notes, reviews and photographs about current design, design shops, cafes and restaurants and exhibitions and galleries in Copenhagen
news, notes, photographs and thoughts about design, architecture, planning and townscape and exhibitions in Copenhagen
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.
You wait years for a new multi-storey car park and then two come along one after the other ....
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.
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.
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.
previous posts on work from Cobe:
Our Urban Living Room at the Danish Architecture Centre,
Strandgade 27B, Copenhagen
until 8th January 2017
Taking the harbour ferry was a chance to take yet another photograph of the Amager Resource Centre designed by BIG - the Bjarke Ingels Group - and due to come into service next year. The stack - the one that will blow smoke rings - is finished and much of the exterior cladding appears to be in place and it's now easy to judge the angle of the ski slope that will run down from the top. Perhaps more important, if only from the design aspect, is that the grey colour helps drop the bulk of the building back into the cloudscape and tones down the impact of the building on the sky line.
Work on what initially was called the Bryghusprojektet in Copenhagen but is now known as BLOX seems to have moved forward rapidly through the summer. There are now fewer cranes, less obvious engineering work and with a more open site, where hoardings and builders cabins have been removed, it is now much easier to get a sense of how the finished building will appear.
It still looks a bit like a stack of plastic lunch boxes but, as more of the large panels of pale green and opaque white have been put in place and the scaffolding and covers removed, it now seems to be at least some reference to the use of green and blue slate colours for many of the buildings in the city from the 20th century. It strongly adheres to danish ideals of rational and minimal style and is clearly aware of how buildings can and do use views of the harbour and the light reflected up off the water.
It was obvious that the relationship with the dark, solid block of the Royal Library, the near neighbour along the quay, was always going to be a difficult one … dominate, compete or be subservient … but the decision to simply be different seems now to be the simplest one. There are still some odd issues with the way the new building will loom over low historic buildings around a courtyard on the side away from the harbour and it will undermine the impressive scale of the important 17th-century Brew House but that may well be resolved by the way the open space on the city side of the new building will be quite complex with changes of level with steps and sunken areas, that will form a transition from street level to the interior and then through to quay of the harbour.
That complex interlocking of levels is in part because a major road running along the quay is bridged by the new building but there will be links under the road as one important function of the building is to provide a route between what is now to be known as the Cultural District of the city and the water front.
Work is so far advanced that it was possible to allow the public access during the Night of Culture to see the progress for themselves.
Determined clearly by necessary economic considerations, there will be a mix of uses for the building including car parking, a restaurant, a gym and luxury apartments across the upper levels but the primary function will be as the new home for the Danish Architecture Centre and for BLOXHUB - the Danish Design Council along with other associated bodies and companies working broadly on architecture to focus on the Built Environment … rather than the Natural Environment.
The architect for the project is Rem Koolhas and his studio in Rotterdam - OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) - and the development is by Realdania who have an excellent web site for more information.
On a walk down to the shopping centre at Fisketorvet on a clear sunny Autumn afternoon and happening to have a camera, it was a good opportunity to take photographs of the apartment buildings at Havneholmen.
There are two courtyard blocks here designed by the architectural firm of Lundgaard & Tranberg that were completed in 2008.
With recent changes to this site there was a reason to look again at the typography and the layout of its pages and a chance to use some different colours. That meant thinking about which colours for me stand out in Copenhagen with a clearer appreciation of the city now I live here year round through all seasons.
Water around the city - the seascapes of the sound - and water in and through the city - the water of the harbour, the lakes and the fountains of Copenhagen - along with the strong clear light, means that clean, deep blues are a strong influence on design and architecture here along with the softer distinct slate green colours found in the work of Arne Jacobsen and in many of the more recent buildings in the city with opaque panels of blue or green or with acres of glass picking up the tones reflected up off the water. Cream and sand colours, of many of the historic buildings, are important and, of course, greys tending to purple of the cobbles and setts contribute a lot to the colour and tone of the townscape but in the end, to my surprise, I realised that it is the dark yellow and deeper colours, from ochre through to the deep oranges and darker reds of iron oxides, used for so many of the painted buildings, that had made a real impact.
Of course, these strong earth colours are not unique to Copenhagen but are found throughout Denmark and in Oslo and Bergen and from Malmö to Stockholm and beyond, so they are truly Scandinavian colours and part of a strong colour palette that designers and architects see around them every day.
The trip out to Lyngby to look at the new furniture store of FDB Møbler was also the chance to take some photographs of the town hall that was designed by Ib Martin Jensen and Hans Erling Langkilde, following a competition in 1937, and completed in 1941.
Built in reinforced concrete, the block has five main floors faced in Greenland marble and a penthouse inset from the main plane of the front and faced in copper. Set across one side of a large square the front forms a gentle arc and the design is uniform and regular apart from windows at the right-hand end that rise through two full floors and mark, externally, the position of the council chamber and the glazed entrance and porch which is not central but off set again to the right. The entrance hall leadsthrough the building to the main staircase that is in a block that projects to the back.
Door fittings and so on are of a very high quality and the main staircase is impressive rising the full height of the building with curved flights.
Lyngby town hall, Lyngby Torv, Lyngby
The house designed by Poul Henningsen for himself and his family in Gentofte, a suburb of Copenhagen, and completed in 1937 was purchased by Realdania By & Byg in 2014.
After an extensive programme of restoration work, returning the house to its original appearance, it will be leased but just for this week the public has been allowed access.
It will be open on Saturday and Sunday the 17th and 18th September from 13:00 to 17:00.
Brogårdsvej 72, 2820 Gentofte
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