Orientkaj

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The large building to the east of the new metro station at Orientkaj - on the north side of the dock - is the new Copenhagen International School designed by CF Møller and completed in 2017. The scheme for swimming and water sport facilities is also by CF Møller.

When the first stage of new metro line M4 out to Nordhavn opens then the trains will leave the circle line at Østerport and head out towards the harbour and, after a new station at Nordhavn, will climb up onto elevated track and a new station at Orientkaj.

Here, as the trains pull into the station, to the right, looking east towards the sound, there will be a view down one of the largest docks in this part of the harbour with a line of large brick and concrete warehouses along Orientkaj itself … most dating from the second half of the last century and most bonded warehouses. These face across the dock to the new Copenhagen International School designed by CF Møller and completed in 2017.

CF Møller have designed a scheme for the dock itself with a series of islands and boarded walkways in front of the school for swimming areas, an area for water sports, - including kayak polo - and changing rooms and a sauna with facilities to be used by the school but also by the local community.

The impressive scale of the dock will be broken and the area takes another step away from its immediate past with nearly all evidence for the container port - the very reason the dock is here - lost but, and again it is a big but, it is schemes like this that will bring at least some nature back down to the quay side and will make the water a strong part of life in this area rather than simply a dramatic backdrop.

 

Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design

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This is the final few days to see the major exhibition at the Danish Architecture Center about the life and work of the Danish engineer Ove Arup whose consultancy was instrumental in their partnership with architects working on iconic building projects from the Opera House in Sydney to the Pompidou Centre in Paris and for major transport projects including the road and rail bridge over the Øresund.

 

exhibition continues until 17 February 2019
Dansk Arkitektur Center, Bryghuspladsen 10, 1473 Copenhagen

Femern tunnel link

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Authorities in Schleswig-Holstein have officially approved the German part of the Femern link so work can now start on constructing a rail and road tunnel between Germany and Denmark.

It will be an immersed tunnel - the longest in the world of this type - with the sections constructed at a new production site with dry docks on the Danish side and they will then towed out by tug and lowered into a trench across the sea bed that will be up to 60 metres wide and 16 metres deep.

This is an amazing engineering project - the largest undertaken in Denmark - and I would recommend watching the video animation on the Femern A/S site to see how the sections of tunnel will be made and taken out to the trench.

This is also, of course, a major design project that requires expertise in road planning and for the design of infrastructure at each end and there will be an important design project for the operation stage for signage, marketing, branding and so on.

With completion planned for 2028, the tunnel will be 18 kilometres long and will link Puttgarden on the German island of Fehmarn to Rødbyhavn, on the south coast of the Danish island of Lolland, and the journey through the tunnel will take 10 minutes in a car and 7 minutes for the train.

Many make the trip across now by using the regular ferry service but for heavy freight traffic - now taken up through Jylland/Jutland and across the bridges linking to Fyn and then on to Sjælland - the tunnel will shorten the journey by 160 kilometres.

This may mean more tourists will arrive in Copenhagen by car but the real impact will be for commercial traffic and therefore, of course, for the development of the region of eastern Denmark and the south part of Sweden.

Already on the agenda is the construction of a new metro line to Malmö to run through a tunnel parallel to the Øresund bridge. For anyone commuting between the two cities, this would not make journey time shorter than the current rail journey over the bridge but the new Femern link between Germany and Denmark will mean many more freight trains crossing to and from Sweden so a metro link would relieve some of the pressure on the bridge and planners and governments are also considering a fixed link further north up the sound between Helsingør on the Danish side and Helsingborg in Sweden.

 

the Fehmarnbelt tunnel

next lines for the metro in Copenhagen

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construction work where the new metro line at Nordhavn emerges from underground and rises up to the new station at the start of the elevated section of track

the new station from Orientkaj

Even before the new inner-city circle line of the metro in Copenhagen has opened, there are ongoing discussions about the stage after the next stage - if you follow what I mean!

Construction work is progressing fast on the spur line of the metro that will go out to Nordhavn - the north harbour district - and, eventually, on out to the cruise ship terminals and, in the other direction, the south spur down to the south harbour - the Sydhavnslinjen - is also moving forward fast with the green boarding up around the site of the excavations for the new station at Enghave Brygge near the power station. That line will continue on to Ny Ellebjerg where it will link with the main suburban train lines and both these metro lines should open in 2025.

So, the next new section of metro, and still at the planning stage, could be an M6 line to form an arc across the top of the island of Amager. It would link the two original metro lines that head south down through Amager - so the M1 down to Ørestad and Vestamager through Islands Brygge and the M2 line down to the airport through Amagerbro - but will also continue west and through a tunnel to re-join the circle line and to the east, beyond a new station at Refshaleøen, the east end of the new line will also go under the harbour - either to form a link back to the new circle line at Østerport or to run north to Nordhavn.

Even more ambitious are proposals for a further new line out from the M6 - an M7 line - that could take the metro under the Øresund to Malmö in a new tunnel some 22 kilometres long to be excavated on a line north of the Øresund Bridge.

From Copenhagen central station to Malmö central station would then take about 23 minutes and the line could be finished and opened by 2035.

Obviously, this will be another amazing engineering project in the city but, more than that, such major infrastructure will influence how the city will work in the future - so which areas will prosper and change because of these new fast transport connections - and it will form the framework for major developments and major expansion of the city through to the middle of the century and on.

 

Alfred Nobels Bro

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Alfreds Bro Map.jpg
 

A new harbour bridge, Alfred Nobels Bro, was opened in the middle of December.

In the south harbour, south-west of the centre, the bridge crosses Frederiksholmsløbet - a wide canal off the main harbour - and links Enghave Brygge and the area around the shopping centre of Fisketorvet - to the large area of new apartment buildings of Teglholmen.

The north side of the bridge is close to the power station H C Ørsted Værket and close to the site for a new metro station. Until the excavations and work for the metro are completed in 2023, the new bridge can only be used by cyclists and pedestrians but it will then take all vehicles.

This is the final link that completes the 13 kilometre circuit around the inner harbour for bikes and walkers and runners.

The canal here is 90 metres wide and the bridge deck is wide with two lanes for traffic at the centre; wide lanes for bikes on both sides and wide pavements. The pavement on the side looking inwards, down the canal, is bowed outwards and has a broad single bench, with its back hard against the road, 70 metres long and with a bowed shape that follows the plan of the bridge itself.

It's not clear why the bench faces down the canal rather than towards the open harbour unless the idea is that people will sit here to catch the last of the evening sun - an attempt to repeat the way that Dronning Louises Bro over the lakes to the west of the city is used as a popular place for people to sit in the evening before they head home from work.

The deck is supported on pairs of concrete columns that lean outwards but the structure is so large that it can hardly be called elegant and until the new apartment buildings are completed it really would be difficult to describe the views from the bridge as attractive.

The team behind the design of the bridge were COBE Architects, the engineers MOE, Arkil Holding A/S and G9 Landscape who made the mahogany bench.

Langebro - a new museum

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Plans have been submitted to the department of Culture and Leisure for permission to create a new museum for Langebro with a new café in the substructure of the bridge on the Amager side.

There has been a bridge here since the 17th century but the present bridge designed by Kaj Gottlob was completed in 1954.

On the 17 January 2019 there will be a meeting about the bridge and the new museum at the nearby Kulturhuset down the harbour from the bridge and there is information about the bridge and about the proposed museum here.

 

update on the new bridge over the harbour

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from the Christianshavn side of the harbour

 

On the Christianshavn side of the harbour, the paving and the cycle route with a bollard to separate out those coming from those going have all been laid out but the base for the new bridge has been covered temporarily with timber.

Round concrete piers for the bridge and the barriers to protect those piers are finished and on the far side - where the bridge lines up with the end of Vester Voldgade - next to BLOX - there are even traffic lights where cyclists will have to cross Christians Brygge - the main road with heavy traffic that runs along the quay. Again the base where the bridge lands on the city side has been covered for now with boarding. All it needs is the bridge … or rather all it needs is the remade bridge after the first version was dropped from a crane as it was being shipped from the manufacturer in the Netherlands.

There was a competition to name the new bridge and the most likely name seems to be Lille Langebro or Little Long Bridge as it crosses the harbour beside the main road bridge that was built in the 1950s.

Historic maps show that the new cycle bridge is on the line of an earlier Langebro so should it be the New Old Long Bridge? When the ditches of the city defences were filled in around 1870, a line of new apartment buildings were constructed along the line of bastions on the outer side of Vester Voldgade and H C Andersens Boulevard was laid out between those buildings and the Tivoli gardens. The map below from the 1860s shows, towards the top left corner, the old west gate to the walled city in the area of the large square in front of the town hall that was built around 1900.

update on Karen Blixens Plads

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from the east with the humanities library to the left

 

 

Back in June 2017 there was a post here on a scheme by the architectural studio COBE to re- landscape Karen Blixens Plads – the large public square on the southern campus of the university of Copenhagen.

Recently, walking through the university, there was a chance to take photographs of progress.

Now in place are the large sunken areas for new bikes stores for the thousands of bikes that thousands of students leave here every day and the main structures of artificial hills have risen over the bike stores so now hard landscaping is going in and then, presumably in the Spring, planting.

COBE

from the west entering the square from the metro

Jørn Utzon Horisont / Jørn Utzon Horizon - Dansk Arkitektur Center

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A major new exhibition has just opened in the Golden Gallery – the lower exhibition space at the Danish Architecture Center in Copenhagen – to mark the centenary of the birth of the Danish architect Jørn Utzon who was born in April 1918 and who died in November 2008.

Under the title Horisont / Horizon, the exhibition makes extensive use of models, audio-visual presentations and the reproduction of many photographs taken by Utzon himself as he travelled widely and looked at traditional buildings in North Africa, Iran, Nepal, China and Africa and at the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright in America that all inspired his work or were, at least, used as a starting point for some of the most imaginative and most eclectic modern buildings of the second half of the 20th century.

 

the exhibition continues through until 3 March 2019
Dansk Arkitektur Center / Danish Architecture Center

FORSK! - research projects from Aarhus School of Architecture

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This exhibition at the entrance-hall level of the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen is on the work of eight research students and graduates from Aarhus School of Architecture. 

These projects cover a wide range of subjects from understanding natural and historic man-made drainage as it has to adapt or be adapted for increased rainfall - a consequences of climate change - through new possibilities in the way we use traditional materials like concrete and, for wood, how new techniques of digital fabrication can be used to develop new forms of construction. 

 As people move into cities some buildings in rural settlements in Denmark have been abandoned and one of the projects looks at how we assess buildings that are no longer needed and might be demolished and looks at how we understand and remember buildings that are part of a common cultural heritage.

The project by Elizabeth Donovan explores how a strong visual or graphic presentation that shows the complex history of sustainability over a century reveals new connections and suggests hierarchies or priorities when “bridging the gap between discourse and practice.”

“Each project further illustrates a rising need for interdisciplinary dialogue to both develop and build knowledge and hereby influence the world.

Aarhus School of Architecture labels this research by design. This methodology, developed at the school, tests ideas and theories through real-life case studies … a proposed solution to a relevant problem, rather than a theoretical consideration.”

Timber curtain by Niels Martin Larsen and Maya Lahmy
explores how we shape materials - here by using digital control of a router to cut precise joins to construct a complex lattice of curved and twisting sections of timber.

Mass and Manipulation by Jon Krähling Engholt
Concrete is normally flat and relatively smooth but here a rubber membrane that has a pattern of cuts made with a laser is used for the former and is supported in different ways as the concrete sets. The weight of the concrete means that the rubber stretches and as the cuts stretch they distort or twist to reveal a different characteristic of concrete that as it sets changes from a viscous fluid to a solid.

Don’t Blame the water! Katrina Wiberg
In many settlements, particularly if they are low lying or close to the coast, modern expansion is often over marginal land - building on meadows and marshland that had taken or slowed down surface water when rain was heavy. 

Maps can show features of the landscape that have been overlaid by man-made drainage systems over decades or even over centuries.

The study area for this project was the settlement of Lystrup. Historical maps, contemporary maps and flood maps were compared to correlate  historical wetlands with flood-prone residential areas to resolve the actual relationship.

Decisions about climate resilience have to include "the planning processes and decision-making mechanisms that shape urban development."

We claim or reclaim land for new developments to extend urban areas and settle in places that in the past were considered to be either unsuitable or difficult for habitation and studies like this will make it possible to distinguish between the Dry and Wet City because "When the cloudburst occurs, the water takes over, and the ice age landscape emerges. The Wet City awakens."

 

Bespoke Fragments Anders Kruse Aagaard
 … explores concrete wood and steel but uses them in a way that challenges our perception of these traditional materials that normally we barely notice.
Concrete is twisted over curved and almost free form steel reinforcing rods to create shapes that are closer to sculpture than structure and in Intermediate fragments from 2014 ash is cut and curved and twisted using digital machining and then slotted into a complicated concrete base for a striking interplay of materials and forms.

Urban Carpet by Polina Chebotareva
10,000 pieces of Douglas fir were linked together with steel wire, the wood charred to form an unfamiliar surface that protects the surface from moisture using a technique related to the Japanese Shou Sugi Ban. 
When it rains the wood gives off a slight scent of smoke that enhances the experience and with use the colour changes to brown so you can trace where people have walked.

For the festival in Aarhus in 2018 the Urban Carpet was installed on a traffic Island in the middle of the main road in front of the central railway station - an area of 100 square metres. 50,000 people cross over here every day but normally people do not notice the island so it is described as an overlooked urban space. The carpet challenges preconceptions and invites people to experience a familiar route in a new way.

Transformation of the abandoned Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag
This project looks at the impact as people migrate from the country to the town and buildings are abandoned. It recorded but also intervened in the decay cutting through some buildings that are destined for demolition to reveal new views and a new focus on both the structure and on perceptions about how it was used and its role in the community as it is  lost from a common history.
Biopsies of the abandoned 2015 looked at a farmhouse in Ydby dated 1780 and tracked the decay of a pig shed.
The reverse biopsy 2016 looked at an abandoned confectionary in Hurup  two months before it was demolished. The building was cut through and for the first time that opened a view and link between the shop in the front and the bakery at the back and revealed a stratification and private history to stimulates a reassessment of the place these buildings had in the lives of people … those who lived in them and those who visited them or possibly knew them only from the outside.

 

new metro hoardings

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Around the city, the final stages of work on the new metro line means that the high hoardings around the engineering works for new stations have come down and work on new paving and hard landscaping has started but the extension of the metro out to the south harbour is not due to open until 2024. 

New hoardings have gone up around the site of the new station at Enghave Brygge and the paintings, in 12 sections on the theme of Evolution, are pretty amazing extending for nearly 500 metres … said to be the longest continuous graffiti in Europe.

The artists are Ulrik Schiødt, Peter Skensved, Michael Wisniewski og Caligr Oner står bag rekordmaleriet med deltagelse fra graffitikunstnerne Balstrøm, Welin, Sabe, Crema, Tonek, Toms, Name, Debs, Code, More, Then, Dae og Even.

 

Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design

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 This is the second major exhibition at the new Danish Architecture Centre and covers both the early life of Ove Arup and then the major projects around the World of the design and engineering company that he founded in London in 1946. There are profiles of the major engineering projects they have completed including the Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre in Paris with models, drawings, films, interviews and historic photographs.

The story is continued through to current projects including work by the Arup Sound Lab. Arup were the consultant engineers for the road and rail bridge over the sound between Copenhagen and Malmö and for the design and construction of the new building for the Danish Architecture Centre.

  

Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design continues until 17 February 2019
at the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen

the rain is coming - Heimdalsgade

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In 2015, an exhibition at the Danish Architecture Centre - The Rain is Coming - set out the repercussions for the city from major changes in climate.

One obvious problem, already experienced in the city, is that sudden and heavy rain storms overwhelm the drainage system, so streets are inundated with water, traffic is severely disrupted, property damaged and drains and sewers broken or polluted water surges out into the Sound.

Since that exhibition, several extensive drainage and landscape schemes have been completed to cope with these sudden rain storms and the most recent is in Heimdalsgade in the city district of Nørrebro where innovative climate tiles for paving have been installed.

Design work was by Tredje Natur … an architectural and design studio founded in 2012 by Flemming Rafn Thomsen and Ole Schrøder with offices nearby. They undertook extensive research and development for the project over three years that was supported by funds from Realdania and Markedsmodningsfondenover.

Their new system manages both surface water and rain water from the roofs of the buildings along the street by taking it down through holes in the paving slabs and into a series of vertical and horizontal pipes, below the pavement, that control and direct rain water either to temporary storage before it is released in a controlled way into the drains or it is diverted into areas of planting.

 
 

Plugs within the pipes can change the configuration but can also transmit data for water management … controlling flow or in winter detecting that pavements have been salted so water cannot be directed to irrigation. These schemes have to protect sewers and stop contaminated surface water polluting water in streams, lakes or the Sound.

These plugs can also be adapted as sockets that take street furniture such as signs, lights and plant boxes.

Work was undertaken to coincide with work to replace pipework for the area heating system to minimise road works and disruption.

The new climate paving can be seen along Heimdalsgade for 50 metres from the end furthest from Tagensvej … so at the corner with Overskæringen, outside the café at Heimdalsgade 22. With a new area of planting taken out into the road, this has meant a new if narrow but shielded public space that has already been colonised with tables and chairs from the cafe.

Tredje Natur

 
 
 

Practice Futures

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A major exhibition, Practice Futures, has opened at KADK - the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation.

The full title of the exhibition is Technology in Architecture, Practice Future, Building Design for a New Material Age, and this is an import examination of that area, if you see it in terms of a Venn Diagram, where the disciplines or professional expertise of architecture, engineering, techniques of construction and the development and the technology of materials meet and overlap.

Fifteen research projects are presented here from international PhD students working in six major European research departments and working with fourteen established partners including major architectural practices, engineering companies and construction companies.

These ongoing studies are reassessing well-established materials such as timber and concrete and rediscovering or reassessing or developing techniques to shape, bend, finish and join materials to achieve new forms of construction such as large scale, computer-controlled extrusion or printing and the development of new materials for large-scale building projects. 

This is about new tools and new approaches for reassessing traditional materials and established craft techniques but also about using computers to assess complex information; to solve unconventional design problems and to control systems for constructing new forms and new types of building. 

Projects presented here are prototypes to demonstrate customised solutions to realise challenging new construction projects that not only have to take into account the need for high energy conservation but also have to tackle rapidly-developing problems or social pressures from population growth, and, as a direct consequence, find new solutions to the demands of cities that are growing at an unprecedented speed. This is construction design trying to deal with political and economic constraints and with the added and pressing demands of global climate change.

KADK Udstillingen og Festsalen
Danneskiold-Samsøes Allé 51-53
1435 København K

the exhibition continues until 7 December 2018

 

umsicht regards sguardi 17 - SIA at Design Werck

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An exhibition has opened at Design Werck in Copenhagen to show major engineering and design projects that were selected for their annual award in 2017 by SIA … the Schweizerischer Ingenieur- und Architektenverein or the Swiss association of engineers and architects.

“The SIA invited architects, engineers, public authorities, companies, investors, and private and public developers to submit projects covering schemes of any size. Each project was then judged on the design’s response to its environment and on the way it applied solutions that would meet users’ needs in an exemplary or novel way.”

Six projects received awards and two others were given honourable mentions for their pioneering roles in designing evolutionary living spaces and their contribution to the sustainability of Switzerland’s built environment

Photographs are by Beat Schweizer and films are by Marc Schwartz.


The exhibition continues at Design WERCK until 7 October 2018

 

restoration II - the forecourt of the design museum

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Work continues at Designmuseum Danmark where the entrance gates, railings and stone piers along the street are being rebuilt and the setts of the forecourt relaid to form a new ramp to replace the steps up to the front entrance door and to install lighting and so on for new outdoor exhibition cases. 

The project - designed by the architectural practice COBE - includes a new ticket area, book shop and new cafe in the lower part of the old pharmacy … that’s the pavilion to the right of the forecourt.

 

As new blocks of stone have been brought to the site and set up, the work is an opportunity to see some of the details of 18th-century stone masons’ techniques that have been replicated … so it is possible to see the way bold mouldings are cut across large blocks to form plinths and caps to the piers.

The large ashlar blocks of the stone piers and the blocks that form the moulded bases and caps are dressed back with strong vertical tooling which contributes a distinct surface texture and gives a darker tone to the architectural details. Note how at each end of the ironwork screen the outer piers are not butted against the brickwork of the pavilions but are set into them which would suggest that the brickwork and stonework were built up at the same time … not one built against the other.

top left - the door into the former pharmacy of the hospital which will be the access to a new arrival space with ticket desk, book shop and new cafe. Note the silhouette in the brickwork of the ball finial and moulded cap of the stone pier that has been dismantled.

top centre - an iron pintel, set into the stonework of the pier, that will hold the strap of the lower hinge of the gate

 

Heavy spiked or barbed railings and the ornate iron gates are held in sockets cut into the blocks.

At this stage the gates are back on site but are on pallets so it is possible to see the robust quality of the iron work and to see how the straps of the gate hinges form a loop that will be dropped over hefty iron ‘pintels’ set into the stonework. 

This major project has also been an opportunity to repair some of the stonework on the entrance front of the main building and it is interesting to see around the doorway that although the stone frame or architrave of the door looks hefty or robust, it is, in fact, made up with relatively thin slips of stone with pieces forming the moulded front and separate pieces forming the reveal or jamb running back to the door frame and the brickwork behind is surprisingly crude.

 
 

Abstracta by Kasper Akhøj from Galleri Feldt

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Galleri Feldt were at CHART DESIGN at Den Frie gallery in Copenhagen with a fascinating show of the display system designed by Poul Cadovius in 1960. 

It was a modular system with metal tubing connected by knuckled joints to form cubes of different sizes to create a flexible display system for exhibitions. The joints were the key to the system - each with up to six prongs in eight different shapes. Cadovius even used scaled up frames to construct geodesic-style domes that were used at the Copenhagen Furniture Fair in 1961. 

A module of the system is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art - donated by the business man Charles Mauro after he negotiated with Cadovius to manufacture and sell the tubing and the links or joins in the USA. 

In 2006, when travelling through the countries of the former Yugoslavia, the Danish artist Kasper Akhøj was intrigued by what seemed to be an almost ubiquitous display system surviving in shops and department stores but also used on the street for market stalls. 

Then, and on subsequent trips over the following twelve years, he pieced together the story of how the Danish system was produced first in China and sold to the Yugoslavian state and then was manufactured in various forms in Yugoslavia … the spread of the system reflecting the complex political situation and an uneasy relationship with the concept and then the reality of consumerism in a communist political system. Akhøj  acquired pieces and their packaging and part of the collection was on show at Den Frie.

Galleri Feldt have produced a pamphlet - a folded poster - with text by Ronah Sadan setting out the story. To quote the conclusion ……

“… the history embedded in the structures Akhøj produces, imbues them with ontological instability and, by extension, turns them into symbols for the vulnerability of artistic agency: as Abstracta’s fate ultimately eluded Cadovius’ control, the fate of Akhøj’s work - and of works of art in general - is ultimately not in its originator’s hands.” 

Kultur Tårnet a year on

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22 June 2018

 

Since 1620, there has been a bridge at the centre of Copenhagen harbour. Knippelsbro was constructed to link the old city to what was, in the 17th century, a new and prosperous settlement of Christianshavn that was being built on land claimed from the sea and - from a new south gate of the city - there was a way across and on to the island of Amager.

Over the centuries the bridge was rebuilt several times but these all crossed the harbour at the level of the quay so there was restricted headroom for boat traffic to pass through unless the bridge was opened. This became a problem in the early 20th century as the wharves and quays south of the bridge dealt with more and more goods so more and larger commercial shipping was coming through the harbour and as the number of people use the bridge to cross backwards and forwards increased with the building of large new apartments blocks along Islands Brygge and south of Christianshavn with new housing in Amagerbro and then in Sundby.

A new bridge - the present Knippelsbro - was constructed and opened in 1937 designed by Kaj Gottlob. This has a much higher deck level - with long ramps up on either side to take road traffic up and over the harbour and more shipping could pass through without opening the bridge - the current harbour ferries pass under the bridge without it having to open. There were two copper-clad towers - with that to the north for the main control room for opening and closing the centre span and a south tower contained sleeping accommodation for the bridge master and his men.

From the 1940s and through the 1950s and 1960s, the docks to the south of the bridge prospered with commercial quays extending down on both sides - so the bridge must have been manned throughout the day and the night - but with the decline and then the shutting of commercial wharves on the inner harbour, the number of times the bridge was opened each day declined and the south tower became redundant and was left empty and unused.

Lars Erik Lyndgaard Schmidt and Malthe Merrild saw the waste of abandoning such a prominent historic monument and came up with possible ways of using the building.

Last year, after several years of them putting considerable pressure on the city and after opening for a trial period to see if there was sufficient public interest … there was … and after extensive restoration work, the tower was opened to the public.

It is now an amazing viewing platform from where you can see up and down the harbour but more than that it's a very unusual venue for events; a very unusual place that can be hired for business meetings during the day and, despite the tight space, it's a venue for gastronomic events and concerts.

Today marks the first anniversary for Kultur Tårnet. Congratulations.

 

Kultur Tårnet

Dinesen

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Dinesen, the Danish floorboard company, did not have a major exhibition in their showrooms in Copenhagen this year for 3daysofdesgn but I called in there on the way to look at the new showrooms for by Lassen that are on the third floor of the same building Søtorvet.

They have an amazing display that runs down the centre of the showroom with the base of a Douglas fir with the bark still attached but sawn through into enormous planks. A visitor had counted the tree rings and the fir, from a forest in South Germany, is thought to have been 117 years old when it was felled.

 

 

 

In from the base, more bark has been removed and the sawn planks are more obvious and then from there, running on down the showroom, is a table made from planks from the tree that are 50 metres long. FIFTY METRES.

It's truly astounding and it shows, in perhaps the most tangible way possible, that the Danish love of wood for furniture is not just about style or taste but about a deep understanding of timber and an appreciation of it's importance and a deep knowledge that comes from experience and decades … no not decades but actually centuries of working with wood in this country.

Dinesen

Just a few days earlier I had taken family, who were visiting, to the Viking Museum in Roskilde. The ships there - dating from the 11th century and excavated from the fiord in the 1960s - are stunningly beautiful and amazing for their size; for their striking design and for their engineering and above all because they show that shipbuilders in Roskilde a thousand years ago were masters of the skills needed to work with the timber and understood how to realise designs that were strong and did service for decades.

Outside, in the area between the museum building and the water of the fiord, there was a demonstration of various shipbuilding skills, using traditional techniques, and one craftsman was dressing the surface of a split timber plank with an axe. A tree trunk had been split with wedges then than being sawn … aa ancient technique that meant thin planks could be formed that took into account the twists and natural faults in the wood. With a few swings with the axe, the surface of the plank was taken back from rough fibres and splinters to a surface that was smooth and almost unblemished.

If anyone wants to know just why Danish furniture in wood is so good then the answer is simple … all it takes is a 1,000 years of experience.

Vikingeskibs Museet, Roskild

Africa: Rethinking Architecture and Design

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An exhibition that presents 25 new research projects that demonstrate how architecture and design can contribute to projects for innovative and sustainable solutions - for instance for alternative energy sources or water treatment and problems with sanitation in a period of rapid development that puts pressure on natural resources.

 

The exhibition continues at KADK, Danneskiold-Samsøe Alle, Copenhagen until 6th May 2018