empty office blocks

View fullsize

Some of the office blocks below Knippelsbro, on the Christianshavn side, have been empty since Nordea Bank moved from here to their new Copenhagen headquarters near the metro station at DR Byen.

When I lived in Christianshavn, I walked past these buildings most days. 

Designed by the architects Henning Larsen, they are now twenty years old but they are well built and, to me, still attractive architecture and built to a standard too often missing now. Particularly in the winter, the pattern of lights going on and the silhouette of people working in the offices and then slowly offices emptying and lights going off set a reassuring pattern to the afternoon and evening.

That these buildings are empty and looking for new tenants is part of a depressing cycle of change that now, for different reasons, we have to address. 

That pattern was established in the city in the late 19th century. Before that, banks and merchants and lawyers all had offices as we would understand them now, with clerks and so on, but generally these were in rooms within a house or warehouse - often workspace below or behind the home of the merchant or the banker or the lawyer. Gradually and particularly as the number of people employed in a business increased then purpose-built offices emerge and the trend was from small rooms to increasingly large and more open space - the form of space we now assume to be a basic pattern for any modern office - and, of course, only made possible because the use of concrete and steel meant that more and more internal walls could be removed as they were no longer necessary to support floors and roofs above.

With ever larger offices came ambition, business expansion, mergers and with them developers. The first purpose-built commercial area of the city was around the city hall, new at the beginning of the 20th century, but within a decade or so it became unfashionable or buildings were too small or the rents too expensive for new companies so new offices were built further out or on sites that might become available in the city itself. Some sites could be acquired cheaply and cleared of old housing … so, for instance, new office buildings went up on Vognmagergade and later on Pilestræde and, in some parts of the old city, complete blocks were taken over with office buildings.

New office districts were identified and attracted out of the city either young but growing companies or large companies wanting a more impressive HQ at cheaper rents and so the cycle continued leaving abandoned older buildings that were either subdivided and filled with tenants on shorter and shorter leases or some developer - with a keen eye for potential profit - bought and demolished for newer and bigger blocks to tempt back companies prepared to pay high rents for something swisher or by a prestigious architect with a 'name' …. a crazy feeding system that somehow gets justified as wealth creation but ultimately is paid for by us in the price tag of the goods or services we buy.

Now add to that a pandemic and at last we are beginning to ask if this tread mill is actually right … or at least right for the environment and right for our towns and cities and right for us as places where we have to go because we have to work or we have to do business.

I don't know what the answer is but I do know we should not rush - either right now or when the coronavirus lockdowns end - to simply get back to where we were before and as fast as possible because where we were before might well be the wrong place.

Immediate solutions include planning controls that slow down or stop that cycle of building up and moving on but long term we need time to assess how and where people work: office buildings, as they are now, may not be appropriate and there should certainly be a general moratorium on new office buildings on green sites. Any new buildings certainly have to be built to last longer and be built so that they can be adapted to other uses. For a start, floor heights should be increased so services in floor voids or ceiling spaces can be adapted easily to new internal arrangements.

Where a capital city or large regional or industrial centre has a financial district then most people have long abandoned the areas as a place to live and, if office buildings disappear, then all the services associated …. transport, coffee bars, restaurants for business lunches and so on all struggle or fail. 

Copenhagen is in a relatively strong position compared with many cities.

What the city centre here needs is more housing at a reasonable price and good student accommodation and certainly some office buildings could be repurposed. The old Copenhagen model of apartment buildings with shops but also with other businesses at the lowest level is a good way to integrate work back into the day to day life of a community. No one wants to live above a sheet-metal workshop or a slaughterhouse but street blocks need a hairdresser or a baker or an accountant or a computer repair shop. Some buildings here have already moved back in that direction … notably 8House by Bjarke Ingels in Ørestad and the Sunby-Øster urban hybrid designed by Dorte Mandrup.

Watch the film Brazil by Terry Gilliam if you want to see the type of office we certainly don't need in our bright new future.