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kay fisker, mødrehjælpen, copenhagen 1953-1955

Thu, 23 Apr 2015 15:00:29 GMT

mødrehjælpen, administration and accommodation, copenhagen, denmark 1953-1955.
architect: kay fisker, 1893-1965.

for hagen and boris. view from the west. stitch of two. autumn.

a late fisker work down the street from where I live and a fine example of modernism inserted into a pre-modern context. fisker always drew solitary old trees in his pencil renderings. I think this shows what he had in mind.

this photo was uploaded with a CC license and may be used free of charge and in any way you see fit.
if possible, please name photographer "SEIER+SEIER". if not, don't.

the fisker set

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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.

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p.v. jensen-klint 05, grundtvig memorial church 1913-1940

Thu, 23 Apr 2015 14:56:40 GMT

jensen-klint's main work, the grundtvig memorial church northwest of copenhagen, is often named as an example of expressionist architecture.

we should always be suspicious of categories in art and the partial blindness they induce, but few categories carry more misunderstandings and nonsense than expressionism.

with jensen-klint, I believe the term should be avoided altogether. we are looking at a neo-gothic church. the great change in scale between the church and the surrounding housing has been compared with the expressionist idea of a stadtkrone but a similar contrast can be found in the contemporary work of heinrich tessenow.

the highly expressive and original tripart tower is the architect's attempt to design a tower that would connect organically with the nave and two aisles of the basic basilica plan. the problem of how to assemble tower and nave is as old as the christian building type itself and jensen-klint's solution was born on his 60th birthday in 1913 as the result of a deep personal and creative crisis.

unable to secure commissions, he decided to develop his ideas to their full extent on paper instead. in a sense, he was giving up his career but the move proved liberating to his talent. he entered his next church design, done entirely without a brief or a client, into the 1913 competition for a grundtvig memorial and lost. to a statue.

a week later, in an exceptional turn of events, the jury admitted to have made a mistake and announced that jensen-klint's church was to be built.

the project attracted a lot of international attention when first published and again in the 1920's when the tower was completed. I have read that it inspired many church designs across europe and north america but I have never seen a list.

hallgrímskirkja (1937-1986) in reykjavik is obvious, though, and named elsewhere in connection with klint:
www.flickr.com/photos/solveigzophoniasdottir/306156116/in...

iceland was a Danish colony until 1948 (the whole north atlantic colonial adventure is a dark chapter in our history and one that isn't over yet) so the influence here is more easily explained.

I am less sure about this one, Akureyrarkirkja (1940), also on iceland: www.flickr.com/photos/solveigzophoniasdottir/291511984/

but the art deco crowd seems to have had an eye for klint - as seen here in turner's cross which has been named in connection with the grundtvig church. it is by barry byrne (1931) and found in cork, ireland: www.flickr.com/photos/robandlucy/763443719/

I have read that there are also bastard children of the grundtvig church in poland and the US. haven't found them yet. in denmark there are plenty. most significantly, jensen-klint's son kaare klint who completed his father's projects continued building churches in the style which since became a school:

www.flickr.com/photos/14716771@N05/2108788850/in/pool-dan...

the jensen-klint set so far.

this photo was uploaded with a CC license and may be used free of charge and in any way you see fit.
if possible, please name photographer "SEIER+SEIER".
if not, don't.

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c.f.hansen, christiansborg palace church, copenhagen, 1810-1826

Thu, 23 Apr 2015 14:55:55 GMT

christiansborg palace church, copenhagen, 1810-1826.
architect: c.f. hansen, 1756-1845.

this one is for you, wen, should you stop by. it is one of my all-time favourite buildings in copenhagen and shows c.f. hansen at his most radical.

the royal palace had burnt down in 1794 and hansen was commisioned to rebuild, reusing foundations, bricks and sometimes entire walls of the palace ruins.

apparently the kind of architect who thrives on limitations, he designed what appears to have been a masterpiece of pure geometry, large unbroken surfaces of grey walls and delicate, classical moldings.

I say "appears to have been" because that palace was lost to fire as well, in 1884. it could have been reconstructed, but hansen's architecture was so unpopular at the time that the idea was soon abandoned. in the end, a heavyhanded neo-baroque bad dream in turd coloured granite replaced it and only the palace church survives to tell us of the splendors that were lost.

...except that the church burnt too, of course, and as late as 1992 when the roof and dome were ignited by fireworks from a passing carnival procession...fires are a copenhagen tradition.

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c.f.hansen, christiansborg palace church, copenhagen, 1810-1826

Thu, 23 Apr 2015 14:53:05 GMT

christiansborg palace church, copenhagen, 1810-1826.
architect: c.f. hansen, 1756-1845.

final c.f.hansen interior for now.

the palace church gives a rather moving idea of just how much was lost when hansen's christiansborg palace burnt down.

as in the photos below, daylight is filtered through a layered construction, ultimately hiding the source of light from the visitor. a single oculus in the dome tells of the time of day.

this photo was uploaded with a CC license and may be used free of charge and in any way you see fit.
if possible, please name photographer "SEIER+SEIER". if not, don't.

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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.

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