Arne Jacobsen - buildings for Novo Nordisk

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 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. 

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office building for A Jespersen & Son by Arne Jacobsen

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The office building 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 precise and exacting process to refine the design, Jacobsen worked very hard to get a building that looks so simple so right by a process of reduction and simplification of not just the overall design but also of all 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 open plan inside the building and incredibly stripped down and sophisticated design for the facades on the exterior. This is not a brutal building but concrete construction at its most subtle and sophisticated.

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Torvehallerne, Israels Plads

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Just a block to the west of Norreport metro and railway station is Israels Plads - a large square that was laid out in the late 19th century once building immediately outside the defensive walls of the city was allowed.

Across the north side of the square is Frederiksborggade, a busy road of shops and apartments leading out to the lakes and the bridge to Nørrebro. There are large and quite grand apartment buildings on the two long sides of square but the south end is open to Ørstedsparken - a green space with mature trees and a large lake that remains from a section of the moat that ran around the outer side of the city defences. 

There was a greengrocers’ market on the square from 1889 until 1958 when a large new vegetable market opened at Valby.

As part of a major upgrading of the area, two new food halls designed by Peter Hagens and between an area of outside market opened in September 2011 at the north end of the square. The buildings have simple thin elegant framing supporting shallow pitched roofs and are completely glazed creating good large light spaces that are divided into aisles lined with stalls like many traditional indoor markets.

The food halls are now well established and extremely popular with stalls outside for vegetables and flowers and stalls inside for bread, coffee, wine, fresh meat, cheese and of course fish, along with stalls for cake and drinks. 

Cafes and restaurants in the halls and around the square are particularly busy for lunch and in the evenings when people stop here for a drink on the way home from work and the food halls are now a popular destination for tourists.