headquarters of Danske Bank to move

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the frontage along Holmens Kanal from the south ... the major square, Kongens Nytorv, is to the right and Holmens Church and, beyond the church, Christiansborg are to the left 

 

the square of Kongens Nytorv is to the top right-hand corner and the buildings that are presently occupied by the bank are towards the centre - the arc of buildings above and facing on to the canal on this map drawn in the 18th-century 

the bank from the north - from the edge of the square. The fine house that forms the north part of the present bank  was the mansion of the shipowner Erich Erichsen and was built for him in the 1790s from designs by Caspar Frederick Harsdorff although Erichsen died in 1799 ... before it was finished

Danske Bank is to move from its buildings in the centre of Copenhagen, where they have been based, for almost 150 years.

This move raises some interesting points … not least because it reflects significant and ongoing changes in the financial and commercial history of the city. 

Here, in their present buildings at Holmens Kanal - in a group of major historic buildings to the south of the the great square at Kongens Nytorv - Danske Bank is immediately opposite the National Bank of Denmark and was 200 metres from Børsen - the Borse or Exchange - and barely 250 metres from Christiansborg and all the offices of parliament and, more recently, has been within sight of the rival, Nordea Bank, and the Foreign Ministry on the opposite side of the harbour so this site has been very much at the centre of the political, business and financial life of the city.

But that World runs differently now … there are more players than just the big banks and they are spread across the city and these old buildings, with grand banking halls, no longer seem appropriate for the way that people have to work or do business but I do regret that I will no longer be able to go into the banking hall and sort things out that need to be sorted out face to face.

It’s curious …. we talk about clothes and music and TV or films changing fast because they look dated or unfashionable … but surely a lot of those changes are superficial … about the colour or cut. Much more fundamental changes come through with little more than a shrug. Banking halls with counters where money was paid in or taken out have been phased out over little more than twenty years after being the main interface between a bank and its customer for 200 years or more but the cash machines that first appeared in the 1960s or was it the 1970s … the “hole-in-wall” machines … are already disappearing as we move with little protest to phone or on-line banking and cash-less payments for almost everything. And these are not just quaint details of social history but do have an impact on planning and on the way we use the buildings and streets of our city centres.

And there have been other changes in the way that we live, day to day, that have had a similar impact on the buildings that were once crucial … so the main post office in the centre of the city went over a year ago and, as with these imminent and inevitable changes to the bank buildings, there are also changes to the dynamics of these areas … knock-on consequences in terms of planning not least about how and when people come to these areas. 

There are proposals for a major remodelling of Laksegade - the street immediately behind the present buildings of Danske Bank - which is hardly bustling with life but these are good buildings and provide some areas of quiet that are a counterbalance to wall-to-wall commerce with block after block of shops. One of the really important things that differentiates Copenhagen from so many cities is that so many people live right in the centre and there are areas of relatively quiet and relatively less commercialised life.

This is a complicated group of tightly packed but substantial historic buildings of different dates and different forms so it will be interesting to see the proposed schemes as the bank moves out and the developers move in.

Laksegade from the west with the building of the bank at the far end. This area is to be redeveloped with the bank moving out

a detail to show the amazing quality of the architecture in this part of the city

Laksegade from the north - approaching from Kongens Nytorv - with the bank to the left

Studio Fountainhead

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An exhibition of work by Dominique Hauderowicz and Kristian Ly Serena who founded Studio Fountainhead in 2013. This is the third of three exhibitions in the gallery over the Autumn to show the work of young architects from Copenhagen.

Studio Fountainhead

Dreyers Arkitektur Gallerei at Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen

continues until 30 December 2017

 

Proposals for Dokøen - the area around the Opera House

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The Opera House from the north west

 
 

Designed by Henning Larsen Architects and completed in 2005, the Opera House dominates the central harbour in Copenhagen … in part because, obviously, it is a very very large building but the scale is exaggerated by the open areas to either side with lawn to the south - over an area about 140 metres by 140 metres - and on the north side an even larger space 160 metres by 160 metres that is now mostly car park but divided by a dock running back from the harbour and with a historic brick pumping house that dates from the 19th century along with massive gantries of two harbour cranes that were kept when this part of the dock was cleared.

 

The original scheme included large apartment buildings that were to have flanked the Opera House but with the onset of the economic recession that phase of the development was put on hold. 

New proposals, under discussion, are to proceed with building the apartments planned for the north side of the Opera House around the dock - retaining the cranes and the pump house - but for the area to the south the new plan is to construct a large underground car park and then reinstate the area of grass for a new park with landscaping. 

It has been suggested that the quay facing across towards the harbour - facing towards Ofelia Plads but now set back and at an angle - could be pulled forward to line up with the edge of Papirøen to the south. Would that be a gain? It might make the harbour too regular - too much like a wide canal - and there is another potential ‘loss’ because any development and even more dense planting will in part hide and will reduce the visual impact and impressive scale of the two long historic blocks along the canal to the east that were warehouses but are now converted into homes.

RAMT AF BYEN / CITY STRUCK

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This will be the last major exhibition from the Danish Architecture Centre in their present space in the large, historic, brick warehouse on the Amager side of the harbour because early next year they will move across to the other side of the harbour to BLOX … to new buildings designed by Rem Koolhaas and OMA and now close to completion

The exhibition has been curated by Marie Stender and is a selection of striking images by different photographers who explore the city as a place for people that is moulded and adapted by people for the way they really live day by day.

Divided into three areas - Boundaries, Meetings and Flows - this is the antidote to all those perfect images that are seen in so many architectural journals and glossy coffee-table books were perfect buildings are shown in the best light, from the most flattering angle and invariably devoid of people ... stripped of their reason and, metaphorically and literally, stripped of their humanity. 

When you watch people en masse in complex urban spaces you see quickly if the planning has failed -  so anything from a curiously empty and unused and unloved space to exactly the opposite where a street or a square or a building seems to be overwhelmed by the people passing through or trying to use the space. In these photographs, you see how people colonise public space and use it in ways no architect or planner had envisioned.

continues at the Danish Architecture Centre on Strandgade until 28 February 2018

new routes into the city from the harbour

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Frederiksholms Kanal from BLOX looking towards the Marble Bridge with the new cobbles and trees with more restricted parking for cars

looking towards the harbour with BLOX in the distance and the Brewhouse of Christian IV on the far side of the canal

 

BLOX will be the new home of the Danish Architecture Centre and work on the building is moving forward but the roads to the building from the city centre have already been remodelled.

On the east side the road alongside the canal was resurfaced this summer. Most spaces for parking cars have been removed and the wide area cobbled and trees planted to create a very pleasant route for pedestrians that links BLOX to Marmorbroen - the Marble Bridge to Christiansborg - and to Nationalmuseet - the National Museum or, from there, on to Gammel Strand or on further to Gammeltorv and Vor Frue Kirke.

Vester Voldgade to the west now has a wide bike lane and attractive new hard landscaping and planting of trees. Aligned with the new bicycle and pedestrian bridge over the harbour it will link BLOX to City Hall Square.

 

 
 

Vester Voldgade with the tower of the city hall in the distance

playing with the conventions

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For the post about waste chutes in Copenhagen it was necessary to discuss briefly the conventional or standard arrangement of apartment buildings in the city … with apartments running back from the front to the back of the block and with an entrance from the street with one apartment on each side at each level or landing and the waste chute outside the apartment, usually on the landing between the two apartments … but then in design and in architecture there are always exceptions so its interesting to look at what doesn’t follow the norm. 

Sometimes it’s a response to an exceptional situation where the conventional solution is not appropriate and sometimes it’s that business of a designer or architect ‘playing’ with the conventions and sometimes, with hindsight, that twist of the rules is actually the first example for something that gains in momentum and means a complete change in the convention.

So with the business of early apartment buildings in the city having a main staircase and then, in many buildings, a second or back staircase which in the best buildings give a separate route from the kitchen down to the courtyard without going down the best front stairs.

It was a social and a practical nicety to have a polite and a service stair but it was also crucial to provide a second staircase as a fire escape when the main staircase was in wood. As concrete was used more and more in the construction of apartment buildings in the city then having a concrete staircase with iron railings changed the assessment of the risk and gradually second or back staircases are seen as unnecessary and are omitted.

Change can be driven by fashion; evolve through innovative design or be forced through by sensible regulation. Oh and society does have an impact … no one in 1930, tipping their rubbish down one of those new-fangled rubbish chutes, could have had any idea that 90 years later the family in the same apartment would want to separate out paper from glass from food waste … designers and architects have to respond if the way people live their lives changes.  

 

 

 

 

illustration from Danske arkitekturstrømninger 1850-1950

This is Svendebjerghus on Hvidovrevej in a west suburb of the city. It was designed by Mogens Jacobsen and Alex Poulsen and completed in 1951. 

It is an amazing building where the conventions are subverted for all the right reasons. The apartments run front to back but adjoining apartments are up (or down) half a floor. Staircases are in the centre and turned to run with the axis of the building. There are waste chutes but to use them you are standing balanced on the staircase itself but that seems to be a small price to pay for all the other gains. One important change is that the block is set back from the road where there is a large garden because that is the west and sunny side so that is also the side where the balconies are. The entrance to the building is down a side road and then from the back … again for the most rational reasons. 

Curiously, despite not being conventional or standard in plan, it seems to represent well the style of the period. Originally the balconies were deep red and ochre yellow … the Copenhagen colours … so the bright deep blue is relatively new. The building is nick-named Hollywood.

 

This is an apartment building between Wildersgade and Overgaden Neden Vandet in Christianshavn. Waste chutes here are external, which is unusual, and the rubbish goes into bins that are not in the basement but at courtyard level where each chute has its own bin shed. What seems curious here is that the vertical chutes run across windows lighting the staircases and the hatches for the chute are not at a landing outside the front door but up or down half a level and for the ground-floor apartments, because the bins are at courtyard level, rather than in the basement, the hatch is immediately outside the door to the courtyard in the side of the bin shed.

down and out in Copenhagen?

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Not all planning proposals or building regulations are monumental in scale or immediately obvious when they are implemented. Recently, in Copenhagen, it was announced that new apartment buildings will not be required to have waste chutes.  

These were introduced in the 1920s and took a fairly standard form. 

The plan of purpose-built apartment blocks in the city generally follow a common general arrangement. However long the block or even when the apartments enclose a large courtyard, there are no long internal corridors but separate entrance doorways at regular intervals along the street that invariably gives access directly to a staircase and there are apartments on either side of the staircase, usually just one on each side at each level or landing, and the apartments run back the full depth of the block with windows to the street and windows to the rear, usually looking into a courtyard. Earlier and larger flats had back or secondary staircases as fire escapes but also for access to the courtyard - for access to drying yards or in early buildings to outside toilets.

Waste chutes were built dropping down through the building with porthole-like hatches at each landing or level ... not inside an apartment but out on the landing between the flats and shared by the two at that level and they are either on the main landing or on the landing of the back staircase if there is one. Waste drops down and into a large bin, preferably at basement level, and this is emptied at intervals.

No longer stipulating chutes in building regulations marks an interesting change in terms of social history. Many older apartment buildings have now been fitted with lifts and very few modern buildings do not have a lift so carrying rubbish down is easier anyway. More important, the way we deal with rubbish is having to change. General waste from the city still goes to incinerators that produce heat for water and heat for communal heating systems and rubbish can be sorted and separated out to retrieve what can be recycled immediately before incineration but it is more efficient to get each household to split their rubbish into different batches so now most courtyards have separate bins for waste glass, paper, plastic or electrical or metal waste and a recent change is to separate out organic waste. Less and less goes down the chute. 

 

the upper plan shows an apartment building with a single main staircase with access to two apartments from the landing and a waste chute between to front doors. The door into the kitchen in each apartment is directly opposite the front door ... so relatively convenient.

the lower plan shows more complex and sophisticated planning with a back or secondary staircase. Doors from the kitchens of the adjoining apartments open onto a landing with the hatch to the waste chute. The staircase provides a way down to the courtyard at the back of the building.

L1230025.jpg

Nordhaleøen

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Research - to assess the possible impact of climate change on the city of Copenhagen - has concluded that rising sea levels together with changing weather patterns, could mean that storm winds could drive a tidal surge into the wide entrance to the harbour and cause extensive flooding in the centre of the city. 

Engineers are working on proposals for tidal defences or barriers that could be raised when necessary to keep storm water out of the harbour but Urban Power - a partnership of young architects in the city - have suggested that this is an opportunity to consider a more dynamic option … they have suggested that a man-made island could be constructed, rather than a single barrier, to protect the entrance to the harbour providing new land to develop and an opportunity to extend and link together, the infrastructure of bike routes, roads and metro links across the north and east side of the city.

read more

Urban Power

 
 

Nordhavn … coming together

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The trip out to Nordhavn to go to Finders Keepers was a good opportunity to have another look around the new district as most of the apartment blocks are finished and most now occupied and the hard-landscaping is going in now that the heavy construction traffic has left. 

My impression, watching the area go up over the last couple of years, has been that this was a bit of a cladding free-for-all. A sort of me me me look at me approach to designing the buildings but actually it is beginning to come together a bit more as a district. A supermarket, a wine bar and a coffee place had all opened since I was last here. The old harbour buildings have been restored and businesses are moving in as well as residents.

Some of the streets are narrower and more tightly built up than along the harbour below Islands Brygge or in the south harbour area but actually that might be an advantage in protecting the streets from the worst of the weather in the winter … after all this is the North Harbour.

It looked as if many of the Danes visiting Finders Keepers were also taking this as a first opportunity to explore the newest area of housing in the city as many were taking photographs and there was a steady stream of people climbing the staircase to the park on the top of the P-hus Lüders multi-storey car park.

 

 

the horizontal, banded brickwork is good ... an interesting take on decorative brickwork from the 19th and early 20th century throughout the city ... a stripped down version that gives the building some texture and a strong tone that sits well with the deep rust-coloured Corten steel used throughout the district for drain covers, rubbish bins and bike stands

 

the graphics for the car park by Rama Studio are fantastic

and the vertical planting is looking good as everything becomes more established

 

Autumn at Islands Brygge

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Autumn seems to have come early to Copenhagen this year. Nobody was swimming in the harbour baths at Islands Brygge today although I have seen some - the hardy or the foolhardy - swimming there on much much colder days than this.

But the park was still being used … by a group being put through an exercise regime and by a group huddled under umbrellas having a picnic and there was a group on bikes being given a lecture … my guess … this was one of the events for the 850th anniversary of the city being celebrated this week and next.

The quay here was a bustling part of the port through into the 1950s and 1960s with cranes and gantries and railway lines for loading and unloading the ships. Some of the evidence from that working port survives but not much. 

The park is crowded in the summer with people laid out in the sun … and watching people laid out in the sun ... and being seen ... a really good example of the way the city has been very careful about providing good space for people to colonise and use.

Even if it was a bit cold and wet today, this really is Our Urban Living Room ...... the subject of a major exhibition at the Danish Architecture Centre back in January.

The quay of Islands Brygge in the early 20th century - before the construction of Langebro.

The apartment buildings on the right and the buildings of the sugar factory - the ornate gable in the distance - and some sections of the gantries and parts of the railway track survive

Søringen - a motorway along the lakes

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Not all major road schemes proposed for Copenhagen have been good but, fortunately, not all major road schemes get built.

Perhaps the most ambitious and most contentious and, if it had been built, the most destructive road scheme proposed was the lake motorway that was planned in 1958 and approved by parliament in 1964.

Two problems had been identified by planners. The first was how to get road traffic in to the centre of the city quickly and how and where to build a brave new metropolis to show Stockholm and Paris that anything they could do to be thoroughly modern, Copenhagen could do too.

read more

Nordhavnsvej and a northern harbour tunnel 

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The planning proposals for Copenhagen dating from 1947, known as the Finger Plan, has served the city well as it expanded out to new suburbs in the north and the west but as the centre of the city becomes more intensively built up - for instance in the area south and south west of the main railway station - and as there is more extensive and more intensive development of the harbour and on Amager - south and east of the centre - in the opposite direction to the spread-out hand of the Finger Plan - then rather different and very ambitious engineering works for new infrastructure are needed. Extensive new road tunnels have been proposed to take traffic around the south side of the city.

read more

a new road tunnel alongside city hall?

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proposal by Tredje Natur for the new landscape of HC Andersens Boulevard
if most of the traffic is taken down into a new tunnel

possible routes for a new North Harbour Tunnel and a possible tunnel
from Bispeengbuen to Islands Brygge

 

A proposal for a major engineering project, to construct a tunnel down the west side of the historic city centre, is now in doubt.

It would take underground much of the traffic that now drives along HC Andersens Boulevard on the west side of the city hall and would have much more impact on the inner city than a north-harbour tunnel. 

It is also more controversial than the north tunnel because it would be expensive; because there would be complicated gains; some people would resent this as the first stage of banning traffic from the centre with all the restrictions that implies and there could be considerable disruption during construction work … although, actually, most people in the city seem to accept major engineering works as now somehow part of everyday life in Copenhagen with the extent of the works and the time scale for the current work on building a new metro line.

read more

the Finger Plan at 70 

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There is another major anniversary for the city this year because the famous Copenhagen Fingerplan - a planning framework for the city - was produced in 1947.

It accepted that following the war, and for clear economic reasons, there would have to be not just rebuilding and regeneration in the city itself but extensive growth outwards but there was also a determination to control unplanned suburban spread.

So the Fingerplan recognised that although people wanted to move out of the overcrowded city they would have to travel back into the city either for work or for shopping and leisure and took, as a starting point, existing lines of a suburban railway system or S-trains that ran out from the city.

By restricting the sites allocated to new housing as broad but clearly defined lines, there could be areas of countryside left between the new municipalities that could be used for agriculture and for leisure and the plan proposed that some large areas could be planted with trees for new woods and forests.

The plan has served the city well and now covers 34 municipalities with over 2 million people living within the area and the new buildings constructed through the 1950s and 1960s and onwards included housing, municipal shopping centres, new schools, new city halls for local government and new factories.

read more

a museum on the move

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Københavns Museum - the museum of the city - is between homes as building work moves forward on what will be their new home close to City Hall at Stormgade 18 but for the harbour festival they have had a temporary display in the harbour park at Islands Brygge.

Staff and archaeologists were there with historic maps and with archaeological finds to talk to people about the history of the harbour and about the amazing finds from their work at the major engineering excavations for the new metro. They have uncovered major sections of the defences at the old gates of the city and on the site of the historic wharfs along Gammel Strand … and this is not just about the extensive banks and ditches that protected the city but about the day-to-day life of the citizens with incredibly well-preserved finds that include shoes, a woolly hat, pottery vessels and glass ware and even a needle for mending fishing nets.

information about the new museum

Kulturhavn - the harbour festival

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This weekend it is Kulturhavn - the harbour festival of culture in Copenhagen - with events not just in the central harbour but over the eight kilometres from Nordhavn to Sydhavn and with everything from demonstrations of belly dancing to an oom-pah-pah band on a boat sailing around the canals to swimming and kayak competitions. 

This was celebrating diverse culture - in the broadest meaning of the word culture - so what has this to do with a design blog? Well, rather a lot.

For a start - with historic working boats and tall ships moored in the central harbour - you realise that here are all the key elements of good design … a clear pushing of the boundaries of what was then up-to-date technology; an appreciation of the best materials and the skills with tools and machinery to work them along with a strong sense of style … so here is a key part of the Danish design heritage. We might not have talked and written about Form and Function in design until the 20th century but we didn’t invent the concept.

 

 

 

The noise and bustle on Ofelia Plads - the recently rebuilt wharf by the national theatre - brought back some of the vitality of the docks when they were working with ships loading or unloading. New apartments along the harbour are fantastic and no one would have swum in the docks then - or at least not for leisure - but it was the working harbour that is the very reason that Copenhagen is here and why it thrived. It is great that some of the cranes and rail tracks and bollards, where the ships tied up, do survive but maybe not enough. 

So the festival is a reminder of just how vital the water way of the harbour is to the city and it is to the credit of the planners that since the navy and commercial shipping moved out in the 1990s they have done so much to not just reuse the buildings and develop the land but are trying to put the harbour very much at the centre of life in the city.

It really is an incredible resource.

 

view of what is now Ofelia Plads when it was a working wharf

the harbour cranes to the east of the Opera House

Donkey bikes

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I guess I spend too much time looking up at buildings as I walk around Copenhagen and don’t give enough attention to things on the pavement because I have only just noticed these bright orange hire bikes from Donkey Republic that have appeared around the city. Actually, I only noticed these ones because a clutch of three were left near the front of the apartment. Is there a collective term for bikes? Presumably not a fleet ... like for cars when they are for hire.

The design of their web page is pretty good with clear instructions for how to set up a hire and unlock the bikes, some advice about rules for riding a bike in the city and some good recommendations for places to visit but I was a bit curious about the text on the bike carriers. Several Danish friends have told me that they don’t understand English puns … or rather their grasp of the meaning of the words is spot on … it's just that they can’t understand why the English find puns quite so funny. But then I suspect that these are aimed at tourists and visitors and not so much the locals. 

Looking at the map on the Donkey app this evening one bike seems to have got as far as the airport and another to Ballerup so if I’m bored I might keep tracking that one to see if it is heading for the west coast.

Donkey Republic

KADK Afgang Sommer’17

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This weekend is the last opportunity to see the exhibition of the projects and work of this year's graduates from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation … a densely packed show of the talents and the phenomenal imaginations and skills of the students who have just completed their courses in Copenhagen.

There are profiles of the students and photographs and descriptions of their work on the KADK site.

The exhibition ends on 13th August. 

KADK, Danneskiold-Samsøe Alle, Copenhagen