a brand identity for design from the Nordic region

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An interesting post on the Dezeen site today about a new initiative from the Nordic Council of Ministers for the advertising agency Mensch with Bjarke Ingels of BIG and others to develop a brand image for marketing design from the Nordic Region - the countries of Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden and the Faroe Islands and Åland Islands. Interesting and worth watching as this develops.

 

to read the article go to the Dezeen site

Rama Studio at Parking House Lüders

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Back in October I posted about the new car park, P-Hus Lüders, by jaja architects with pierced metal designs on the staircase by the Rama Studio. I have just received a link to a page on Rama Studio site that has many more photographs of their work at the car park including signs and other lettering on and around the building. This is a particularly good example of the way in which a project has a complete design image … every detail of a major scheme merits carefully thought through and co-ordinated design.

Rama Studio work at P-Hus Lüders

photograph Rama Studio

moving the Caritas Fountain

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For several years the north part of the large square in front of the city hall in Copenhagen has been a construction site, screened off with hoardings, for work on a new Metro station that is due to be completed here in 2018. 

Until the work started there was a bus station on that part of the square but only some of the bus bays are to return and it has been suggested that when the paved area of the square is restored then the ornate Caritas Fountain - now on Gammeltorv or Old Square, just on the north side of Strøget or Walking Street - should be dismantled and moved to the Rådhuspladsen (City Hall Square) and a large stone basin reinstated for a grander setting. 

The fountain dates from 1608 and was a gift to the citizens of Copenhagen from the king, Christian IV.

 
 

historic map of Gammeltorv, the Old Square, with the fountain and Nytorv, New Square with the old city hall in the centre that was demolished when a new city hall was built

The Infinite Happiness

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The Infinite Happiness, by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, is a fascinating film profile of the 8House  - the large block of apartments in Copenhagen designed by Bjarke Ingels.  It is in their Living Architecture series and looks at the building by talking to people who live and work there … so the best people to understand and appreciate or criticise the architecture. The film was screened recently by Arch Daily and the series has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

open-uri20161124-20276-1cirogl.jpg
 

265,700 bikes in Copenhagen and counting

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Cars in Copenhagen are now outnumbered by bikes … it must be official because it was in a recent article in the Guardian.

Someone has calculated that 35,080 bikes have been added to the total this year alone so that means that there are 252,600 cars in the city and 265,700 bikes and half of them are at Nørreport railway station.

 

 

Two-wheel takeover: bikes outnumber cars for the first time in Copenhagen, Athlyn Cathcart-Keays, Guardian, Wednesday 30 November 2016

Bike City Copenhagen

progress on the Amager incinerator .....

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Work to complete the Amager incinerator is progressing … this photograph was taken today in the late afternoon as I walked back across the new bridge over the harbour. External facing seems to be complete and the single stack is in place but wonder how the gizmo for blowing smoke rings is coming on.

 

Copenhagen Metro

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Work on the new Metro line in Copenhagen is progressing and the stations are being completed. The Danish paper Berlingske has just published a set of 25 photographs of some of the tunnels and of the new station at Frederiksberg. It looks as if the overall design of the stations will be close to that of the existing metro stations with a large, long, top-lit space above the platforms with the tracks on either side and steel escalators up inset from the walls. The big difference seems to be that where the present stations are lined with raw concrete, Frederiksberg Metro Station appears to have walls lined with stone or tile in a soft buff colour ... so giving the station a slightly warmer tone but retaining the strong, clean and functional feel of the spaces. The long  tiles are laid as vertical bands rather than laid with a brick pattern of overlapping courses. 

Nu får metroen personlighed Berlingske 3 December 2016

Johansen Skovsted

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The third of the series of three exhibitions in the Dreyer Gallery at the Danish Architecture centre on young architects in Copenhagen features the work of Søren Johansen and Sebastian Skovsted.

 

the exhibition continues at Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen until 15th January 2017

Johansen Skovsted

Christmas Fair at Designmuseum Danmark

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The Christmas  Fair at Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen is over two weekends - the 2nd to the 4th and the 9th to the 11th of December 2016. There is a large marquee in the garden courtyard with traditional food and drink - gløgg - from Klint Café. Organised with the Danish Crafts and Design Association, the fair has a wide selection of work by some of the best designers and makers. 

Designmuseum Danmark, Bredgade, Copenhagen

 

Norrøn - territory for dreaming

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This is the second of a series of three exhibitions in the Dreyer’s Architecture Gallery at the Danish Architecture Centre with each exhibition running for about six weeks to profile the work of younger, more-recently established architectural practices from Copenhagen.

continues at the Danish Architecture Centre until the end of November

review

The Silo

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The Silo in May 2015 - work had been completed on the ground floor
and the exhibition space was used for 3daysofdesign

 
 

After going to the new exhibition at the Danish Architecture Centre - Our Urban Living Room about the work of the Copenhagen architects COBE this seemed like a good time to go out to the North Harbour to see what is happening at The Silo … one of their major and ongoing projects.

read more

 

May 2016

 
 

The Silo from the west in October 2016 with a new block of apartments in the foreground. The photographs of the balconies that are now being fitted were taken from the roof of the car park by jaja architects that has just been completed to the east of the Silo

 

Ofelia Plads

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looking north across the new pier or plads from the theatre with the Admiral Hotel beyond a dock basin 

Work on Ofelia Plads - a large, new public space in Copenhagen - has just been completed. 

To the north of the Skuespilhuset (Royal Danish Theatre or Playhouse) there was a 19th-century staithe or pier that was constructed parallel to the shore with a basin, Kvæsthusbassinet, and a wharf with a large brick warehouse, now the Admiral Hotel, on the west side and the main channel of the harbour to its east. Most recently it was used as the dock for ferries to and from Oslo and to and from the Baltic islands and ports.

In an ambitious and extensive engineering project that has just been completed, the pier has been excavated or hollowed out to create a large car park that has three levels below ground - or, perhaps it’s more important to point out, there are three levels below water level in the harbour - and the surface was then reinstated with a number of simple, small, low, new, metal-clad structures for staircase entrances to the parking levels and ventilation systems.

This hardly sounds devastating or dramatic in terms of city architecture but it actually shows Danish engineering design and urban planning at its very best - very, very well thought through; carefully and efficiently executed and with no attempt or need to show, in any flashy way, just how much money was spent. In fact the project was a gift to the city through a collaboration between the Ministry of Culture and Realdania.

read more

 

Sankt Annæ Plads

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Sankt Annæ Plads - Saint Anne’s Square or Saint Anne’s Place - is almost back to normal after extensive excavations and engineering works to install storm drains. This has been necessary to cope with surface water when there are massive rain storms. With changes to the climate because of global warming sudden and devastating rain storms are becoming much more common and when the equivalent of a normal month of rain can fall in a few hours then the existing drains in the city cannot cope. 

I actually experienced one of these storms just a few months after moving to Copenhagen. The first apartment I rented was on Bredgade and like many of the older buildings in the city we all had storage space in the basement for boxes and suitcases and spare furniture and so on. One morning I was looking out of the window amazed to see the amount of rain falling - quite literally torrents - when my phone rang and it was a neighbour suggesting I should go down and move as much as possible out of my store as rain was pouring in from the windows set low on the pavement side and was running down the external steps from the courtyard. The street was like a fast flowing stream as the drains just could not carry away that much water.

One of several ongoing schemes to resolve the problem has been to cut drains along the street, between the pavement and the road so, instead of a shallow gutter with grills at intervals, there is now a continuous grid and below it a wide concrete channel.

At Saint Anne’s Square the cobbles around the equestrian statue of Christian X have been reset to form a shallow and almost imperceptible basin so storm water in Bredgade will be encouraged to take a sharp turn into the square rather than running on down the street. There are the new surface drains on either side but also the area of grass that runs down the centre of the Plads has been lowered to absorb more water quickly.

 

the new storm drains about to be laid along the edge of the road last winter

 

If this all seems like a storm in a tea cup, as it were, the cost of storm damage and the disruption to businesses as they have to repair floors and replace plaster and electric wiring and so on is serious and the quantities of water are amazing. There is so much water running off the streets during these storms that sewers burst as water overflows from the street drains and the volume of water is almost impossible to imagine. Sankt Annæ Plads runs down from Bredgade, down from the statue to the harbour but potentially there is so much water coming off the streets in the district that it can cause problems if it is released straight into the harbour, particularly if it has been contaminated with sewage, so the most important part of the recent works was the construction of a massive holding tank that takes up to 9 million litres of water and from there it will be released as slowly as possible into the harbour. I think that tank is actually under new steps at the end of the basin by the Admiral Hotel and is part of the rebuilding of the pier to the north of the theatre that is now called Ofelia Plads. Walking past the works it was difficult to look behind the hoardings to see exactly which area was excavated and just how large and deep that tank is but for 9 million litres it must be big … not an amount I find easy to imagine or visualise.

 

the grass down the centre of Sankt Annæ Plads is back but at a lower level

 

the harbour end of Sankt Annæ Plads looking across the basin and the new steps ... somehow there is a holding tank for 9 million litres of rain water below this area

 

Around the city there are many more programmes of engineering work or solutions that use new surfacing materials or an imaginative redesign of park landscapes to deal with the problem of storm water ... see the post rains and drains ... and last year there was an exhibition, The Rains are Coming, at the Danish Architecture Centre about what is being done in the city to deal with increasingly heavy rain fall.

a new railway station in Copenhagen

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This summer Copenhagen gained a railway station and lost a railway station or, rather, the city gained a large area of paving and a bike park to serve the new development of the old Carlsberg brewery site and the platform of the old Enghave station - about 200 metres to the east at street level but much closer along the track - has been demolished. An extensive redevelopment of this large area - 330,000 square metres - to the west of the city centre has to have a much larger station for commuters than could be accommodated on the site of the old Enghave station buildings and, in any case, that old station was on the far side of a relatively busy road into the city.

read more

Carlsberg Byen - Carlsberg City District

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It’s unusual to find that I don’t like new buildings or modern urban-landscape projects in Copenhagen … I even like Ørestad with its raised metro track and its sense of being a Danish Metropolis. It’s not that I’m uncritical but at the very least I can usually see and usually understand if there were problems or constraints that meant some parts of a new development were and are a compromise.

That’s why, after walking around the first stage of the massive redevelopment of the Carlsberg brewery site … a new campus for University College Copenhagen along with what are presumably commercial office buildings immediately north of the new Carlsberg suburban railway station … I just felt perplexed about why my initial reaction was not positive.

read more

Mindcraft16

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Curated by GamFratesi and organised by the Danish Arts Foundation and the Agency for Culture and Palaces, the exhibition was shown first in Milan in April. There are works here from 17 designers or design studios and the pieces shown are primarily but not exclusively one-off works that demonstrate not only a very high level of craftsmanship but primarily explores the boundaries we impose between craftsmanship, product design and art. 

For many people, crafts and the work of makers implies the production of something utilitarian and is only different from product design in that the pieces are made by hand and in much smaller numbers than commercial or industrial ‘mass’ production. 

Of course that is not true … this exhibition above all tries to focus on the imagination and on the intellectual process of design … the balance between understanding the materials and the techniques to be used but then wanting to push the boundaries - to question, to inform, extend and develop our tastes and challenge our preconceptions about how something should look and even what we want and why and how we use objects that generally are taken for granted. It’s about alternatives and discovering new possibilities. 

 

 

the designers:

Benandsebastian

Anne Dorthe Vester og Maria Bruun

Christina Schou Christensen

Rosa Tolnov Clausen

Freya Dalsjø

Dark Matters

Yuki Ferdinandsen

Halstrøm-Odgaard

Ole Jensen

 

Irv Johnson Music

Marianne Krumbach

Akiko Kuwahata

Cecilie Manz

Nicholas Nybro

Vibeke Fonnesberg Schmidt

Øivind Alexander Slaatto

Henrik Vibskov

 

Mindcraft16 - Designmuseum Danmark,
Bredgade 68, Copenhagen
until 8th January 2017

Our Urban Living Room - Learning from Copenhagen

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A major exhibition has opened at the Danish Architecture Centre which focuses on the work of the Danish studio of Cobe arkitekter but, in a much broader sense, the exhibitions also explores crucial aspects of urban planning … the current and the future role that planning has in the enhancement of our built environment and the way that architecture and planning together can and must encourage the use of public space in our cities and towns for a huge variety of activities.

What is shown here - with models, drawings, photographs and text - are specific projects completed by Cobe over the last decade or so - the remodelling of Israels Plads; the remodelling of the street space above Nørreport railway station; the building of new libraries and schools in the city and all with a very strong and positive planning agenda - but these are also clever and innovative projects that tell us much about the meeting point of public and private space; about the way that politicians and planners determine appropriate policies for how public space is used and shows how much citizens need and how much they appreciate public space and how they use that space in increasingly inventive ways.

 

 
 

Our Urban Living Room at the Danish Architecture Centre,
Strandgade 27B, Copenhagen
until 8th January 2017