CAFx - Copenhagen Architecture Festival 2023

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A festival on urban planning, landscape and our built environment within the overall festival theme of Life Form.

Through the festival, there will be over 100 events throughout the city including exhibitions, films, talks, book launches and guided walks.

These will explore ideas about regenerative design, bio-inclusive biometrics, symbiotic co- creation and architectural asceticism.

Many of the events will be in two post-industrial areas of the city ..... around Halmtorvet and Kødbyen .... the old hay market and the meat market .... and in Jernbanebyen .... the old railway works.

Copenhagen Architecture Festival
1 June - 11 June 2023
events

 exhibition - Spaces of Dignity
1 June 10 August 2023

 Design in the Age of AI
SPACE10
from 2 June 2023


note:
If you subscribe to Politiken on line, they published a guide to the festival with essays and the full programme on 13 May 2023 and that can downloaded as a pdf file

 
 
 

Danmarks næste klassiker / Denmark's next classic

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The fourth television series of the design programme Danmarks næste klassiker has opened on DR - Danske Radio.

It follows the same format, with five designers and in each of the six episodes they are set the task of designing a specific type or piece of furniture for that episode. There are usually some particular functions or features that have to be incorporated into the work.

Again the presenter is Mette Bluhme Rieck with two well-known and well-established designers - Louise Campbell and Kasper Salto - who provide guidance and then judge the designs at a presentation at the end of each programme. Again this year, immediately before the final decision, the works are shown to a selection of the public to comment on and test the designs …. often with quite some humour.

Although the programmes are broadcast just a week apart, in reality the designers are given three full weeks to design and then produce their prototype. During those three weeks they record comments and short films on their progress, with sessions on line to discuss their design process with the judges and, during those three weeks, Mette Bluhme Rieck also visits the designers in their studios. This reveals much about how various ideas are developed and shows how the materials chosen and the practical and technical background of the designers themselves produce five designs of very very different character.

Yet again, what comes through clearly through the programmes, is that these designers rely on small independent workshops with specific skills in working with specific materials. This close relationship, between the designer and the craftsman or manufacturer, has always been crucial to the success of modern Danish design.

The task set for the first episode in this series was to design a table. Each episode produces a single winner from the five designs and, in the next episode, the designers will move on to another project …. in the second episode in this series they will have to design a lamp.

Obviously, the designers can anticipate and, to some extent, prepare for what they might be asked to design so an “overraskelse” or surprise is thrown in to give the programmes a slight twist. This can be site specific and can actually be a commission for a design …. in season three, the designers had to design a chair for the lobby of the youth theatre in Copenhagen that was then undergoing extensive work to remodel and extend the space.

In the sixth and final episode of this series, not only will one more winning design - this year a chair - be added to the podium but the judges will then chose an overall winner from the six works that could well become Denmark’s next classic.

Danmarks næste klassiker

 
 

bord / table
lampe / lamp
overraskelse / surprise
børnemøbel / children’s furniture
opbevaringsmøbel / storage
stol / chair

CAFx 2021 - Copenhagen Architecture Festival 2021

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Today is the start of CAFx 2021 ... the Copenhagen Architecture Festival.

There is an extensive programme of events in Copenhagen and Aarhus with films, discussions, performances, lectures, architects opening their studios and offices for events and a number of city walks.

The theme for the festival this year is Landscapes of Care and that is divided into four areas covering ….

Portraits, projects and practices
Diversity and community
Health and architecture
From climate sinner to climate agent

 events include:

  • the premier of a film portrait of Dorte Mandrup from the Louisiana video series

  • a short festival of films by David Lynch including screenings of the films Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway

  • tour of Christianshavn to look at how culture, community and individualism have moulded the urban landscape with discussion on how the life of the street has been "sanitised and tamed".

  • Jan Gehl and Peter Thule Kristensen discuss how urban spaces develop

  • The Battle for the Square Meters - a discussion on the framework for community-orientated activities in Copenhagen’s urban spaces

  • a none-rave rave in the courtyard of Thorvaldsens Museum

  • Cities for Free - film and debate about the urban development of the city in the future with a focus on Lynetteholm

  • Diagnoses: The space of the psyche from the Victorian to the welfare society

  • Brumleby by Michael Gottlieb Bindesbøll - housing built following the outbreak of cholera in 1853 - a tour including the co-operative association building museum

  • Aesthetics for care - a talk on how art has an impact on well being

  • Frederiksberg Hospital - a landscape of care - how to preserve the cultural history as the site is redeveloped

  • Bispebjerg Healing Garden - from 1913 by Martin Nyrop and the garden designer Edvard Glæsel

  • Landscape of care in the post pandemic city - an event organised by Emergency Architecture and Human Rights

  • Creating resilience - changing coastal landscapes - a discussion about current research on the impact of climate change on the coastline of Amager

Copenhagen Architectural Festival
7 October - 17 October 2021

journal / programme / calendar

 

new buildings on the roof of Det Danske Filminstitut / the Danish Film Institute

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Det Danske Film Institute from the King’s Garden

Planning permission has just been granted for an extensive new development on the roof of the Danish Film Institute.

With two courtyards, this large building that covers a complete block in the centre of the city was built in two stages for the great Danish media company Egmont.

The first part - the west half of the block with a frontage to Vognmagergade - dates from 1912-1914 and was designed by the architect Bernard Ingemann. The second part - the east half that faces onto Gothersgade and looks over Kongens Have - the King's Garden - dates from 1926-1928 and was designed by the architect Alf Cock-Clausen. Egmont have a large office building opposite on the other side of Vognmagergade.

By the late 19th century, this part of the city, just inside the old defences, was tightly-packed with old houses around narrow and crowded courtyards that had become notorious slums. In the 1890s and into the 20th century the area was rebuilt. The courtyards and buildings were demolished and a major new street, Christian IX's Gade, was laid out, at an angle, to cut through the old area to the corner of the royal gardens, with new offices, new institutional buildings and large new apartment blocks were built on either side.

Gothersgade 55 - the east part of the Egmont building - is now occupied by Det Danske Filminstitut who have three cinemas here to show classic films under the name Cinemateket and there is also the library of the national museum of film with its reference archive of magazines, books and film posters.

The extensive work on the roof will create a new, cinema with 127 seats and there will be extensive terraces and pavilions for a cinema foyer and a café and areas for displays and exhibitions of historic film artefacts from the film museum.

 

Det Danske Filminstitut
Tagterrasse med filmmuseum
Egmont

the view from the roof of the Danish Film Institute looking towards Nyhavn
and the trees on the outer defences of Christianshavn

 

Den Danske Model / The Danish Model

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Since the Danish Architecture Center moved to their new building, in addition to a series of major exhibitions, there have been small displays and video presentations in lobbies, on staircases and spaces around the building that have included video interviews with Danish designers and architects and areas with examples of classic Danish furniture.

With the large exhibition on the work of the architecture studio BIG - Forgiving - From Big Bang to Singularity - now occupying so much of the exhibition space then the more general introduction to Danish architecture and design is currently in The Hall - the area above the main exhibition space that can be used as a venue or conference space or lecture theatre.

Made in Denmark has a number of long banner panels - with interesting quotes about design from Martin Nyrup, Jens Thomas Arnfred, Anders Lendager and others - and they are also showing the short film The Danish Model.

Obviously, the film is best seen on a large screen but as this part of the exhibition programme will change in October and, as it is an extremely good introduction to modern Danish design, then the link to the film through vimeo is included here.

 
 
 

Servitudes - Jesper Just at Kunsthal Charlottenborg

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Servitudes, a video installation by the Danish artist Jesper Just, has opened at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen.

The architecture of the gallery space plays a strong part in framing or containing a series of eight videos, including one projected onto the floor, and all are synchronised and seen on a proscribed route along a raised metal walkway with a series of ramps that are reminiscent of temporary access ramps for wheelchairs. These take the visitor through the series of large but dimly-lit spaces and rise high enough to mean that at one point it is necessary to duck down to get under a doorway that normally forms a high and wide link between gallery spaces.

Each film is on a continuous loop and dominate your view point so distort any real sense of scale or time and most visitors seemed to watch each film through so another and strong element of the exhibition is the groups of people seen as silhouettes leaning against the rails of the walkways or, in one gallery, sitting on a bank of platforms.

The videos too have a strong architectural theme and were filmed at One World Trade Center. One has a series of lift doors in a large lobby that are opening and closing to no discernible pattern but with no one entering or leaving and one film has a young woman in a barely-furnished space looking out through high plate-glass windows at a landscape of the city skyscrapers. In another, the camera pans slowly across a finely-detailed glass and steel façade broken by rhythmic tapping that eventually resolves into a young girl, back to the camera. striking a panel at street level with a stone.

The catalogue rightly describes the exhibition as mesmerising.

Servitudes, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen
the exhibition continues until 11 August 2019

Bauhaus #itsalldesign

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Designmuseum Danmark, Bredgade 68, Copenhagen

A major exhibition has opened at Designmuseum Danmark on the history, the staff and their teaching and the work of the Bauhaus school of architecture and design.

This reassessment was conceived by Vitra Design Museum and Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn to mark 100 years since the opening of the Bauhaus.

review to follow

the exhibition continues until 1 December 2019
Designmuseum Danmark

 

SONG 1 by Doug Aitken

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A sound and video installation at Copenhagen Contemporary with six curved screens forming an almost enclosed circle so the 35 minute programme can be viewed from the inside or from the outside.

This uses the classic pop song "I only have eyes for you" interpreted by very different singers and musicians but what runs through the sequence is a persistent but very beautiful feeling of melancholy.

In some sections of the sequence, images are separate to each screen or in others they are repeated on alternate screens; some images are mirrored in pairs or they wash around the full circuit as a single scene like an amazing modern version of a fairground round-a-bout.

The original version of the song is a jazz standard from 1934 but listening to so many versions, recorded over so many decades, it seems truly timeless. Cultural references abound in the images and above all it seems to be a love song - not actually to a lover but to what is truly great about the United States and it's architecture and its graphics with universally recognised symbols from the 20th century about being American in modern America so there are scenes in diners and on free ways driving inter state or in all-night bus stations.

So this is not about the natural landscape of the States but about man-made settings - the built invironment imposed on the natural - generally larger but also smaller urban and anonymous man-made spaces. It's a view of metropolis that seems indescribably lonely and sad but here mesmerising and hauntingly beautiful.

at Copenhagen Contemporary, Refshalevej 173A through until 30 December 2018

Copenhagen Contemporary / Song 1

 
 
 

Copenhagen Architecture Festival 2018

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13th April 2018

Copenhagen Architecture Festival opens on the 3rd May and continues through to 16th May 2018. 

Yesterday the full programme was launched on line and this year, for the first time, there will be events in Odense as well as Copenhagen, Aarhus and Aalborg … all cities with a “strong architectural identity.”

The theme for this year is HOUSING HOMES / AT HUSE HJEM with lectures, film screenings, exhibitions, workshops and guided tours to look at ideas of home, housing and belonging … “to look at what constitutes a home, what does it mean to be home, and how homes are created in different and difficult situations.”

The ambition of the festival “has always been to share architecture with a wide audience by being unpretentious, curious, and bringing a new perspective to the table. We want to create new encounters between subjects, people, and ideas in the city’s space. The intention is for architecture to act as a character in the dialogue through the audience’s personal experiences of the spaces. Architecture is thus for everyone- not just for architects.”

 

download the programme from CAFx

Architecture Festival

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The full programme for the Copenhagen Architecture Festival is now available on line to download from their press page. The festival, in late April and through the first week in May, includes events in Aarhus and Aalborg.

There will be an interesting mix of lectures, films - including the first showing of a film about the work of Bjarke Ingels - and discussions with a number of guided tours of the city including some, of course, by bike, and an opportunity to get to see inside some important buildings including The Silo - a dock building that is being converted into apartments by COBE.

If there is one over riding theme, it is not the bricks and concrete and steel of the buildings but an examination of many of the problems and the potential of living in a city in the 21st century.

Copenhagen Architecture Festival