Holckenhus is a large and prominent apartment building on HC Andersens Boulevard that is two blocks south of the city hall and opposite Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.

It occupies a complete city block that is not square but is actually a distinct trapezium with it's narrowest front to HC Andersens Boulevard; a long north front to the relatively narrow but busy Stormgade; a main frontage to Vester Voldgade and the most important and best-known frontage to the public space of Dantes Plads.

The building was designed by the architect Philip Smidth who also designed several of the major buildings around the city hall and it stands over the site of one of the major bastions of the old city defences called Holck's Bastion and that gave the building its name.

This part of the defences was the last major section around the city to be dismantled - late in the 1880s. Work on the the apartment building started in 1891 and was completed in 1893. Work on the Glyptotek began in 1892 and was completed in 1896 and there are early photographs that shows open ground beyond the gallery and the apartment buildings where the land there was being claimed from the sea.

The apartment building has upper floors in red brick with architectural features - including window architraves and quoins that form pilasters at the corners - in pale stone or cement and over a rusticated stone base but the most distinct feature is the steeply-pitched mansard roofs with dormer windows over what are marked out with quoins to be corner towers along with raised roofs over the sections or pavilions at the centre of each long frontage.

One source of inspiration for the design is clearly the architecture of chateaux and urban palaces in France from the 16th and 17th centuries so the style is generally described as French Renaissance although there is also a strong link to Danish architecture of the 17th century.

There were shops or commercial properties at street level with a lower-height mezzanine above and the most important apartments were on the second floor with balconies to the windows at that level with stone balustrades.

Inventories show that NA Scioldann, the builder of the apartments, lived in a large apartment in the building and he is credited with encouraging artists to move here to studios at the upper level.

A census of 1895, records that the prominent artist PS Kroyer had an apartment in Holckenhus, where he lived with is wife Marie Kroyer and three maids and a nurse for their new-born daughter, and the painters Agnes Slott-Møller and Emil Nolder are also known to have lived in the building.

Controversies over the future of Holckenshus aired in newspapers through last summer after the property was acquire by Blackstone - an American private equity fund - and there were reports that in their work to ‘upgrade’ the building, stained glass on staircases has been removed and high-quality and original woodwork on doors and staircases have been painted over but with details now picked out in gold.

However, the controversial and contentious proposal from Blackstone is to raise the roof between the towers to create eight luxury penthouse apartments. Clearly, the corner turrets and the central pavilions on each of the long facades is the key feature of the design of the exterior and a common roof line would undermine and change fundamentally the original concept.

The building is a major Danish cultural assets and not just the external appearance, in such a prominent position, should be preserved but features of the original interior have to be protected.

An article in Jyllands-Posten on 28 August 2019 Historisk bygning har huset Krøyer og andre store kunstnere: Renovering møder kritik by Ronja Melander has photographs of the interior and the web site of the Museum of Copenhagen has an article on the building and its occupants - Holckenhus - en beboelsesejendom med kunstneratelierer

Holckenhus has been added to the time line for apartment buildings on the site Copenhagen by design

the Boulevard in 1897 with the corner turrets of Holckenhus just visible (centre left) with the newly-completed Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

the view from Dantes Plads to Christiansborg above and the plan fot an extension of the city drawn by Conrad Seidelin in 1857 below with a long double avenue or ride to the corner of a large new garden that appears to have been designed for irregular paths through densely planted trees with a terrace out to the bay and an avenue of trees returning along the shore to Langebro that then crossed to Christianshavn from the end of what is now Vester Voldgade.

Note: the plan shows the original railway station, built in 1847, with the railway line along what is now Sønder Boulevard, and what might have been a proposal for a new U-shaped station on Vester Voldgade.

Standing on Dantes Plads - just out from Holckenhus - the buildings across the north side of the square - it becomes obvious that there is a straight view down the street called Ny Vestergade to Christiansborg on its central east/west axis, across the Marble Bridge, and through the outer stable court to the great tower over the east entrance.

In the other direction, west from Dantes Plads, this line cuts close to the corner of Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek but continues as far as the side entrance to Øksnehallen - the meat market - even following across the bridge taking Tietgensgade over the main railway lines at the south end of the platforms of the central station.

Copenhagen is not a city of long straight roads let alone grand avenues and bombastic planning so the line and the length of this axis - 1,300 metres in all - is curious.

Although the central axis through the courtyards of Christiansborg and out over Marmorbroen / the Marble Bridge was created in the early 18th century - when the castle was rebuilt - the axis on further to the west was not a viable proposition then as it was blocked by the high bank of the defences on the outer side of what is now Vester Voldgade, and, beyond the defences, the sea of the bay to the south west cut in much closer than it does now so the sight line from the Marble Bridge - the west exit from the palace - would have looked along the beach. It might have been possible that this had been planned as a grand route from Christiansborg to the palace at Frederiksberg but that would have needed a new gateway through the defensive bank and, in any case, the alignment is wrong.

What seems more plausible is that this axis as far as the meat market has its origin in a scheme for extending the city that was proposed by the Danish architect Conrad Seidelin in the 1850s in anticipation that the old defences of the city would be dismantled.

In the end, by the time the high banks of the defences were taken down and the ditches filled in, the ownership of much of the land around the city had changed hands and some new streets had already been laid out so little of the plan by Seidelin was realised.

Here, west of the old city, he had proposed a long tree-lined avenue or boulevard on the central axis of Christiansborg that created a ride or esplanade out from the Marble Bridge to a large informal garden or park on the line of the lakes. This seems to have been envisaged as a royal garden comparable to the Queen's gardens that had been laid out to the north of the city at Sophie Amalienborg in the second half of the 17th century. Seidelin also proposed an avenue or ride returning along the harbour.

The axis, from Christiansborg to the meat market, seems to have survived by default despite the fact that the avenue and new gardens became less and less likely as the decades passed.

the Seidelin plan