For the first time, the Danish Architecture Center (DAC) presents a Danish exhibition that uses everyday life as a way to understand architecture. Hello Denmark celebrates Danish architecture and design and explores what makes Denmark and Copenhagen popular around the world: a healthy and happy everyday life.
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Denmark is often highlighted in international contexts as a role model when it comes to creating optimal living conditions for the population; conditions that contribute to a high quality of life. Denmark has been named the world’s happiest country several times, and before the coronavirus left its mark on the world, the New York Times included Copenhagen as one of its of recommended places to visit in 2020.
What are the ingredients in the Danish people’s coveted recipe for the good life? Can it be linked to the architecture and design traditions?
The exhibition Hello Denkmark shares the common narrative about Denmark as a world-class design and architecture nation. This narrative bears witness to a design tradition and strong set of values that permeate all of Danish society, shaping the life – every day – from the smallest teaspoon to an entire city plan.
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In this exhibition, one will experience six installations, each representing an element from the everyday life the Danes value so highly and that influence how they build, reside and live. It is about a close relationship to nature; the trust upon which the society is built; the insistence on hygge; the unique bicycle culture; the design-infused society; and the need to live near water.
Hello Denmark opened on June 8, 2020, in Copenhagen at the DAC. The exhibition is supported by the philanthropic association Realdania and the Knud Højgaard Foundation.
Climate changes will inevitably transform the urban landscape. Acting with visionary foresight, the municipality of Copenhagen has decided upon a comprehensive Cloudburst Management Plan for the entire city, including 300 cloudburst adaptation projects in the next 10 to 20 years. Enghaveparken is among the first of these. With so many projects planned within a short time span, how do we avoid the risk of ending up with relatively generic projects, possibly characterised by a strong focus on the new technical solutions? Enghaveparken might provide an answer.
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Enghaveparken is a well-preserved neoclassical park in Copenhagen that the design team has to adapt to climate change while preserving the cultural value of the park’s neoclassical structure. In the contemporary ‘Anthropocene age’ the human impact on the world is so severe that there is no place not influenced by human activities. This emphasises the long-known mantra we landscape architects live by, i.e. that no work is done on a tabula rasa.
Everything we do must relate to the site and what was there before, and this empowers the debate about heritage. Considering heritage, and how it has shaped the proposal for Enghaveparken in Copenhagen, can be a way of strengthening cultural and aesthetic diversity in a discourse where cloudburst adaptation is at the centre of attention. If you want to understand the proposal, the devil is, as the saying goes, in the detail. We do not see large changes or a reworking of what the park is, but rather think ‘the park looks like itself’.
Throughout the proposal, two approaches to heritage are emphasised equally. First, the park’s neoclassical design from the late 1920s, with its alleys and hedges symmetrically dividing the park into six clearly defined rooms, is retained and becomes a framework for the new park. This follows what heritage scholar Graham Fairclough calls ‘Old Heritage’, which is defined as those objects or parts that need public protection on a national scale, as envisioned by experts.
However, another approach to heritage is also visible in the design: Local people have appropriated the many intimate garden rooms in this neoclassical park and introduced all kinds of social practices and events. Retaining the possibility of continuing these practices and strengthening the possibility for appropriation fits in with what Fairclough calls ‘New Heritage’. The design team seems to especially care about this ‘new’ understanding of heritage, or what historian Dolores Hayden describes as “local memories”. These activities and memories are understood and used as inspiration for the design. In this way, the two different understandings of heritage, the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, support one another. By using both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ heritage approaches, the project is amplified.
As a result, no grand intentions are projected onto the site, but instead small innovative developments of existing structures and practices. This underlines the proposal’s commitment to preservation and the idea that a small intervention can have a great effect.
The designers seem to have gained from looking back at the different uses, seeing the different layers and understandings of heritage as a resource and framework for their creativity, which thus become a generator of the design. No two places are the same, and neither is their heritage. Thus, heritage becomes a resource and a tool in unveiling the complexity or particularity of a place, whether it is the existing spatial qualities or a certain characteristic use of the place. Together ‘new’ and ‘old’ heritage can be a way to avoid the cloudburst transformations from looking the same.
Enghaveparken
Client: City of Copenhagen
Design team: TredjeNatur, COWI and Platant
Competition: 2014
Area: 35,000 m2
Cloudburst capacity: 24,000 m3
Credits:
TredjeNatur, COWI and Platant for the Municipality of Copenhagen. Used with permission.
Located between Nørreport Station, Ørstedsparken and the new market halls, the redesigned Israels Plads brings vibrancy to the heart of Copenhagen. Today, the multifunctional space bustles with people of all ages.
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Israel Plads, located in the heart of Copenhagen, has been redesigned after years of funding issues, planning deliberation and community consultation. It lies next to Torvehallerne, a covered food market that replaced the traditional Grønttorvet vegetable market. The new square is a lively, informal space marking the transition to the Ørstedsparken. Ten years ago, the square was a desolate, wind-swept place, used variously as a parking lot, an area where locals walked their dogs, and an informal gathering space where students played basketball in makeshift ball cages. The space looked abandoned, messy, almost derelict. Today, it has become a place that bustles with activity and attracts many people every day.
Until 1958 the square, then called Grønttorvet, was the location of the city’s major wholesale market. This is where retailers as well as individual clients came to buy fresh food; the market was known for its charming as well as chaotic atmosphere. Soon however, the traffic and logistics that came with the market were no longer manageable in the restricted space of this inner-city neighbourhood and the wholesale market had to find a new location.
At the end of the 1950s Grønttorvet became an empty spot in the middle of the city, without any real function, and the potential of an undiscovered urban space emerged. Grønttorvet, renamed Israels Plads ten years after, experienced the same lot as other large inner-city markets, such as the famous Halles in Paris, for instance, which were forced to move to a southern suburb in 1971. The big empty spot left after this transformation created unique possibilities for establishing a major new urban square in the centre of the city.
For many years, Grønttorvet looked unattractive despite of its unique central location. Things finally began to change in 2011, when, after 15 years of political and financial quarrels, the project of the two market halls on the northern side of the square became reality. The idea of a covered food market was fortunate in its timing, for it was realized at a moment when people’s interest for new culinary experiences was growing. Torvehallerne has injected new vibrancy in a once deserted area and has worked as a catalyst, attracting people from all over the city.
The organizers of the architectural competition named the team of Sweco, COBE, Niras and Morten Stræde winners for the redesign of Israels Plads in 2007. The winning team presented a simple architectural concept for the square: a “flying carpet” that has landed on the ground, defined as a light granite surface, lifted up 25 centimetres from the ground. Different organic shapes are punched out of the granite surface, providing various sports facilities, such as a ball cage, a skating area, a playground for young children and sitting stairs.
The granite plate is recessed from the surrounding facades, leaving sufficient space for car traffic, and descends to meet the street level. Along the facades, a band of traditional Copenhagen pavement with granite slabs and Nordic cobblestones runs around the square, connecting the granite plate to its surroundings. The pavement, in contrast to the light granite of the square, is a reference to traditional Danish building materials and matches the colourful historical facades from the 18th century. […]
Read on in Topos 91 – Squares and Promenades.
Israels Plads
Client: City of Copenhagen
Design team: Sweco, COBE, Niras and Morten Stræde
Completion: 2014
Area: 12.500 square metres
Copenhagen has a new piece of bicycle infrastructure. The so-called “Cykelslangen”, the “Bicycle Snake”, is a cycle superhighway that increases the ease and efficiency of daily commutes in the city. It not only marks another step in Copenhagen’s vision of becoming an eco-metropolis, it also allows a glimpse into the complex structure of a modern city.
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Situated between a clumsy urban mall and a sleek hotel, sweeping from a highway overpass down to the harbor front, is one of Copenhagen’s latest infrastructural gems, epitomizing an ease and efficiency of everyday urban life. The striking and heavily hyped Copenhagen Cykelslangen, the “Bicycle Snake” delivers cyclists along a 280-meter-long bicycle bridge – or extended ramp – from a first-story-level, heavily-trafficked highway overpass to the ground-level, car-free harbor front.
The Bicycle Snake: Life between buildings
The Bicycle Snake measures 5.5 meters above ground level at its highest point, and resting on elegant, evenly spaced white pilotis. It has replaced what used to be an uncomfortable bicycle trek down two flights of stairs, followed by a slow, cautious ride through crowded pedestrian plazas. Now, in less than one minute, cyclists glide along the gentle curvature of the striking orange-covered cycle bridge between buildings and over water to the harbor.
Cyclists use the bridge day and night. It cultivates a human dimension in an otherwise awkward and soulless configuration of looming concrete and glass structures along Copenhagen’s harbor front. The vision of Danish urbanist Jan Gehl of multi-use, human-scale “life between buildings” is performed almost perfectly on the Cykelslangen. The path leads the cyclists to a pedestrian square, which offers space for movement, sitting, and the opportunity to be watched both from above and below.
The version of a green city also lives up to the new design and proves that the city can actually deliver on its promise of being carbon-free by 2025. This vision has since become an internationally renowned green-city brand, as Copenhagen has been named the European Green Capital (2014) and the world’s most livable city by Monocle (2014). One delightful ride down the Bicycle Snake authenticates that this green-city brand lives on in the space between buildings.
Cycle Superhighways
With the Bicycle Snake, Copenhagen – one of the world’s best bicycle cities – has delivered a highly functional and aesthetically pleasing piece of bicycle infrastructure that elevates its cyclists above ground-level traffic to increase the ease and efficiency of their daily commutes in the city. In this regard, the Bicycle Snake is in line with the city of Copenhagen’s vision to become an eco-metropolis, or a city of cyclists for cyclists. Copenhagen ambitiously aimed to have 50 percent of all citizens commute by bike by 2015, with 90 percent of all cyclists perceiving a sense of safety while cycling.
Although the actual number of commuters on bicycle is still lower than the city would like (37 percent, at last count), Copenhagen has achieved what many cities never will by providing cyclists with their own infrastructural grid of strictly separated bicycle lanes and paths, ensuring a high degree of safety and speediness. With the current developing network of so-called supercykelstier – “cycle superhighways” – moreover, the city and the surrounding municipalities are trying to make the bicycle become a real alternative to carbon-heavy, everyday means of transportation, even on longer distances.
Liberation of the cyclist
Riding along a cycle superhighway connecting the city center with the surrounding suburbs up to 20 kilometers outside the city, many of the obstacles that contribute to making the bicycle ride a slow, laborious and potentially unsafe form of transportation in urban areas have been eliminated. Instead, cyclists are offered the possibility to move swiftly, safely, and independently of the general congestion along “green routes” of often picturesque quality.
Apart from cultivating a vision of a carbon-neutral daily-commuter culture in dense urban areas, and while the potential health benefits for the individual are to be taken seriously, the cycle superhighways place cyclists in a curiously autonomous space of solitary bike travel. Earphones plugged in, swooshing towards the city center at high speed, the cycle superhighways provide an extreme liberation of the cyclist from the messy mélange of everyday urban traffic situations. […]
Read more in Topos 94 – City Visions.
The new landscape in front of The National Gallery of Denmark is designed as a melting pot – where art can mix with urban life. The urban space was created by Danish Polyform Architects and Dutch landscape architects Karres en Brands and has received a warm welcome from the Copenhageners. At the official opening event the museum set a new visitor record as almost 8,000 people celebrated the city’s new artsy urban space.
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Polyform partner Thomas Kock explains how the urban space is designed to be accessible and welcoming to everyone: “This garden is meant for both the museum and the city – its embracing design obviously makes access to the arts easy, but it also gives the general public a new green urban space to meet up in, the option to sit down by the fountain and maybe enjoy art happenings and events.” Thomas Kock also underlines the fact that the new urban space is the exact opposite of the previous baroque-inspired garden and it’s strict, closed-off design: “Today, soft round islands of grass and winding pathways invite you into a landscape that is open day and night. We wanted to allow lots of space so the art could float out of the museum and into the garden – making it a melting pot for art and city life.” concludes Thomas Kock.
The goal of letting art meet urban life was seemingly achieved at the opening of the garden, as a mixed crowd of thousands enjoyed the last sunny day of Indian Summer. The art crowd mingled at the foot of the museum stairs, hip youngsters drank draft beer on the grass and seniors and parents enjoyed the sight of kids playing with boats and bathing in the water fountain.
The large water basin in the middle of the garden is a natural hangout and gathering point. The fascination and attraction of water draws people in and the wide edge of the basin invites them to sit down. According to Thomas Kock, however, the basin is designed for much more: “Its multifunctional. On a normal day the basin will serve as a water mirror, which pulls the city’s towers into the garden and thereby brings the city and the museum closer together. But emptied out, the basin can also serve as a platform for art installations, concerts, performance art or even as an ice skating rink.” And Thomas Kock continues, “With a diameter of 105 feet, the basin can facilitate a wide variety of creative expression.”
The Danish Minister of Culture Marianne Jelved inaugurated the museum garden at The National Gallery of Denmark in September. The garden is always open for visitors.
Fun facts about the new museum garden:
– The garden’s water fountain is made of 32 specially designed, radiused concrete parts that weigh up to 8 tonnes each.
– The depth of the basin was designed so that kids (and adults) could easily play with model boats.
– A beloved part of the former baroque-inspired garden were the lilac bushes. For this reason 318 lilac bushes will be planted in the new garden. The lighting fixtures of the previous garden were reused in the new garden as well.
– The garden has moveable green chairs, which allows visitors to move them around and sit exactly where they want.
Museum Garden The National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark
Client: The National Gallery of Denmark/ City of Copenhagen/ Annie og Otto Johs. Detlefs Foundation
Landscape architects: Karres en Brands
Architects: POLYFORM
Realisation: 2011 – 2014
Area: 10,000 square meters
Budget: 2,7 million euros
Competition 1. Prize
