Tidskapsler - København i 1990'erne / Time Capsule - Copenhagen in the 1990s

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It was strange but a huge amount of fun to walk round this new exhibition at the Museum of Copenhagen.

There are more than 700 time capsules here - compact perspex boxes - 16x16x26 centimetres - that were produced in 1996 - in the year that Copenhagen was the European City of Culture - and then stored away with a promise that all would be revealed after 25 years.

Before going to the exhibition, I would have said that I remember the 1990s quite clearly. However, half the time, objects in the capsules looked so familiar that surely this was all only yesterday but then I'd see something I'd forgotten all about and, with that shock of remembering, I'd realise it really was all a life time ago ... just how could anyone have done that, worn that or used that or could ever thought that seemed normal.

In one time capsule, there was a membership card for Blockbusters and I had completely forgotten about the ritual trip down to the store, literally a block away, on a Friday or a Saturday afternoon to rent a couple of videos if it was going to be a quiet evening.

And it was clearly a very different time and a very different city because, back in the 1990s, Copenhagen was on the brink of bankruptcy with high levels of unemployment. The port had been in decline for at least a decade and much of the housing in the city, particularly in Vesterbro, was very rundown.

Many who could, had abandoned the central districts and moved to new suburbs like Rødøvre or Lyngby. In 1950, there were around 768,000 people living in Copenhagen but the population declined through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and by 1990 there were only about 465,000 people living here. That’s a significant decline.

With hindsight, the turning point may well have been when Copenhagen was chosen as the European Capital of Culture in 1996. That triggered new investment in culture and it was certainly seen as a way to stimulate tourism but there would also be important, long-term gains.

Film making and theatre in the city and art and literature were reinvigorated and there was a new optimism in planning and development.

The city began to see the harbour as a potential resource with important new projects for civic building along the harbour with work starting on an extension to the national library that was to leap the old port road so, instead of looking inward to a garden and to the parliament buildings, it staked an early claim to the water frontage. Work began on a new opera house at the centre of the inner harbour and new developments of office buildings were started on either side at the south end of the harbour, including on the site of the old Burmeister & Wain engineering works immediately below Knippelsbro and, below Langebro, along Kalvebod Brygge, on the city side, and along a new harbour park - Havneparken - on the Amager side.

Presumably, back in 1996, the idea behind these time capsules was not just to capture that moment in time - the zeitgeist - but were a way to make people focus on what was good or bad about their lives in the city and perhaps decide what was important for the future.

Individuals and all sorts of societies - including schools, clubs and workplaces - made time capsules and the boxes are filled with an incredible range of objects from condoms, to needles from the drug culture in the city, along with music cassettes and, CDs - then a new and more expensive technology for playing music - and there are floppy discs; a spool of labels for adding bar codes and even mobile phones that were then relatively novel and relatively expensive. There are guide books to the park at Frederiksberg and bus and train timetables.

One box has a single capsule of Fontex .... an anti depressant that was, apparently, discovered in 1972 but first prescribed in 1986.

The time capsules are grouped by general themes and these include:

Kulturlivet / Arts and culture
København som filmby / Film City Copenhagen
i byen i København / out on the town in Copenhagen
Den Første Pride / Copenhagen's First Pride
Body and Mind
Everyday life
Hiphop
Comedy

 

 Alongside the time capsules are photographs and larger objects from the collection to provide a context with separate sections reflecting many aspects of popular culture and particularly music and club entertainment.

Major cultural events and trends discussed include the Dogme Collective of film makers - Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Kristian Levring and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen - and there is a director's chair with the name Lars von Trier on the back.

Display panels alongside the time capsules explain the emergence of grunge and techno and a fast-developing and rapidly changing youth culture with amazing artefacts like pairs of Dr. Martens boots and Buffalo Boots.

Copenhagen was the first city to launch free bikes that were financed by adverts. They could be unlocked with a 20 DKK coin that was returned when you returned the bike.

But the exhibition also reflects serious problems and concerns of the time like the aids epidemic. Aids spread through the 1980s and 1990s and in 1996 the first EuroPride - part of a campaign for the recognition of gay rights - was held in Copenhagen and the largest single item in the exhibition is an aids quilt.

The journalist Lasse Lavresen is quoted as saying "The 1990s was a decade of irony when nobody meant what they said, and everybody thought history had been relegated to the past."

In one time capsule there is a sperm sample and maybe, just maybe, that can be seen as ironic - or possibly sardonic - but how many kids put on a pair of Buffalo Boats with the hope that it was seen as a comment on contemporary politics or even as simply a sarcastic gesture? For some, what they chose for their time capsule was a shout of defiance and for others a cry for help but irony? No, not irony but certainly there is a vitality that makes life in the city now seem rather bland in comparison.

 

Københavns Museum / Museum of Copenhagen
Tidskapsler - København i 1990'erne / Time Capsule - Copenhagen in the 1990s
the exhibition opened on 4 February and continues until 31 October 2022

Stamsteder – Københavns sidste værtshuse / The local - Copenhagen's last pubs

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Stamsteder – Københavns sidste værtshuse marks the publication of a new book on "brown" pubs in the city and is described as a pop-up photographic exhibition by the Museum of Copenhagen.

The book was written Anders Højberg Kamp and Johannes Jacobsen with photographs by Thomas Skou and is published by Savador Books.

It records brown pubs and they have played a crucial role in the life of the city, acting as social centres and, for the old, the lonely or the desperate, as homes or a place to escape from home and their regular drinkers as families.

There were over 1,000 pubs in the city and it's suburbs in the late 1980s but that number is down to 200 now.

"The places contain stories and secrets as dark as the darkest bitter, and merry as a light ale and the party can continue until the bright morning ..... (but) the winds of urban renewal blow out into every nook and cranny of the city."

In the exhibition there are photographs of 14 pubs from 14 districts across Copenhagen and Frederiksberg.

Indre by - Centralhjørnet
Vesterbro - Pinden
Østerbro - Bassinet
Frederiksberg - Vinstue 90
Nørrebro - Sorte René
Amager - Cafe Schelenborg
Islands Brygge - Café Isbjørnen
Christianshavn - Fingerbøllet
Christiania - Woodstock
Sydhavnen - Café Fremforalt
Valby - Den Gyldenblonde
Vanløse - Jydeholm Bodega
Nordvest - Café Fuglereden
Brønshøj-Husum - Husum Bodega

Stamsteder – Københavns sidste værtshuse
Københavns Museum / Museum of Copenhagen,
Stormgade 18, Copenhagen
from 1 December 2021 to 2 January 2022

Byen på Tegnebordet / Drawing a city

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There are a few days left to see Byen på Tegnebordet - the current exhibition at the Museum of Copenhagen.

This is an amazing selection of designs from the drawing office of the city architect from 1886, when the drawing office opened, through to 1998 when the office was closed.

After an introduction that includes a large, useful map marking the location of the buildings, the drawings are displayed in three main sections that reflect the key work of the drawing office.

The first section is school buildings and housing, mainly apartment buildings. It shows how important education was in the city and how rapidly the plan and the form of schools changed as teaching methods evolved. Buildings from both types - both the schools and the apartment buildings - are brought to life by short quotations and comments from oral history studies.

A second section looks at what we now describe as utilities or service buildings so here there are designs for water towers, power stations, sewage works and the amazing buildings of the meat market - Den Hvide Kødby.

In the third section are drawings from the city architect’s drawing office of designs for street furniture that still shape the look of the streets and squares of the city so this is designs for street lights, benches and poster stands and the drawing office designed the first electric trams in Copenhagen.

The office employed some of the most talented architects in the city: Ludvig Fenger, the first city architect, designed fine schools; Arne Jacobsen, who worked in the drawing office for a short time around 1929, designed the pavilions and the open stage at Enghaveparken and Ib Lunding designed the trams.

Byen på Tegnebordet, Københavns Museum
the exhibition continues until 14 November 2021

 

Musikhuset København to use the old building of the Museum of Copenhagen

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The future use of this fine 18th-century building on Vesterbrogade was uncertain after the Museum of Copenhagen moved from here to their present building on Stormgade south of the city hall.

Initially, the building was to be sold and then, after the reversal of that decision, there were rumours that the buildings would be restored and would become a centre for music.

It has just been announced that the recently-formed association Musikhuset København will be allowed to use the buildings for classical concerts and jazz before major restoration work starts in 2022.

the old Museum of Copenhagen

Musikhuset København

Flanøren / the flaneur

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The new Museum of Copenhagen in Stormgade opened in February and has separate galleries or rooms for each of the distinct periods that together make the city what it has become …. the periods of construction and expansion that, together, explain the stages through which the city developed.

Space in the museum is good but certainly not limitless so objects from the collection in the different displays have been selected with care because they have to explain their part in a clear but sometimes fragmented story about important events and different periods of growth and of change. 

In one of the upper rooms there is a display about the city in the late 19th century with a large model of the new city hall at the centre … a building that was finished around 1905. This was the period after the ramparts and the gates of the old city were dismantled, so it was a period when the city began to expand outwards and the number of people living here increased rapidly. It was also a period of amazing developments in technology and in manufacturing … a period when trams appeared in the city and telephones and flushing toilets … a period when their lifestyle then seems familiar and not actually that different from our own lives now.

This particular part of the story of Copenhagen has been told by focusing on eight types or characters or professions from that period. People who have been chosen to represent the ways in which life was changing.

They include the Tram conductor; the Kiosk attendant; the Architect and the Engineer … so that's two jobs that were new in the city and two increasingly-important professions. There is also the part of the story of life in the city that is told through The Child because so many schools were built in this period and it was when education became available for more people and changed more and more lives. There is Cyclisten - or the cyclist - representing both new popular transport but also to show that this was a period with more leisure time for more people, and there is Kanonfotografen or the street photographer and Flanøren.

 
 

For fairly obvious reasons the last two - Kanonfotografen and Flanøren - were of particular interest ………

By profession I'm an architectural historian and a social historian but, throughout my career, looking at photographs and taking photographs have been essential parts of my work … so, taking photographs as a record; using historic photographs as important and reliable evidence that document change and using carefully-selected photographs to get across information in books and exhibitions and lectures. But I would not describe myself as a street photographer even though now I spend much of my time in the street taking photographs.

There are two types of street photographer covered by that broad term:

The first - and the focus in the museum in the gallery about the late 19th century - could be described as commercial photographers who took their studio to their customers and often, but not always, with a mobile dark room. They were taking pictures of people in the street who wanted their photographs taken - or were persuaded by the photographer that they wanted to have their picture taken. Street photographers produced the outdoor version of the studio portrait.

Until I saw the camera in the museum, and the background information with it, I had not understood just how quickly street photographers became common in the city or just how popular they were right through to the 1960s. There is one view of the square in front of the city hall that appears to show at least three cameras set up so trade must have been good and clearly, for many visitors, part of a good day out in Copenhagen was to have a photo taken.

Presumably, some of these photographers moved across to using polaroid cameras but as these became cheaper, and people could afford their own Polaroid camera to take their own instant pictures, and then, as Polaroid cameras were, in turn, replaced by cheaper and cheaper digital cameras and then phone cameras, these street photographers disappeared.

Of course, where they have resurfaced is with the photographers who work the fashionable streets of cities like New York or London or Milan and take pictures of people on the street because of their clothes or their style and then post the images to Instagram …. but that’s another story.

The second type of street photographer in Copenhagen were the photographers who photographed the streets and of the buildings and of life on the streets in the city and their works can be seen throughout the museum.

Some were taking photographs of the new streets and new buildings or of the historic buildings for books or for magazines or to sell as prints or for popular postcards and major events in the city were photographed - particularly for newspapers. Some photographers where taking photographs to document and to reveal social situations or social interactions and would now be described as a photo journalist rather than as a street photographer.

One of the first and perhaps the greatest of the early photographers to record everyday and more mundane aspects of life in a city was the French photographer Eugène Atget, who, working in Paris, took photographs of unlikely subjects like alleyways or shop windows or piles of old clothes in second-hand shops. There were also major American photographers like Paul Strand and then Walker Evans, who recorded the reality of the life of the poor. They would not have described themselves as street photographers but that was where they worked.

The Danish photographer Jacob Riis was actually eight years older than Atget. Initially, he was a journalist but then became a photographer and is now described as a documentary photographer. Riis emigrated to New York when he was just 21 and worked there rather than in Denmark so I am not sure how much his work influenced photographers working here but certainly there are amazing photographs in the city archive that record the slums and the alleys of the city that have long gone so photographers in Copenhagen were not simply interested in polite and middle-class subjects.

Kongens Nytorv ….
photographs taken around 1900

above all,
these photographs show just
how much space
cars need and take

the photographs
are from the City Archive

 

street camera
in the Museum of Copenhagen

 

not all the old photographs of Copenhagen are of the affluent streets and squares - this is Adelgade where the old house were deemed to be slums and were demolished in the 1950s

At first I was perplexed by that word Flanøren until I read the information panel where it explained that it comes from the French flâneur … a word translated as loafer if you want to be rude or, in some dictionaries a flâneur is defined as “an elegant idler” which is marginally more polite but not much more.

And they were mostly young men that you see in the photographs. Apparently, they had also called themselves Boulevardiers so obviously they strolled backwards and forwards along the fashionable streets and through the squares of Copenhagen seeing and being seen. It is fascinating that this was clearly a time when anything French had to be good …. from the boulevards to the mansard roof.

I realised that I spend much of my time walking up and down the streets of Copenhagen to take photographs but I don't think anyone would call me elegant - idler maybe - but elegant no unless it was with irony. 

Kongens Nytorv by Paul Fischer

 
 

Both the paintings and the photographs by the Danish artist Paul Fischer - he took photographs as a first stage for composing his paintings - show how the public space of the streets and the squares then played an important part in everyday life in Copenhagen and, significantly, well over a century later, the way that people in the city use the public space of the streets and the squares continues in much the same way.

Walk along Sønder Boulevard - particularly on a Friday evening after work or on a sunny Sunday afternoon - and you'd probably assume that the large number of people sitting outside and the number of children playing and the number of people using the sports courts or exercise equipment there must all be part of a relatively recent Copenhagen - a Copenhagen with much more leisure time - but, actually, using public space for exercise and for socialising has a strong and well-established history.

Copenhagen was tightly constricted by the city ramparts and even in the 16th century it must have felt crowded …. after all, the first deliberate expansion of the city was with the building of Christianshavn in the early 17th century.

Certainly through the 18th century and the 19th century, it must have felt as if everyone was living on top of each other. Through to the 1860s, when the ramparts and gates were dismantled, houses and people were tightly packed together. Over the centuries, because the city could not expand out beyond the defences, garden plots and courtyards were built over and if you look at older houses that survived the numerous fires then you can see that most started with two floors or two main floors with basements and attics but over the years nearly all of them had extra floors added so they were enlarged to three and then four and finally five floors of apartments. And, as now, if an old and low house was demolished then what replaced it was inevitably taller.

Even after the ramparts were removed and the city was able to breath … imagine taking off a tight corset after three centuries … it was not the end of densely packed housing. The new districts of Nørrebro and Vesterbro were built outside the ramparts but both areas had and still have some of the most densely-packed areas of housing in Europe. That's one reason why the public space of Sønder Boulevard, running across the south side of Vesterbro, is now so important for the people who live in the area.

It is hardly surprising that people in the city took over the streets and the squares and the wide roads immediately inside the ramparts and walked on the broad path on top of the ramparts as places to exercise and socialise. The King's Garden was opened to the public in the late 18th century and citizens have been using it ever since. Families stroll through the cemeteries in the city at weekends and there are traditions for taking the first walk in the Spring around the ramparts of Kastellet or taking a Sunday walk along Langelinie to look out across the Sound. Even Tivoli seems to be as much about walking and talking and sitting and drinking as it is about rides and thrills.

If Coronavirus has proved one thing it's that it's hard to keep Copenhagen indoors.

Paul Fischer (1860-1934)
self portrait (above) and
one of his photographs of
Kongens Nytorv in the snow

Fischer did not paint the gritty reality of life in Copenhagen around 1900 but, generally, the life of the middle classes although there are studies of flower sellers and market traders

 

traffic on HC Andersens Boulevard

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One of the paintings in the current exhibition at the Museum of Copenhagen about the work of Paul Fischer is his view of HC Andersens Boulevard looking north towards the city hall from just before Dantes Plads on the right with the distinct building of what was then the new Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek on the left.

The first impression is that this must be a romanticised or highly edited view with people just sauntering across the boulevard but Fischer used his own photographs of the streets and squares in the city to compose what he painted and seems, generally, to have painted what he photographed.

So comparing the painting with a photograph taken last week you can see just how much space we have sacrificed to the car and just how much clutter there is with street signs and road markings.

When Fischer painted HC Andersens Boulevard there were trams running into the city hall square and out along Vesterbrogade and by then the railway line from the central station to Østerport had been constructed and suburban lines were being opened so public transport was well established.

Part of the problem with the Boulevard now is not just that there are three lanes of traffic between the lakes and the bridge over the harbour that run across the west side of the main city hall square but the traffic is unrelenting and although there are traffic signals - where pedestrians cross over - the traffic then sprints on to the next crossing so there can be noise and heavy fumes. The road has also taken over more and more of the width to allow for feeder lanes and particularly where vehicles back up before the lights waiting for them to change to let them cross over the traffic coming in the opposite direction.

One simple solution would be to drop the overall speed limit. This would not make it slower for the overall journey but simply control the cars racing to try and beat the next lights. It should also be possible at some junctions to stop traffic turning left, to cross over oncoming vehicles, by making cars turn right and then go round three sides of a block before crossing straight over at the junction where otherwise they would have turned left. Then, perhaps, some of the feeder lanes and the parking lanes could be taken over for wider pavements and more trees.

Paul Fischer exhibition at the Museum of Copenhagen

painting of HC Andersens Boulevard that is currently in the exhibition at the Museum of Copenhagen about the work of Paul Fischer and the same view photographed last week

 

HC Andersens Boulevard runs across the west (in this view the right) side of the city hall square with the Tivoli Gardens and then Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek before the harbour and Langebro. This aerial view shows just how much of the overall width - 50 metres from building front to building front - is tarmac and shows the chicanes at each junction.

When the square in front of the city hall was laid out and when these major buildings were constructed around 1900, Vester Voldgade on the east (left) side of the city hall was initially the main route down to the harbour and it follows the line of the road that was inside the city defences before the banks and outer ditches were removed in the late 19th century.

The original Langebro was at the end of Vester Voldgade and crossed to Christianshavn inside the defences on the line and angle that is now taken by Lille Langebro - the recently-opened bicycle bridge.

 

Københavns museum / Copenhagen's Museum - the building

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Københavns Museum / The Museum of Copenhagen reopened on the 7 February in the restored buildings of the former Overformmynderiets in Stormgade just south of the city hall.

Established in 1901, the museum has an important, extensive and diverse collection that covers the history of the city and its citizens and includes important artefacts from the past …. with items recovered in archaeological digs around the city; maps; paintings; prints; documents and historic photographs.

Through the first half of the 20th century, the museum was in the attic of the city hall itself but in 1956 the collection was moved to 18th-century buildings in Vesterbrogade that had been the home of the Royal Shooting Society. The museum there closed in October 2015 although the archaeological responsibilities of the museum staff continued - they have, for instance, recorded archaeological finds uncovered during the excavation works for the new metro - and, of course, they have continued to curate the collection and archive while preparing for the completion of the new museum.

The new site includes extensive administration offices in an adjoining building and the museum has extensive new education facilities in the basement of the main building.

Completed in 1894, the building on Stormgade was designed by the architect H J Holm for the Overformynderiets - the trustee or guardianship office that, among other things, oversaw the affairs and money of minors …. children who were orphaned and inherited money before legally coming of age. In England the comparable organisation was probably the Court of Wards.

The building is at the corner of Stormgade and Vester Voldgade although the streets do not cross at 90 degrees and the slight angle may, in itself, have inspired the unusual arrangement of the building. The plot is relatively square and there could simply have been frontages to both streets with a courtyard behind but instead there are ranges running back from each street along the plot boundaries and that create an open courtyard at the street corner itself with a gateway set across the angle and in the inner angle, where the two ranges join to form an L shape, the corner is also angled across for the entrance doorway so the courtyard has a strong diagonal cross axis from the gateway to the entrance.

Inside, immediately inside the door, there is a tight but dramatic lobby just up from the courtyard level but then with an ornate flight of steps up to the main level and a stair hall with the main staircase that runs on back in that angle between the two ranges on that same diagonal axis.

Original decoration of the staircase and main rooms on either side was elaborate and this painted plasterwork and the painted ceilings have all been restored in the work to adapt the building as the new home of the museum. It makes the building itself a stunning part of the museums display with an important role in telling part of the history of the city.

The period of rapid growth of Copenhagen in the last decades of the 19th century and through into the early part of the 20th century was certainly one of the great periods for Danish architecture and design. After the city, for several reasons, decided to dismantle the banks and water-filled ditches that had surrounded and protected but constrained the growth of the city, there was an massive and impressive period of building construction with much of that being civic or public works. As large new suburbs of Vesterbro, Nørrebro and Østerbro were built outside the line of the old walls and gates, the circuit of the defences was replaced by a series of parks and major public buildings including, among others, a new National Art Gallery; a Botanic Gardens; a new College of Engineering; a new building for the Carlsberg collection of art and sculpture - The Glyptotek - and, of course, a new City Hall and all built over a relatively short period of twenty or so years.

The architects and designers of these buildings and the interiors they created looked back to the Renaissance and to France and, more important, back to the great period of Danish architecture around 1600 for inspiration but the ornate decorative work on the outside and in the interior of the buildings, is perhaps no longer as well appreciated as it might be.  So the restoration of these rooms for the museum will, hopefully, lead to a greater appreciation of the period and they also show that modern lighting, uncompromisingly modern displays and absolutely contemporary furniture can fit well within such ornate interiors and that gives these earlier interiors an ongoing relevance.

The architects for the recent work were Leth & Gori and Rørbæk og Møller. On their web site Leth & Gori have photographs of the building in the early stages of the work that were taken by the museum to record where later subdivisions of spaces and blocking in doorways and so on were being removed and they show just what had to be done to uncover the original arrangement of the building. On the Rørbæk og Møller site there are images of the restored rooms but before museum displays were installed.

Design work for the exhibition displays and the panorama was by JAC studios with lighting design by fortheloveoflight.

Københavns Museum / Museum of Copenhagen
Leth & Gori
Rørbæk og Møller

 

Københavns Museum / Museum of Copenhagen

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On the main entrance level in the new museum, to the right of the entrance hall and the main staircase, there is a spacious and light room, one of the main rooms in the building, with a 17th-century style of ceiling with exposed painted beams supported on brackets. This is now an impressive entrance and ticket area with bookstall and with seating and tables for the café though with the counter and some seating in small spaces off the main room.

The rooms in the range to the left of the stair hall form a good-sized space for temporary exhibitions - the important first exhibition being Paul Fischer - Copenhagen in a good light.

On the first and second floors are arranged a series of spaces where the history of the city and its people are set out. The first area covers the period from 1200 to 1660 with archaeological remains from the first stages of the settlement shown in a very swish oval, glass and steel display with good animation panels such as a sequence to show how early tools were made by hunting down deer and then cutting and working the antlers. The second area covers the period from 1660 to 1850 and, on the second floor, there is Copenhagen from 1850 onwards along with what will surely be a main attraction for the new museum - a panorama and model of Copenhagen - and displays that bring the story of of the city through to now.

There are some areas still to be completed but that gives a good sense of a museum that can develop and grow, rather than being tied to a completely fixed display that itself quickly is seen to belongs to a single point in time, and it also gives a hint of just how much work is involved in curating and presenting these complicated displays. To look forward to soon are new areas on the history of the harbour and port - so Copenhagen as a mercantile and trading centre - and an area on the book trade and printing in the city so Copenhagen as an important centre of learning.

Because I have a post-graduate degree in museum and gallery studies, I often find myself distracted by looking at how a museum has displayed their objects and how they have tackled labelling or lighting as much as at the objects shown. But equally, as an academic, I tend to get frustrated by some trends in recent museums and particularly when they feel they have to entertain as a priority over everything else so they pander to an idea that visitors might have a short attention span and so focus on screens and buttons and effects and often with a minimal number or sometimes no actual objects. There is a part of me that still likes huge cases full of lines and lines of amazing objects where you discover things and get hooked in by things you had not realised were there - an old approach to museum displays that is sometimes derided as storage on display.

I would say honestly that the new Museum of Copenhagen has got the balance just about right. There are absolutely outstanding objects here and beautifully presented but there are also touch screens and audio visual displays to present a phenomenal amount of background information. After all, the museum is here with a role not only to curate an important collection but also to tell a rich and complicated story.

There are really good sections on the 19th-century cholera outbreak that was one of the insentives for rebuilding the city in the late 19th century and a small room which, in a dramatic way with sound effects, shows the impact of extensive and devastating fires in the 18th century that, with the consequential rebuilding, changed the city radically.

Other themes include material on crime and poverty in the city and, in stark contrast, a section on the 18th-century city that looks at the contrived and prescribed manners of the wealthy and the life of the craftsmen and journey men who were and still are crucial to the city.

In the area looking at the city in the late 19th century there is a very clever trick to present that period through eight different aspects or view points represented by people or occupations so an engineer, a street photographer. a cyclist and a flaneur - a young man who strolled around the city seeing and being seen. These are represented by objects - a street light, a camera on a tripod and so on but also by a number of amazing historic photograph that can be seen on a large flat screen by, of course, swiping right.

the entrance and information and bookstall area - the display of important archaeologica finds - Copenhagen around 1900 portrayed through the engineer, the street photograph, the flaneur and others - wooden posts that reinforced the steep slope of the defences - model for the equestrian statue of Frederik V set up in 1771 - and a cigarette machine - so OK that last one hardly needs a caption

 

The main attraction on the top floor is a large model and a panorama of the city with certain aspects that can be lit up at the touch of a button - for instance the line of the coast or beach at each stage can be picked out as a blue line to reinforce the important fact that much of the city is built out over the sea - but it is also worth standing and looking at the full display on the data wall. It actually takes around 30 minutes to scroll through the full sequence but here I discovered astounding facts about the modern city …. did you know just what a huge proportion of the waste collected from the streets is, by weight, cigarette butts? Or that there are now 675,000 bikes in the city and people in Copenhagen cycle a cumulative total of 400,000 kilometres a day so the equivalent of a relay race of 35 circuits of the world?

Design work for the exhibition displays and the panorama was by JAC studios with lighting design by fortheloveoflight.

Københavns Museum / Museum of Copenhagen

the panorama and model of the city and the data wall …. it takes about 30 minutes for the phenomenal amount of information to scroll across but well worth the time to find out so much about the city through the most recent decades

 

Paul Fischer - Copenhagen in the best possible light

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For the opening exhibition at the Museum of Copenhagen, the work of the painter Paul Fischer is an inspired choice. 

Fischer was born in 1860, visited Paris between 1890 and 1895 and died in 1934 so his paintings of street scenes and middle-class life in the city reveals much about a great and crucial but possibly now under-appreciated period in the development of Danish architecture and art.

It was certainly a formative period for technology in Copenhagen - a point of transition to a city with electric trams; electric lighting in the streets; telephone kiosks in the squares and a bustle in daily life that we would recognise as essentially modern. That period, in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, is also, of course, a great period for new buildings and change. It followed the dismantling of the old defensive banks and moats that had constrained the city and then the construction, around the city, of important new parks and new public buildings - including the National Gallery, the Glyptotek, the new city hall and, of course, the building that the museum itself now occupies. Many of these new streets and squares were painted by Fischer.

For the composition of his paintings of street life, Fischer made use of photographs that he himself took - so he was an early street photographer - and these are shown alongside many of the paintings so there is an intriguing game to spot which buildings have survived; which have gone in the last ninety or hundred years and which streets and squares have barely changed.

Fischer was also a commercial artist - again in a remarkably modern way - who produced illustrations for advertisements and newspapers and magazines and designs for post cards and an extensive collection of examples are on display.

This is a fascinating exhibition that takes a clever course between exploring and celebrating the work of an accomplished artist but also looks at the record his paintings and photographs have left us of the people who lived in the city and how they used the streets and the buildings in that specific period.

Paul Fischer - Copenhagen in the best possible light
at the Museum of Copenhagen, Storm Gade 18 - the exhibition continues until 31 July 2020

 

reopening

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On the 7 February 2020, the Museum of Copenhagen will reopen in its new home at Stormgade 18.

Close to the city hall in the centre of Copenhagen, the building by the architect H J Holm (1835-1916) dates from the 1890s.

Leth & Gori are the architects responsible for the restoration work and for work on the adjoining building at Stormgade 20 for offices for the museum.

Københavns Museum is now part of a city department for culture called Historie & Kunst / History and Art that includes Københavns Stadsarkiv / the City Archive, Thorvaldsens Museum and Nikolaj Kunsthal

Leth & Gori
Historie & Kunst /History and Art
the opening of the new museum
Københavns Museum / Museum of Copenhagen

 

the old Museum of Copenhagen

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the forecourt and the main range of the 18th-century building from Vesterbrogade

The Museum of Copenhagen will reopen in February but in a different part of the city - in a refurbished building on Stormgade close to the city hall - and there is now a growing controversy about the future of the building that they occupied on Vesterbrogade that is now vacant.

In the 1950s, the museum of the history of the city moved to this very fine house that dates from 1782 and was built as a new home for the Royal Copenhagen Shooting Society … a society had been established back in the 15th century to train citizens to defend Copenhagen. 

In the late 18th century, in their new building, outside the west gate of the city, there were gardens and shooting ranges that ran back from the house as far as the beach. However, in the 19th century, after the construction of the Copenhagen to Roskilde railway, that ran across the end of the shooting range and with the subsequent and rapid development of the west suburb, including apartment buildings on the south end of the shooting range and along what is now Istedgade, a high brick wall had to be built in 1887 across the end of the ranges to protect pedestrians walking across on the new road along the beach.

After the war, the Shooting Society moved out of the city to Solyst, north of Klampenborg, and the land and buildings on Vesterbrogade were acquired by the city. Much of the old garden and the shooting range behind the 18th-century house became what is now a very popular inner-city park and Vesterbro Ungdomsgård - a club and sports facilities for young people in this district - was built in 1952-53 across almost the full width of the garden and close to the back of the house so, although there is still an impressive forecourt towards the road, there is surprisingly little land behind the house for such a large and important historic property.

Inside, the house there are large and distinctive rooms with fine interior fittings so the property is protected and any new owner would be restricted in what they could do to the building and that could, in turn, limit how it is used.

Initially the building was offered on the commercial market for sale but, after some discussion, there is now a possibility that the house will either be retained by the city or it could be restored for a social or public function so that some public access would still be possible.

The battle now would seem to be between sections of the city administration who see the building as an important asset owned by and for the city that has to be kept in public ownership and control for the citizens and political factions who see it as financially astute to realise an asset that will have serious upfront and ongoing costs to restore and maintain but for now the building is unused and looks more and more unloved.

the gardens of the Royal Shooting Gallery

the old museum building from the air … the distinct grey-tiled roof with hipped ends of the main building from 1782 is approximately at the centre of this view with the forecourt towards Vesterbrogade running across at an angle at the top or north side of the view.
The L-shaped buildings and the square area of grass immediately below the old building are Vesterbro Ungdomsgård

photograph of the house and forecourt and the service range across the west side of the forecourt
Københavns Stadsarkiv, reference 20087