Opening
To grasp contemporary architecture, one cannot rely solely on the well-known international names and the celebrated stars. In many advanced and developing countries, fine architects are at work whose work is confined to their own country, while the world's attention is fixed on familiar names. Danish architecture is worthy of attention because its scope is contained and inwardly bounded — and the kind of contemporary reflection it offers is, in contrast to France, Germany, and America, distinct. Through the twentieth century it has brought forward outstanding figures — including Arne Jacobsen and Jørn Utzon, perhaps Denmark's two most international architects.
Three Danish generations
The shape of attention to this country may be made clearer through a three-generation division of Danish architects. In the earliest generation, in the early years of the twentieth century, attention to function and the use of logic in design, and a commitment to social aims, were the basis of the work. The new materials — concrete, steel, and glass, which structurally bore the marks of honesty and openness — became symbols of this school.
Kay Fisker and Mogens Lassen
Kay Fisker and Mogens Lassen, in the housing groups of late-1920s and early-1930s Copenhagen, marked many Danish architects. Fisker was also active in industrial and furniture design, and a number of the most famous chairs in the history of design carry his signature.
The most ambitious wing of this generation moved towards larger projects — projects whose materials, technology, and form approached an international rationalism. Smidth, in its 1950s office building, is an example of this approach.
Munk + Olsen — the Tycho Brahe Observatory
Markedly of this generation are Munk + Olsen, who in 1988-89 built the Tycho Brahe Observatory in Copenhagen — a building in which the combination of simple volumes with frank light, and the use of coloured walls referencing celestial signs, marks the maturity of the second generation.
Susanne Ussing and Carsten Hoff
Susanne Ussing and Carsten Hoff, by contrast, made an 'odd' architecture using unfamiliar materials. This pair, in opposition to the polished academic architecture, set forth a kind of architecture closer — biologically and socially — to people themselves.
Tegnestuen Vandkunsten — the Sneglhusene primary school
The Tegnestuen Vandkunsten group, in 1979-81, built the Sneglhusene primary school — set in the Fuglsang Park neighbourhood, an area designed by participatory means, in which the residents took part in the social and spatial decisions. The school building, with its dense volume and its pitched roofs, reaches for a local fabric.
KHRAS — the Bang & Olufsen offices
In the next generation, KHRAS, in 1996-99, built the Bang & Olufsen offices in Struer. The broad horizontal volume, full-height glazing, and outlook over the sea set a modern industrial architecture in a northerly land.
Schmidt, Hammer, Lassen — the Royal Danish Library
Schmidt, Hammer, Lassen designed the building of the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, in 1993-98. The library extension — also known as the 'Black Diamond' — is a tilted black volume that leans toward the canal; its southern façade is composed of black granite plates and turquoise glass.
Arne Jacobsen — the National Bank of Denmark
Arne Jacobsen, the brilliant figure of mid-twentieth-century Denmark, with his National Bank of Denmark building in Copenhagen, 1965-78, gave us one of his most fully resolved works. The firm, thick volume; the bright stone façade; the interior rooms with warm timber and excellent glazing — a permanent monument to Jacobsen's care in joining industry to atmosphere.
Jørn Utzon — the Sydney Opera House and the Bagsvaerd Church
Denmark's other international figure, Jørn Utzon, was made known to the world by the Sydney Opera House. The Sydney Opera, which began in 1962 and was completed in 1973, has — with its white wings — drawn an impossible structure to the shore in many a sense. In Denmark, too, Utzon built the Bagsvaerd Church, with its plain white volumes and curved interior ceiling — a building that gives a spiritual space, despite its plain materials and plain format.
Henning Larsen, Knud Holscher, Nielsen
Henning Larsen, with the Saudi Arabian Foreign Affairs Ministry in Riyadh and the Velia University Library, gained his standing on the world stage. Knud Holscher and H. N. Nielsen, in the same generation, with their administrative and university buildings, completed Denmark's contemporary face.
A closing view
If the first two Danish generations sought, in the building of a social-welfare state, simple and pragmatic works, the third generation looks at the global scale — without losing its Danish identity. The combination of a kind treatment of the surroundings, a fidelity to the quality of building, and an attention to the social space — from Vandkunsten to Schmidt-Hammer-Lassen — is the clear line that still governs Denmark's architectural approach.
