hans christian hansen, architect: gasværksvejens skole / school, copenhagen...

Thu, 23 Apr 2015 14:58:39 GMT

link to full size image (4057 x 4558px).

gasværksvejens skole / school, vesterbro, copenhagen 1969-1971.
architect: hans christian hansen, 1901-1978, working for the copenhagen municipal architects department.

schoolyard facade in reflected light.

this is a tough building, and a far cry from hansen's previous school in leafy suburban copenhagen. whether you can be too tough for an old working class neighbourhood is a valid question; the woman who runs the school called it robust when I met her, indicating that was a good thing.

a small discovery: the basic massing and organisation in plan is identical to erik gunnar asplund's carl johanskolan in gothenburg, sweden (1915-1924). and not by accident, I am sure.

there is a 19th century main building across the yard, you can catch the reflection of its red brick walls in the windows. hansen's addition is a four storey concrete box with classrooms and a smaller one for the gym. the classrooms are on double-loaded corridors that provide a deep plan good for a tight budget, but also a dark interior, questionable at best as social spaces.

but hansen had made an art of working on a budget, and his teaching spaces are generous and bright, high ceilings everywhere.

artful too is the draping of the two buildings in a pagoda-like roofscape of cheap corrugated roofing sheets, recalling local industrial architecture like the drying sheds of old Danish tile works. the corrugated sheets were a stable of hansen's vocabulary, but he was not alone in celebrating this most humble of materials.

it is in fact one of the things uniting an otherwise scattered group of architects on the left, a group I hope to show with the next building that hansen was a part of, and a group we are going to be exploring over the coming weeks.

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the comments I have added to some of my hans chr. hansen photos can be read together as a kind of mangled, yet surprisingly brief essay on hansen. repetitious and opinionated, it reflects the writer above his subject, but until someone does some serious research on hansen, a complete lack of competition makes me immune to criticism. enjoy :)

01. introduction, amager 1966.
02. the engineer as ideal, hansen's pre-war architecture, sundholm 1939.
03. the church he didn't build. war and the return to tradition, 1942-1944.
04. following fisker. wartime housing, hulgårds plads 1943.
05. the architect finding himself in a kindergarten, skydebanen 1948.
06. developing the restless section. hanssted school 1954.
07. early industrial. nyborggade transformer 1958.
08. the brutalist, bellahøj 1961.
09. perfect self-confidence, ringbo nursing home 1961.
10. perfect idiosyncrasy. ringbo bell tower 1961.
11. the masterpiece, bremerholm 1962.
12. on the fine art of knowing when to be a backdrop. svanemølle 1966.
13. industrialised construction, a first response. svanemølle 1966.
14. concrete charm, bellahøj gas regulator 1967.
15. late irreverence. gasværksvejen school 1969.

the hans chr. hansen set.

Thumbnail by seier+seier

jean nouvel, danish radio concert hall, copenhagen 2002-2009

Thu, 23 Apr 2015 14:52:37 GMT

danish radio concert hall, copenhagen, denmark 2002-2009.
architect: jean nouvel (b.1945)

an almost non-existing facade based on scaffolding, placed in one of the most desolate corners of new copenhagen neighbourhood ørestad which in itself is largely a collection of desolate corners, there could hardly be a stranger introduction to one of the most expensive concert halls in recent times.

but nouvel's scoop is to hint at a rich inner world, to say that the true city is inside. I have aldo van eyck's essay on labyrinthian clarity from the situationist times, issue 4, here in front of me. it could be the programmatic subtext of nouvel's concert hall even if van eyck would have been stupefied to learn just how heterogenous a single building can become when based on his famous line,

for a house is a tiny city, a city a huge house.

nouvel avoids repeating a single detail from major space to major space and one of the questions posed by his house in ørestad is if such complexity can be held together simply by a perimeter of blue fabric. nouvel might have answered with one of the concluding lines from van eyck,

I have...found it expedient to define space simply as the appreciation of it, thus excluding all frozen properties attributed to it academically.

Thumbnail by seier+seier

test2

hans christian hansen, architect: gasværksvejens skole / school, copenhagen...

jean nouvel, danish radio concert hall, copenhagen 2002-2009