brick cladding

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Out near the beach on the east side of Amager there are large new apartment buildings that are going up and at an incredible speed because of the method of construction being used with large panels of preformed concrete lifted into place by huge cranes before then being fixed or linked together. 

Then, on the outer face, goes insulation and a veneer of brick in large sheets made in a factory …. and that is where I begin to have reservations.

There is nothing wrong with the building method - and the advantage is that very speed of building - but then my inner puritan kicks in. I notice the long straight joins between the panels and think that this really has little to do with real brickwork … basically because brickwork isn’t, curiously, just about bricks but also about the mortar and the courses and the patterns - created by how the bricks are laid - and how different colours of brick and how different colours of mortar effect the appearance.

Then there is the thing about honesty … that’s not honesty as in money and value but honesty in design so about using building materials in an appropriate way that reflects and uses the intrinsic qualities of those material. Here I can see that brick facing is used for these modern apartment buildings because people like it - it’s somehow more reassuring and warmer and more comforting than concrete or glass - and because it can be a good attractive colour and, at least, brick does provide an element of texture that can be missing from many cladding materials. 

Which is sort of part of the irony here … it is a factory made product - manufactured - but it appropriates the qualities of something made by hand. On Grundtvigs Kirke every brick was laid one at a time by hand … is that one of the reasons that makes it such an amazing building?

Obviously the apartment building is a very very different type of building so is that voice of my inner puritan wrong and misplaced? Is it perfectly OK to use current technology to achieve some of the benefits for none of the skill or effort?

But Copenhagen has a long and well-established tradition using brick in its buildings and it’s not simply a practical solution simply because these new apartments are very tall blocks so traditional brickwork would not be appropriate …. just look at the huge power stations in the city from the 1930s or some of the very large brick apartment buildings from the 1920s and 30s and you can see good traditional brickwork on very large buildings.

I guess in the end it comes down to thinking that the finished buildings look a bit mechanical because it’s all rather too flat and rather too regular. Presumably the developer would argue that the cost benefits outweigh any quibbles about trying to keep alive traditional building methods and they would probably tell you about 19th-century apartment buildings with thin walls a single brick thick where cold and condensation and noise were and are a serious problem. 

So do cost and comfort always trump aesthetics and rapidly-disappearing craft skills? 

select any image to open the photographs in a slide-show gallery ….

it really is interesting to look at how the concrete and insulation and brick panels are sandwiched together

 
 

​when we get to the future

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In 1927, the architects Arne Jacobsen and Flemming Lassen - exact contemporaries and old school friends - won a competition to design a House of the Future which two years later was constructed for the Housing and Building Exhibition at the Forum in Copenhagen. 

The exhibition hall itself was then a new building that had been completed in 1926 with the design by the architect Oscar Gundlach-Pedersen. He was sixteen or seventeen years older than Jacobsen and Lassen but, although he had trained at the time when national romantic architecture was fashionable and his first works were in that general style, he was interested in new materials and new building techniques and as early as 1922 published an article where he talked about buildings that use these new materials “that are not encumbered with tradition.”

Radiohuset - immediately opposite the Forum - is another key building of the period. Designed by Vilhelm Lauritzen, it was the radio studios of Danish Radio but there was also also a large concert hall. It is now the Royal Danish Music Conservatory. Building work there did not begin until 1936 and it was not finished until 1942.  

Lauritzen was eight years younger than Gundlach-Pedersen so eight years older than Jacobsen and Lassen. He had graduated in 1921 and in the following year started his own office. Of the four architects, he was the only one to visit Stuttgart in 1927 to see an important exhibition there of modern houses - the Weissenhoff Exhibition - that was organised through the Deutsche Werkbund but coordinated by the architect Mies van der Rohe with buildings from seventeen architects. Most were from Berlin, with two buildings designed by Walter Gropius, but there were also houses by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Josef Frank. This major exhibition really marked the crucial point of change for modern European architecture when the terms Futurism and Functionalism were broadly adopted for houses that were designed for what was seen as a very different society and a very different style of living. 

Many of the buildings had metal-framed windows in long horizontal strips, balconies with metal hand rails, simple plastered external walls - usually white but some painted in strong colour - and there were flat roofs used in housing rather than for industrial buildings. These were all features that were to be adopted by Danish architects through the 1930s and 1940s … in fact, all features that are accepted as normal in designs for housing today.

In 1929 Jacobsen was in his late 20s, having recently completed his studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and recently married. Both he and Lassen, as ambitious young architects, had a pretty clear and a confident idea of what should be possible in their work in the future and it is generally accepted that the House of the Future, one of the first buildings by what was to be called the Functionalist School of architects. was the building that launched Jacobsen’s career. 

The plan of the house was a ring of rooms around a central living room that were set out to take advantage of natural light as the sun moved round. There was a flat roof to the house where the owner could land in his helicopter and a garage for a car that appears in the drawings to be a swish sports car with a drop top. At the bottom of the building, that was set by the water, was a boat house for a stylish if not very streamlined speed boat. 

The vision of a bright future for all or just wishful thinking for the few? 

The garage door opened automatically as the car approached; there was a mat at the entrance where suction removed dirt from the visitor’s shoes; windows dropped down with the turn of a handle, like the windows in contemporary cars; there were built-in typewriters; a pneumatic mail system and curiously the kitchen was relatively simple as it was assumed that meals would arrive ready-prepared from a central kitchen.

Within ten years, most of Europe was caught up in a war that put the future on hold. Some of the houses at the Stuttgart site, unlike The House of the Future, designed and built to be permanent, were damaged or lost and in 1943 the Forum itself was destroyed by the Danish Resistance as an act of defiance against the German occupation and it was not rebuilt until 1947. By then the future was over or at least the Functionalist Movement in Architecture had moved on but these architects had left an important group of building around the city - including town halls, office buildings, department stores and large blocks of social housing and apartments that had been built through the 1930s and those buildings set the standard and established the style and used new building techniques that we would now accept as truly modern.

 

shouldn’t we talk about architecture more?

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What a building looks like is important but in the end a building has to be judged by how it works - judged to see if it is doing what it was meant to do - not judged just by how it looks in a presentation drawing or in a beautiful photograph taken in exactly the right light. We judge a building by how it relates to either the crowded busy street in which it stands or to it’s landscape setting.

To understand a building you need to walk up to it, walk around it and walk through it, and, if possible, see it at different times of day and in different seasons.

And it helps if you can look at a number of buildings by the same architect to put the work in some sort of context … it’s that old ‘compare and contrast’ exercises we had to do in English lessons when I was at school though I’m not sure if that sort of thing is still on the curriculum.

Leaving aside the obvious problem of access to a building, it can also be difficult to get an overview of the work of a major architect because, for many, their stomping ground is global … in the past a successful architectural practice might open a regional office 200 miles away, if a long-term project justified the expense, or a second office sorted out some of the headaches of logistics, but now most of the big-name architects, at the very least, have offices in New York and somewhere in China and possibly in the Middle East as well. Architectural practices are truly trans Continental. Star architects can work … and tragically some die … anywhere in the World.

That makes the compare and contrast exercise for major works by major architects almost impossible for any writer or historian or photographer. Of course there are retrospective exhibitions with their catalogues and published monographs but many of those have to use stock images and they inevitably cut out the noise of the traffic, the hot dog stand in the wrong place and often cut out those inconvenient things called people so it becomes really very difficult to judge how a building works day to day or looks in the rain or functions at the end of a busy and hectic day as people try to get away in a hurry. Very few reviews of major buildings look at how many toilets there are or how easy it is to find your way around but surely that is exactly the sort of thing a good architect has to resolve … all that stuff that is important after the wow factor has begun to wear a bit thin.

Of course I admit that I try to take photographs on a good day … not least because I don’t function well in the cold and wet and cold and wet are not much good for the camera either … and I try to adjust the angle of view slightly if it avoids the overflowing waste bin in the foreground and I will wait for the delivery lorry to sort itself out and move on.

One new way of looking at buildings - and certainly a good way to judge a wider setting in a town or city - is to use Google Maps with their satellite and street views although obviously it is better for buildings that are on or close to a road rather than set back in private gardens or in an inaccessible landscape. 

Some major public buildings even have internal coverage by Google so you can explore and pan around the main rooms but that is still relatively rare. Some architects produce very swish, carefully rendered and highly realistic CGIs that are often included in major exhibitions or are published on their web sites but for obvious reasons these are not warts and all. At the very least architects have to admit that those presentations have been sanitised.

Does a detailed assessment for a building matter? In part it’s a done deal, once the building is there and signed off, with all snagging done.   

But isn’t it a bit odd that there are endless reviews of new cars in newspapers and magazines; new restaurants have to face criticism of everything from the size of their plates to the manners and appearance of the waiters and half the internet servers in the World must be straining under the load of hotel reviews good, bad and indifferent, but people buy their next home armed only with an A4 sheet from the estate agent or, worse still, buy ‘off plan’.

 

Exhibitions in museums and galleries that profile the work of an architect or of a studio are popular and certainly a print run of exhibition catalogues can far exceed what might sell as a monograph through a book shop … the current exhibition at the Danish Architecture Centre - Our Urban Living Room about the Copenhagen architects COBE - have sold out of their first stock of catalogues just half way through the exhibition which proves how much interest there can be in contemporary architecture.

The Infinite Happiness, by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, is a fascinating film profile of the 8House  - the large block of apartments in Copenhagen designed by Bjarke Ingels.  It is in their Living Architecture series and looks at the building by talking to people who live and work there … so the best people to understand and appreciate or criticise the design. The film was screened recently by Arch Daily and the series has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

 
 

a series of posts on the architecture of Arne Jacobsen

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The National Bank of Denmark, Havnegade 5, Copenhagen - winning design in the closed competition of 1961, built in two phases and completed in 1978

 

Arne Jacobsen was the most important and the most innovative Danish architect and designer of the 20th century. Certainly he has a well-established International reputation but perhaps some do not automatically associate the work of Jacobsen with the idea of innovation, in part because many of his buildings are well-known and familiar and probably half the homes in Denmark have at least one Jacobsen chair but also because we are all now so used to seeing buildings that are taller, bigger, more exciting or more dramatic. That is unfair … obviously it's not, to use an English phrase, a case of familiarity breeding contempt but his buildings have to be seen and judged in the context of the period through which he lived. It is then that you can see just how innovative and important his buildings and his furniture designs really were. 

Jacobsen trained as an architect in the 1920s, established his own office in 1929 and continued to work on major projects through to his death in 1971. Born in Copenhagen at the very beginning of the 20th century, the buildings of his child hood were cluttered middle-class apartment buildings and grand new, or then relatively new, public buildings in red brick that piled together motifs from Renaissance Germany, French palaces and Danish buildings from the 17th century. At the end of the road where he grew up was a new dock, the Free Port opened in 1904, that had huge warehouses and administrative buildings that owed more to pattern books of bits from north European baronial halls than to anything we would now see as appropriate for industrial buildings yet little more than 20 years later, as an ambitious and recently-qualified young architect, Jacobsen was designing a house “for the future” that was circular with a garage on one side - at a time when few owned a car - and with a boat house on the other side for a swish motor launch and a landing pad for a sort of helicopter, an auto gyro, on the roof. A fantasy of sorts - a winning entry for a competition organised by the Federation of Danish Architects in 1928 - but actually realised if only for a short time in 1929 for an exhibition on housing at the Forum in Copenhagen.  

Through the 1920s and into the 1930s Jacobsen trained with and then worked with the young Danish architects who were looking at architecture in a much more rational way - the Functionalists - building new and better and more practical versions of all those apartment buildings of the late 19th century but trying to improve the quality of mass housing. Many of those buildings, despite many ‘modern’ features seem rooted in the 1930s but Jacobsen developed a sharper, cleaner aesthetic - a remarkably refined use of new technologies and new building methods that exploited and developed to the full the relatively new combination of concrete and steel and he made the use of standard windows and doors and fittings, produced in a factory rather than on site, into a positive and strong characteristic of his buildings. In essence he designed modern buildings that from this view point, well into the 21st century, look good but nothing special but when they were built must have been astounding. Perhaps, in a curious way, Jacobsen’s building look less significant than they really were because we have finally caught up with him.

 

Housing for young couples, Ved Ungdomsboligerne, Gentofte 1947-1949

And he designed a remarkable range of buildings from a large number of compact family houses, mostly in brick, larger villas, apartment buildings, theatres, factories and town halls, buildings for sport and leisure, including an indoor riding school, and what was, at its completion, a groundbreaking hotel and air terminal for SAS in Copenhagen, along with major international commissions and of course his design of the National Bank in Copenhagen, one of his last works. 

He was and is equally well known for his furniture - many of the designs still in production - and that is where you begin to see the intriguing contradictions in his work. It seems difficult to reconcile, as the work of a single imagination, the elegant but flat, almost-mechanical and certainly graphic and strictly geometric design of the exterior of the SAS hotel, the product of precise lines on a drawing board, with the sculptural boldness of the Egg Chair and the Swan Chair designed for the same building and then see the same hand, let alone the same design aesthetic, in the water colour drawings he produced and the floral wallpapers he designed when he was in exile in Sweden in the mid 40s … just a few years before he designed the hotel.

 

3316, The Egg, designed for Fritz Hansen in 1958 and displayed here at their showroom at Pakhus 48 in Copenhagen

What is also remarkable - in a period when major architects seek and win commissions all over the World - is that Jacobsen remained in Copenhagen, the city where he was born, and so, within a relatively small area, it is possible to see a large number of the buildings he designed. He worked on the town hall in Århus, designed factories in Germany and designed a complete college in Oxford but even for those projects he had a small team in his office and they worked from his studio in his home, first in Ordrup, on the north side of Copenhagen, and then after the war, less than 2 kilometres away, in a new house that was one of a row that Jacobsen designed just above the beach and overlooking the Øresund at Klampenborg.

With relatively good weather and the sharper light of the Spring, this seemed like a good time to look at and photograph a number of Jacobsen’s buildings in and around Copenhagen and to produce a number of posts for this site and also a pretty good excuse for the first trip of the summer to the Bella Vista beach.

 

Over a period of a month or so, it was clearly not possible to do a lot of detailed or original research for a series like this but a good time to look and think and the advantage of an online format is that it’s possible to present a lot more images than in a magazine article or a book and, if it is possible to get access to more buildings or return to buildings in better weather or different light, new photographs will be added to these posts.

all in the detail … Bispebjerg Bakke

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Plan from Arkitekturbilleder, Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademis Skoler for Arkitektur, Design og Konservering

 

It would be difficult to find two more different buildings in Copenhagen than the Jepersen office block by Arne Jacobsen and the apartment buildings at Bispebjerg Bakke from the partnership of the Danish artist Bjørn Nørgaard with the architectural practice Boldsen & Holm but what they have in common is that both designs depend absolutely on their focus on every detail of the design … not simply plan and elevations but the profile of window frames, the careful choice of the right finish and exactly the right colour for materials on the facades, the details of unique, custom-made staircases and so on.

Although the apartment buildings were completed in 2007, the initial idea for Bispebjerg Bakke went back many years before that to a conversation between Nørgaard and the chairman of the Association of Craftsmen so, from the start, an important aspect of the scheme was to have a strong link between an artistic concept and its execution with a very high level of craftsmanship.

Nørgaard made an initial model in clay so the design was organic rather than a building, like the Jespersen block, that was primarily about, what was for its date, very advanced engineering. Bispebjerg Bakke is about fluid lines and the potential for architecture to take sculptural form while the Jespersen building is about bringing to reality the beauty of a mathematically precise design. How you view the two buildings; how you experience the two buildings and how you move around and through the two buildings could hardly be more different and yet both depend on understanding completely the building methods that they exploited and both, with huge confidence, play games with forms and with styles that can only be achieved with the support of a client, willing to go with designs that were far from conventional by the standards of contemporary buildings.

Curiously, what the buildings also have in common is that the starting point for both designs was determined by their site. This might not be as obvious for the Jacobsen building, which appears to be suitable for any urban site, but the plan had to take as an unusual starting point, set by the planners, a stipulation that contact with the ground had to be reduced to the minimum as the space had to flow through from the street to the courtyard behind.

Bispebjerg Bakke could not be more different. It is absolutely and completely grounded on its landscape and follows a complex sloping site. To the west is the public road, Bispebjerg Bakke, that runs down the hill with the grounds of a large hospital opposite, and to the east of the narrow plot is a suburban railway line in a relatively deep cutting. The land drops down from the narrow north end but the road curves away to the west and the railway line curves sharply away to the east so the plot widens out as it slopes down to the south and east.

The landscape includes mature trees but it also means that the changing light as the sun moves round and views across the site and through the buildings are crucial as all the apartments have been given a dual aspect but few can benefit from direct sun from the south.

There are 135 apartments in the complex with a main building that has a sinuous line following the road, well over 400 metres long, and with a smaller second building, just under 90 metres long, to the east where the plot begins to widen out as the railway curves away. The arrangement of the apartments is in some ways quite conventional in that there are separate doorways giving access to a main staircase with just two apartments at each level, a single apartment to each side of the staircase, and the apartments run through from front to back of the block … to provide that dual aspect.

Each “block” or section is self contained with footpaths or roads between, linking the public street and path with an internal service road, with two entrance doors in each section but the roof is continuous down the length of the long building running across each pathway or road that cuts through the building. Each break is the full height from the pavement to the underside of the roof which adds considerably to the drama as the sections vary in height from three to eight storeys, the tallest section is at the north or uphill end, and the upper apartments in each section have mezzanines so have windows rising up through two tall or even two very tall floors.

The main staircases, two in each section, rise around an oval stair well and the apartments have curved walls and curved balconies so again the design appears to be organic although there is actually a strong and logical conceit in the use of materials on the different sides of the buildings that gives an interesting rationality to the design. In traditional apartment buildings from the early and mid 20th century in Copenhagen, in districts like Nørrebro, the blocks were built with what was then more expensive and more fashionable red brick on the street side and yellow brick towards the courtyard. In the city, an apartment building might be part of a longer row, forming just part of a city block, or might be around a complete block so often the junction between red and yellow brick is not visible or not particularly obvious. At Bispebjerg Bakke it is made into a distinct feature. Red and yellow brick meet at a vertical join half way through each archway and the join is emphasised with bricks projecting at a slight angle and interlocking to look almost like overstitching used on blankets or leather work.

 

There is a further game with the colour of brick used on each side of the buildings: vertical runs of window and balconies have brick columns or piers between them so, on the red-brick facades, the piers are in yellow brick and tiles, used for the sills and for the parapets of the balconies, are pale yellow but on the sides using yellow brick for the main walls, those piers are in red brick and the tiles - for the sills and balconies and for the surrounds or frames of the main entrance doorways - are red … a deep ox blood red.

Initially, on first seeing them, the doorways and balconies appear to be sculptural - rather free and organic - more Barcelona and more Gaudi than anything normally seen in Copenhagen - but then the effect depends on the very Danish precision and skill of the bricklayers and other craftsmen. Details like rain hoppers, the precision of the construction of the copper roof, the regularity of joints in the roof and the precisely shaped and coursed brickwork are all very carefully executed.

Windows are framed in jacoba wood and given a sinuous profile and inside the rails of staircases are bowed out. 

 

 

It seems odd to describe the roof as flat or even as mono pitch when in reality it swoops and twists across the building but it is certainly not pitched in the conventional sense because it does not have a ridge with inner and outer slopes. In terms of challenges, the main roof must be the most impressive part of the construction as the placing of joins in the copper sheeting must have required very careful design because there are surprisingly shallow and unobtrusive baffles and lipping to direct rain water, which can be torrential in Copenhagen, to run down the slopes to hoppers and down-pipes rather than simply cascading over the edge.

 

The curved lines of the balconies are interesting. Balconies are on the party wall and there is a central dividing pier on the line of the partition between one flat and its neighbour. The front line of each balcony curves back to the main wall line, forming a bowed, almost semi-circular front to each pair of balconies and the windows curve in from the front line of the wall to the partition to create what is, in effect, triangular balconies but with curved rather than straight lines to the front and window. Note window frames are curved but double glazing units are flat simply for practical reasons, primarily economic.  

On their web site Boldsen & Holm describe Bispebjerg Bakke as a building “where art, architecture, workmanship and technology melt into each other, in an equal and even interaction. The organic shape originates from the character of the area …”