greetings of the season

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This photograph was taken earlier in December in the courtyard of the design museum.

There was a light covering of snow in the city on Christmas Eve but by the middle of the morning the wind had swung round to come from the west and the temperature rose and what snow there was melted so, unfortunately, it’s not a white Christmas this year.

 

an anniversary

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The first post to danish design review was on 2nd June 2013 so this web site is now ten years old.

It has changed a lot over the years although one constant has been that it is still hosted through Squarespace.

Back then, I was still living in England, but I was already planning to move to Copenhagen.

Over the following year there were several long trips to Copenhagen and then I found an apartment on Bredgade to rent that was just opposite the design museum. I signed a lease and on 20th June 2014, I picked up the keys so I have now lived in Denmark for nine years.

Having moved to Copenhagen, my initial plan was to write a book about the buildings of Christian IV but I have always been interested in modern architecture and modern design and crafts so this design blog was my way to record what I saw and what I learnt about Copenhagen and its architects and designers as I settled into life in a new city in a new country.

Somehow, as I wrote about and photographed modern buildings and modern design, the blog took over and research on 17th century architecture - trying to understand Rosenborg and Frederiksborg and Kronborg - was put on a back burner.

In terms of my background, I'm an architectural historian although, to be honest, I'm more a social historian than anything so, when I record or survey historic buildings, I'm less concerned about style and more interested in context .... so, it's about using documents and maps and recording the surviving building in detail to understand the method of construction, and the aim is to see standing fabric as evidence that can reveal not only what was built and when and how but can give an insight into how the building was used, at various stages in its history, and when and why the building was altered or adapted.

So, like an archaeologist but assessing the evidence from the ground up rather than from the surface down.

That same way of looking at and trying to understand and put into context can be applied to modern design and modern buildings to find out how and why a new piece of furniture or a new building ends up looking like that and to understand how it was made, and to see if the design evolved and how and why and to understand how a new work fits in a wider social or political context.

As a place to post photographs and thoughts, as I explored historic buildings in Copenhagen, I set up a second web site under the title copenhagen by design.

Keeping up with the two web sites - the design site and the historic building site - was getting difficult .... is an apartment building from the 1950s modern or historic and a modern design might well look back to much earlier designs for inspiration.

More .... looking at something old might make me reconsider what I think about something new or the other way round so looking at a new work can make us rethink what we have accepted as true about an historic work.

Even exhibitions and books, reviewed on the site, rarely stick to clear divisions between historic and current.

Over the years, many of the posts have been duplicated between the two sites so links were added but indexing became more and more complicated and difficult between two sites and between new and older posts.

So, in the Spring, I made the decision to merge the two sites by bringing all the posts from copenhagen by design into the danish design review site and to edit and reconcile links and tags and categories in the hope that this will give a more solid and more consistent site to build on in the future.

This housekeeping - basically copying and pasting but with some editing - has taken up a lot of time over the last three months with little obvious front-end gains for readers but most of that is finished and I can now catch up on a backlog of posts and can introduce some new sections to the blog.

danish design review and copenhagen design news reorganised

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Posts from danish design review with copenhagen design news, and posts from copenhagen by design have been moved into a single web site with new and more extensive categories.

With posts from two blogs and with ten years of posts this has been a time-consuming job, with a lot of copying and pasting and with some editing, but, when it’s finished, and with a rationalisation of tags, indexing and searching for earlier posts should be quicker and easier.

There are now six primary headings - think drawers in a filing cabinet -  with posts under design, furniture, kunsthåndværk, architecture and townscape and with a new section Building Copenhagen ... for posts on the history of Copenhagen and posts on historic buildings in the city that were, until now, posted to the independent site copenhagen by design.

 

Under each primary heading, there are secondary categories that are identified by colour - so they are folders in each drawer of that filing cabinet.

copenhagen design news is the entry point to the site and all new material will appear there first before being filed under the relevant category.

danish design review will be, as originally intended, a place for longer articles about wider issues with a format more like a journal or magazine.

Tags and links - the links both within the site and to external web sites - are being checked and updated. After ten years, web sites and physical stores and studios have moved or have folded.

Links on the left, at the bottom of a post, are to other posts within this web site and links at the bottom of a post to the right are to external sites.

Readers clicking on tags at the bottom of a post can see other posts so, for instance, other posts on the blog about other work by a designer.

Full versions of book reviews and exhibition reviews are in their own categories and have their own indexes.

I just hope that this is not all too complicated for it's own good.

 

Here are all the categories for danish design review:

 
 

... and in with the new

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The start of a new year is probably as good a time as any to look carefully at how this blog does or doesn't work and to consider changes.

danish design review has been going for well over five years so one obvious problem is that there are now so many posts and so many photographs that it can be difficult to find things and inevitably some links, particularly links to other sites, may be broken. Over the next month or so, tags and categories will be reassessed and checked so some links might be changed and might not always work as expected but that is a work in progress. That’s basic housekeeping.

The quantity of material is also pushing limits so loading pages can be slow. One solution would be to compress image files but the photographs are an important part of these posts so images will keep as high a resolution as possible and continue to open in a full-screen slide show if you select them. Looking at analytics and at Google search it is interesting to see that the site comes much higher up the rankings if you search for a name or a topic by image rather than by text references.

Analytics also show that relatively few people come to the site on their phone but there are no plans to reduce content or clip it to make it phone friendly. Squarespace software does a good job of scaling content but posts are still aimed at readers who look at the site on a large lap-top computer or use a desk-top screen. I’ve just checked the stats and over 75% of readers look at this site on a desktop or laptop computer. All work on editing and layout here is done on an high-resolution Apple A3 size screen and I guess that shows in what you see.

The focus for the news and for the reviews over the rest of the winter and into the spring will be to look at housing and planning in Copenhagen. Huge areas of new residential buildings are going up on the old Carlsberg site and in new areas of the North and the South Harbour; there is extensive new work on land around the new Royal Arena in Ørestad and new apartment buildings are transforming the beach area of north-east Amager so this is a good time to see what has been completed and maybe a time to criticise.

Much is written about the important role that Denmark plays in design and in prestigious international building projects but the country has a long tradition of building good housing - after all Danes have to have somewhere to put all that good design - and the country has a well-deserved reputation for creating good well-planned towns with a high approval rating among residents and, on top of that, the country is ahead of many nations in trying to tackle the consequences of climate change so, as more and more people in the World are moving into densely-packed cities, Denmark's most important role as a driving force and model could actually be in urban planning and development.

A new series of posts here will look specifically at the townscape of Copenhagen to work out - or not - just why it is such a good place to live. There will also be a new series, long in the planning, to meet and talk to architects and designers and makers in the city to look at their work but also to find out why they are here in Copenhagen and ask them about how they see the future of design in the city.

In the design review half of the site it will be back to writing about more of the chairs designed in Denmark through the 20th century but there will also be a new and separate series of posts on chairs designed and made since the start of this century. In writing about designs from the 1940s and 1950s I kept thinking that there are questions I really wished someone had asked those designers then about what they had done and why as they worked on a specific design … I'm hoping that I can ask some of those questions about designs now.

 

schmidt/hammer/lassen

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Krystallen, Nykredit Bank, Kalvebod Brygge, Copenhagen 2011 

Nykredit Headquaters, Kalvebod Brygge 2001

 

 

Just added to the list of architects that are in the menu that drops down from the top bar. These pages are not intended to be complete lists of buildings or a critical assessment but are for basic information, an introduction, and will be a place for links to exhibitions, reviews and information about new buildings.

Dorte Mandrup Arkitekter

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Næstvedgade Day Care Centre, Copenhagen (2004)

 

Slowly but hopefully surely more architects and designers are being added to the menus that drop down from the bar at the top of the site. These pages are simply a broad introduction to the work of an individual or a studio ... a quick reference point for a reader wanting to find links to a person or a company that has been the subject of a post so links will be added to existing works, to provide a context, or for new work or to web sites, exhibition details, and references to catalogues and monographs.

The latest addition is a brief summary of the works of the Copenhagen architects Dorte Mandrup Arkitekter.