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
Work has just started on a new bridge over the harbour for cyclists and pedestrians that will curve across the water parallel to and north of Langebro to provide a new route from Christianshavn or Islands Brygge to the city centre so that cyclists can avoid the heavy road traffic of H C Andersens Boulevard by encouraging people to use the quieter road - Vester Voldgade - that runs parallel up to the city hall.
There are proposals to create a large new public square in Copenhagen on the north side of the central railway station.
The present station was designed by the architect Heinrich Wenck. Work on the building started in 1904 and was completed in 1911. It was constructed across a shallow valley or low ground so trains now leaving the station to head north are well below street level. This left an odd and large void in the street scape although, in the days of steam trains, this must have been important to keep the station platforms as free as possible of smoke and dirt.
The new scheme is to build across this large area of the tracks to create a square with the existing main street of Vesterbrogade across the north side, the main front of the railway station forming the south side and the Astoria Hotel from the 1930s on the west side of the square … an open paved area about 50 metres wide and almost 150 metres from the road to the station. An important part of the new work will be extensive and more rational storage areas for bikes. When the new line of the metro opens in 2018 even more cyclists, using this part of the system as an interchange as they travel in and out of the city, will need somewhere to leave a bike.
After posting recently about a proposal to move the 17th-century Caritas Fountain from it's present site in Gammel Torv in Copenhagen to a new site in centre of the large square in front of the City Hall, I came across a good article on line on the Magasinet KBH site - Fremtiden på Rådhuspladsen er fuld af træer - Future City Hall Square is full of trees - which has much more information and a plan for a plan to move the Dragon Fountain, now at the south-west corner of the square to the central axis in line with the main door into the city hall.
It's interesting to see the wider scheme shown on the drawings because it is not just a plan to move a fountain.
When hoardings around the construction site for the new metro station are dismantled, there is a proposal to plant a grove of trees across the north part of the square. In part this dense planting and some additional trees on the east side will give the large space in front of the city hall a stronger sense of enclosure and will use the trees, as they grow, to define a more regular and more rectangular space.
In part this follows on from the successful redesign of the area to the east of the City Hall - the Vartov Square - with its formal planting of cherry trees that are now well established.
Magasinet KBH is a really good site for information about new buildings and planning proposals in the city with a particular focus on urban space and you can also subscribe to their weekly news letters.
For several years the north part of the large square in front of the city hall in Copenhagen has been a construction site, screened off with hoardings, for work on a new Metro station that is due to be completed here in 2018.
Until the work started there was a bus station on that part of the square but only some of the bus bays are to return and it has been suggested that when the paved area of the square is restored then the ornate Caritas Fountain - now on Gammeltorv or Old Square, just on the north side of Strøget or Walking Street - should be dismantled and moved to the Rådhuspladsen (City Hall Square) and a large stone basin reinstated for a grander setting.
The fountain dates from 1608 and was a gift to the citizens of Copenhagen from the king, Christian IV.
The Infinite Happiness, by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, is a fascinating film profile of the 8House - the large block of apartments in Copenhagen designed by Bjarke Ingels. It is in their Living Architecture series and looks at the building by talking to people who live and work there … so the best people to understand and appreciate or criticise the architecture. The film was screened recently by Arch Daily and the series has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Cars in Copenhagen are now outnumbered by bikes … it must be official because it was in a recent article in the Guardian.
Someone has calculated that 35,080 bikes have been added to the total this year alone so that means that there are 252,600 cars in the city and 265,700 bikes and half of them are at Nørreport railway station.
Two-wheel takeover: bikes outnumber cars for the first time in Copenhagen, Athlyn Cathcart-Keays, Guardian, Wednesday 30 November 2016
Work to complete the Amager incinerator is progressing … this photograph was taken today in the late afternoon as I walked back across the new bridge over the harbour. External facing seems to be complete and the single stack is in place but wonder how the gizmo for blowing smoke rings is coming on.
Work on the new Metro line in Copenhagen is progressing and the stations are being completed. The Danish paper Berlingske has just published a set of 25 photographs of some of the tunnels and of the new station at Frederiksberg. It looks as if the overall design of the stations will be close to that of the existing metro stations with a large, long, top-lit space above the platforms with the tracks on either side and steel escalators up inset from the walls. The big difference seems to be that where the present stations are lined with raw concrete, Frederiksberg Metro Station appears to have walls lined with stone or tile in a soft buff colour ... so giving the station a slightly warmer tone but retaining the strong, clean and functional feel of the spaces. The long tiles are laid as vertical bands rather than laid with a brick pattern of overlapping courses.
Nu får metroen personlighed Berlingske 3 December 2016
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 ....
Work on Ofelia Plads - a large, new public space in Copenhagen - has just been completed.
To the north of the Skuespilhuset (Royal Danish Theatre or Playhouse) there was a 19th-century staithe or pier that was constructed parallel to the shore with a basin, Kvæsthusbassinet, and a wharf with a large brick warehouse, now the Admiral Hotel, on the west side and the main channel of the harbour to its east. Most recently it was used as the dock for ferries to and from Oslo and to and from the Baltic islands and ports.
In an ambitious and extensive engineering project that has just been completed, the pier has been excavated or hollowed out to create a large car park that has three levels below ground - or, perhaps it’s more important to point out, there are three levels below water level in the harbour - and the surface was then reinstated with a number of simple, small, low, new, metal-clad structures for staircase entrances to the parking levels and ventilation systems.
This hardly sounds devastating or dramatic in terms of city architecture but it actually shows Danish engineering design and urban planning at its very best - very, very well thought through; carefully and efficiently executed and with no attempt or need to show, in any flashy way, just how much money was spent. In fact the project was a gift to the city through a collaboration between the Ministry of Culture and Realdania.
Sankt Annæ Plads - Saint Anne’s Square or Saint Anne’s Place - is almost back to normal after extensive excavations and engineering works to install storm drains. This has been necessary to cope with surface water when there are massive rain storms. With changes to the climate because of global warming sudden and devastating rain storms are becoming much more common and when the equivalent of a normal month of rain can fall in a few hours then the existing drains in the city cannot cope.
I actually experienced one of these storms just a few months after moving to Copenhagen. The first apartment I rented was on Bredgade and like many of the older buildings in the city we all had storage space in the basement for boxes and suitcases and spare furniture and so on. One morning I was looking out of the window amazed to see the amount of rain falling - quite literally torrents - when my phone rang and it was a neighbour suggesting I should go down and move as much as possible out of my store as rain was pouring in from the windows set low on the pavement side and was running down the external steps from the courtyard. The street was like a fast flowing stream as the drains just could not carry away that much water.
One of several ongoing schemes to resolve the problem has been to cut drains along the street, between the pavement and the road so, instead of a shallow gutter with grills at intervals, there is now a continuous grid and below it a wide concrete channel.
At Saint Anne’s Square the cobbles around the equestrian statue of Christian X have been reset to form a shallow and almost imperceptible basin so storm water in Bredgade will be encouraged to take a sharp turn into the square rather than running on down the street. There are the new surface drains on either side but also the area of grass that runs down the centre of the Plads has been lowered to absorb more water quickly.
If this all seems like a storm in a tea cup, as it were, the cost of storm damage and the disruption to businesses as they have to repair floors and replace plaster and electric wiring and so on is serious and the quantities of water are amazing. There is so much water running off the streets during these storms that sewers burst as water overflows from the street drains and the volume of water is almost impossible to imagine. Sankt Annæ Plads runs down from Bredgade, down from the statue to the harbour but potentially there is so much water coming off the streets in the district that it can cause problems if it is released straight into the harbour, particularly if it has been contaminated with sewage, so the most important part of the recent works was the construction of a massive holding tank that takes up to 9 million litres of water and from there it will be released as slowly as possible into the harbour. I think that tank is actually under new steps at the end of the basin by the Admiral Hotel and is part of the rebuilding of the pier to the north of the theatre that is now called Ofelia Plads. Walking past the works it was difficult to look behind the hoardings to see exactly which area was excavated and just how large and deep that tank is but for 9 million litres it must be big … not an amount I find easy to imagine or visualise.
Around the city there are many more programmes of engineering work or solutions that use new surfacing materials or an imaginative redesign of park landscapes to deal with the problem of storm water ... see the post rains and drains ... and last year there was an exhibition, The Rains are Coming, at the Danish Architecture Centre about what is being done in the city to deal with increasingly heavy rain fall.
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.
Yesterday was the Copenhagen half marathon and also “car free Sunday” so traffic was kept out of the city for much of the day.
It was a great opportunity to see many of the major buildings without the distraction of cars around them but it also emphasised just how much space, even in a historic city, is now taken up by tarmac … roads and squares look so wide and strangely bare without traffic. You also realised that it’s not just the space taken up by the traffic but that people are pushed to the margins of open space and in some places, without cars or, at least, with less traffic, there would be much more space for trees and, in some areas, space even for large-scale planting of large trees.
On Sunday you could also see just how many lights and signs and road markings are required for the traffic. None of this should be a surprise, I suppose, but still, to see the centre of the city without traffic, I realised just how much public space is dominated by cars.
There are illustrations from the 18th century showing people in all their finery strolling along broad streets inside the old city embankments … but did people then complain about the clatter of carriages and carts and the smell of the horses and the manure everywhere or did they just accept that as the price to be paid for living in a bustling prosperous place?
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