsbro - was constructed and opened in 1937 with the designs by Kaj Gottlob. This has a much higher deck level - with long ramps up on either side to take road traffic up and over the harbour - so more shipping could pass through without opening the bridge - the current harbour ferries pass under the bridge without it having to open. There were two copper-clad towers - with that to the north for the main control room for opening and closing the centre span and a south tower contained sleeping accommodation for the bridge master and his men.
From the 1940s and through the 1950s and 1960s, the docks to the south of the bridge prospered with commercial quays extending down on both sides - so the bridge must have been manned throughout the day and the night - but with the decline and then the shutting of commercial wharves on the inner harbour, the number of times the bridge was opened each day declined and the south tower became redundant and was left empty and unused.
Lars Erik Lyndgaard Schmidt and Malthe Merrild saw the waste of abandoning such a prominent historic monument and came up with possible ways of using the building.
Last year, after several years of them putting considerable pressure on the city and after opening for a trial period to see if there was sufficient public interest … there was … and after extensive restoration work, the tower was opened to the public.
It is now an amazing viewing platform from where you can see up and down the harbour but more than that it's a very unusual venue for events; a very unusual place that can be hired for business meetings during the day and, despite the tight space, it's a venue for gastronomic events and concerts.
Just beyond Enghave Park and below the site of the Carlsberg Brewery and called Humleby - literally Hops Town - the 235 houses were, in fact, not built for the brewery but were built for the Workers’ Building Society, to provide healthy homes for the workers at the engineering company of Burmeister & Wain.
Designed for the society by Frederik Bøttger, work started in 1885 and the houses, were completed by 1891.
In a period when most major architects have an international career, working on commissions almost anywhere in the World, it is relatively unusual for any to return to work for the same client again or to add new buildings to an earlier commission but Arne Jacobsen worked for the company Novo Nordisk through his career, designing first a villa in Klampenborg in 1933 for Thorvald Pedersen, a founding director and owner of the company, and then factories and housing, for workers in the company, and one of Jacobsen’s last commissions was a finishing plant for Novo in Mainz in 1970, the year before his death.
At one site, in an outer district of Copenhagen in the west part of the city and on the north edge of Fredriksberg, Jacobsen designed three separate buildings for Novo over a period of well over 35 years and it is fascinating, with that single group of buildings, to see distinct phases in the architect’s career.
The impressive post building at Øster Allé - on the south-east corner of Fælledparken and close to the football stadium - was designed by Thorvald Jørgensen and was completed in 1922.
It has been converted into a museum of post and telecommunications and replaces the postal museum that was in the central post office in Møinichens Palæ on Købmagergade.
Enigma, Øster Allé 1
The on-line site of the Danish Architecture Centre is an amazing resource for information for modern architecture and landscape and urban planning. There is of course the obvious information about the Architecture Centre itself, on Strandgade on the south side of the harbour in Copenhagen, with opening times and information about exhibitions but that is just the access point to a huge amount of data.
There are at a basic entrance point three separate sections under the headings DAC&LIFE, DAC&BUILD and DAC&CITIES but of course opening and moving through the various sections is seamless.
Under the Life section is the Copenhagen X Gallery that gives access to descriptions, photographs and basic information about new buildings in Denmark including actually quite significant basic data about the architects, engineers, client, square metres and even cost that is actually quite difficult to pull together so easily from other sources.
Buildings can also be tagged and added to a personalised guide book with maps and downloaded as a pdf or sent as an email to others so pretty useful if you are planning to look at a number of buildings with a number of friends or colleagues.
There is information about new buildings in Copenhagen and its immediate area, as well as buildings in Aallborg, Aarhus and Odense.
All the buildings are indexed by year, by architect, by location and so on and can also be found from links on maps.
There are even pre-recorded pod guides for running or walking and for at least four years DAC organised an annual architecture run of 6 km in which up to 1,000 people took part. Have to confess that my first reaction was only in Copenhagen could you find something like that.
Exhibitions at DAC can be tracked back to 2003 so again an amazing resource now and a good starting point for research.
There are also other interesting pages like the book lists … for instance one compiled recently by Kim Herforth Nielsen of the major architectural practice 3XN. Short comments about each book explain how the books have influenced the work of the practice.
News links cover not just DAC and Denmark but news about major projects and exhibitions and symposiums around the World. There is a strong focus on the development of cities, future possibilities in urban design and, of course, sustainability.
Danish Architecture Centre
In May 2018 DAC moved from Strandgade to Bryghuspladsen 10, 1473 Copenhagen
The Spring sunlight was slightly grey and misty which made the tower blocks at Høje Gladsaxe look almost surreal, almost like CGI. Five large towers are set in line on a hillside in the northern suburbs of Copenhagen. Completed in 1968 they were designed by Hoff & Windinge; Jørgen Juul Møller and Kai Agertoft and Alex Poulsen.
Extensive renovation in 1991-1992 by A5 Tegnestuen included glazing in open balconies on the south sides of the blocks although the walkways across the north sides were left open.
read more
The town hall in Lyngby was designed by Ib Martin Jensen and Hans Erling Langkilde, following a competition in 1937, and it was completed in 1941.
Built in reinforced concrete, the block has five main floors faced in Greenland marble and a penthouse that is inset from the main plane of the front and faced in copper.
read more
In 1608, the Caritasbrønden or Caritas Well on Gammel Torv was constructed for Christian IV as his gift to the citizens of Copenhagen when a new city hall was built across the south side of this open space to replace a medieval city hall that had been on the east side of the square.
Just over a century later, that 17th-century building was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1728 and a new city hall was built on the same site. When that building was, in turn, destroyed in the fire of 1795, a new city hall was built on the west side of Nytorv and the two squares were joined into a single open space.
An outline of the 17th-century hall is marked with stones set into the cobbles of the square.
The group of figures in the centre of the basin of the fountain - representing the virtue of love or charity - was first carved in wood by the German artist Statius Otto but later was cast in bronze.
The fountain was not just ornamental but was part of a system supplying fresh drinking water to the city.
This photograph was taken on the 16th April - on the Queen’s birthday - just after the royal carriage had progressed along Strøget to take the Queen from the palace to a reception at the city hall.
In Copenhagen, the plan of apartment buildings - the way that rooms in each apartment and the staircases and entrance halls were arranged - developed through the first decades of the 20th century.
In terms of layout, there was not a sudden change in the number of rooms in an apartment or their arrangement in the 1920s and 1930s but apartments became more compact and certainly less likely to extend backwards from the street block into back ranges.
By the 1920s, many purpose-built apartment blocks in the city, particularly large new buildings for social housing, were still set out around a courtyard with some buildings occupying a complete city block and most were of five or six storeys but there was a change because where courtyards had service buildings in them, then these were low, only a single storey, to keep the courtyard open, light and uncluttered.
In 1939 Arne Jacobsen and Flemming Lassen won an open competition to design a new town hall, a new library and a theatre in Søllerød.
Work on the town hall started almost immediately but, with the onset of war, plans for the theatre and the library were first postponed and then abandoned.
Completed in 1942, the town hall is stunning but it is a building of curious contradictions …. it is constructed in concrete with concrete and clinker internal walls - making use of new materials and engineering of the most up-to-date buildings of the period - but it is faced with pale, buff-coloured and finely-veined marble from Porsgrunn in Norway so an expensive building material and one more often associated with tradition and status and, certainly, with the implication of a sense of permanence even now not associated with the use of concrete. At the very least, the use of marble for the exterior appears to be a statement that here there had been an investment in a high-quality building that was expected to be in use for many years.
Although, in many ways, this must have appeared at the time to be an uncompromisingly modern building, the elegant, carefully-proportioned and finely-detailed elevations that Jacobsen designed, owe much to both Functionalism but also to the earlier, well-established Danish architectural style that is generally known as New Classicism in Denmark from twenty or thirty years earlier.
A new town hall seems to represent stability and optimism for the future, as the old city expanded rapidly out into new suburbs, but it was started in the year that the Spanish Civil War came to an end and just as Europe moved towards an all-encompassing war.
Above all, although this is the town hall for a new and expanding suburb, the building is not in the densely built-up urban setting of a traditional townscape but has a distinctly rural setting, standing back from the road, beyond a wide area of grass, not in a civic square, but set on a sloping site against the green of the well-established trees of an ancient royal forest.
For the row houses in Ørnegårdsvej, built in 1957 for A Jespersen & Son, Arne Jacobsen used a form of curtain wall construction - with large areas of window for front and back walls of the terraced rows that are not load bearing. Generally, this is a form of construction that is normally associated with commercial and office buildings, rather than housing, and with metal, aluminium or steel, used for a framework that hold panes of glass or opaque panels, but at Ørnegårdsvej the large areas of glazing on the front and back of the the terraced houses between the solid cross walls have relatively thin timber frames for the windows with teak glazing beads.
The buildings are listed and original colours on the exterior have been retained although inevitably many of the houses have been restored and some the interiors altered. Doors and some parts of the frames are painted a dull olive green; and blind panels, concrete reinforced with asbestos fibre, are painted grey but tall thin panels, on the line of the cross walls and rising unbroken through both floors, are black. The effect is rather like a painting by Piet Mondrian but in a rather more muted colour scheme.
Rødovre is a suburb of Copenhagen and is about seven kilometres west of the centre of the city but inside the outer defences of Copenhagen - the Vestvolden ramparts - that date from the middle of the 1880s.
Rødovre became an independent municipality in 1901, presumably a rationalisation of local government that reflected growth in the population in the late 19th century but there was extensive building of new houses before and after the second world war. As well as housing here - Islevvænge with 194 row houses - Arne Jacobsen designed a major group of buildings in the centre that included a new City Hall* completed in 1956; a long range of apartments to the east of the City Hall that date from 1959 and between them a library that was designed in 1961 and finished in 1969.
Rødovre is a suburb to the west of Copenhagen and was established as an independent municipality in 1901 but it was in the 1950s that a new civic centre was created with a new City Hall designed by Arne Jacobsen on the west side of a new square and completed in 1956. The first plan was to build a library and a new technical school on the east side of the square, facing the city hall, but only the library was built … a larger building than shown on the initial scheme and set slightly further north on the east side of the square with its entrance door immediately opposite the entrance into the City Hall, to form a cross axis to the square.
Not completed until 1969, Jacobsen’s library is a large, flat-roofed, single-storey building, that is clad in dark green/grey stone. In fact, the walls are built in brick and the panels of stone are supported proud of the structural wall with small steel anchors.
There are no windows breaking through the outer wall - just doorways on the west entrance front (facing the City Hall) and on the east side of the building, immediately opposite the public entrance, as access for staff and services.
There are five open courtyards that are glazed on all four sides to bring natural light into the reading rooms and offices and meeting rooms set around the courtyards.
It is as if the aim was to create an inward-looking building to avoid the distraction of views to the World outside.
The SAS Hotel in Copenhagen - designed by Arne Jacobsen and completed in 1961 - is perhaps the best known and the most widely published building from the Classic period of Danish design.
So, it is not really necessary to go back over the history and the design of the building here but I took a few photographs for a recent post about high buildings in the city for the web site and one thing struck me that, rather stupidly, I had not appreciated before and that is that it is built out over the top of the main railway tracks running into the central station from the north … or at least the lower north part of the hotel and the car park to the west is built across the tracks.
I don’t know how many times I’ve been on trains in and out of the railway station but never once realised that the oddly gloomy area of concrete catacombs that the trains go through beyond the north end of the platforms is actually under the hotel. I went back to the reference books and found out that, with the building of the station and the construction of new lines between the central station and Østerport station in 1917, the area along Vesterbrogade, north of the Tivoli gardens, became an area of major redevelopment for commercial office buildings. To the concern of the city council, one prominent but oddly shaped plot - a long triangle left along the east side of the railway track immediately north of Vesterbrogade - remained undeveloped. On the back of other planning applications they stipulated that work should also be completed on that triangular plot and, to make the site viable commercially, the area over the tracks was covered and the massive new hotel was completed on the extended plot.
Powered by Squarespace
