Tivoli Hjørnet / The Corner

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This building - a new Tivoli food hall designed by the American architects Pei Cobb Freed & Partners - has just won a major architecture award -  the 2020 AIA Award from the American Institute of Architects - and I really cannot understand why.

It is on a tightly-constricted plot at the north-west corner of the gardens but could hardly be more prominent being immediately to one side of the main entrance to Tivoli and with a long street frontage facing across to the main railway station. Anyone arriving in Copenhagen by train walks across to and along and around the corner of this building as they walk into the city centre.

I can understand why it was a major commercial project for Tivoli but the design of the building fails in so many ways.

It crowds up to and swamps the red-brick entrance gates that date from the 1890s and looms over the historic building.

The glass of the street frontage is a strange colour and the street frontage has no vertical features or, rather, few features at all …. so it has a stark minimalism that emphasises rather than disguises it's bulk.

The pavement along the long side to the street was always narrow. The waving form of the new front, over sailing the pavement and with the doors into the food hall set back, does allow for more space but this is now piled up with pavement tables and chairs of different types to ‘attract’ in punters.

On the side towards the gardens there are terraces that sound amazing as described by the architects ….

“the building's terracotta terraces weave together and step back, beneath the Copenhagen sky. Hemmed with lush planting ….”

….. but the brick tile cladding is a strange pale, off-yellow buff colour and the terraces seem pinched and squeezed in and the planting, when I looked at the building, seems to be thin and wilting because the planters are not big enough.

From both sides of the building - from the street and from the gardens - there is a messy roof line that is mostly giant vents on the garden side and odd terrace furniture for the upper restaurant on the street side.

Once inside you realise it is just a fairly standard food hall from any motorway service-station with closely-packed independent - so disparate - food stalls and a ceiling of electric ducting and ventilation systems.

Inside, you can see that the exterior design disguises the high ground-floor commercial space by acting as a pelmet to give the frontage a more human scale. Not so much form follows function but form follows kroner.

The blurb by the architects describes their design as being inspired by the historic defences of the city but I am not convinced.

Above all this building seems to barely recognise the character of the gardens - let alone the character of historic buildings in the city beyond. Tivoli is an absolutely amazing place … all about escape and fantasy and entertainment but those are qualities obviously lacking in this new building.

While I was taking photographs I did come across one of the famous white peacocks from the gardens but he looked pretty tired and pretty disorientated as he grubbed around the waste bin looking for food.

This is simply a food hall for feeding people on an industrial scale. It may well deserve an award for being a successful commercial investment but does it really deserve an award that suggests it is an outstanding example of contemporary architecture?

Pei Cobb Freed & Partners
2020 Award from the American Institute of Architects

 
 

“Cantilevering out on the city side, the building shares in the vitality of the street. It enfolds rather than delimits. By capturing the nuances of the changing light and unfolding with passage its variable form, it is designed to enrich the experience of passers-by, who are invited to drift above and along Bernstorffsgade,”

quote from architects web site

 

“With one foot planted in the past and one in the future, this project engages the history of Copenhagen’s extraordinary Tivoli Garden and adds to its storied legacy. The garden … was envisioned as a place for amusement, culture, and recreation, and the Hjørnet project resonates with the garden’s dualities: traditional and experimental, bucolic and urban, contemplative and entertaining.

Where it faces the city, the building is animated and welcoming. On the other side, it echoes the spirit of hygge and social harmony …”

citation from the American Institute of Architects

 

were the defences of the historic city really the inspiration for the design of the food hall?

“The key architectural idea for Tivoli Hjørnet was derived from the fortification walls and moat that historically enfolded the city and today remain imprinted on the garden's layout. Just as these walls formed the boundary of the city, so is the building a new edge for the garden. It is an inhabited zone that both engages and entertains.”

again, quoted from the on-line site of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners

an earlier scheme for a new hotel in the Tivoli gardens

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Towards the end of 2006, the British firm of architects Foster + Partners won an international competition to design a hotel for Tivoli.

That design, like the more recent design by BIG, was to have a tall circular tower and was described by the architects as:

“driven by a careful urban strategy concerned with the preservation of Copenhagen's low skyline, the scheme comprises an elegant cluster of interconnecting cylinders that combine to form a generous podium corresponding to the heights of the surrounding rooflines. Elegantly rising from the podium, a slender sculptural tower acts as a marker for the scheme and relates in scale to the City Hall tower opposite, adding to the language of spires in Copenhagen. The landscaped roofs of the lower buildings extend the greenery of Tivoli and reinforce the buildings sustainable profile. In addition to allowing for rainwater collection, the buildings are oriented to maximise natural light and views while reducing unwanted solar gain in the summer, but capturing the suns rays in the cooler winter months.”

A photograph of a model of the proposed hotel shows just how high the tower would have been - tall enough to throw a shadow across the square in front of the city hall in the later part of the day and, visually, it would have competed with and from angles it would even have blocked views of the tower of the city hall.

If built as designed, the hotel would have had a frontage to HC Andersens Boulevard and that would have meant the demolition of Slottet -  or Tivoli Castle - the building designed by Vilhelm Klein that was completed in 1893. that would have been an unfortunate loss as not only is it a good building in itself and part of the extensive and important new building works across the west side of the city in the late 19th century but it was the first home of what was then called the Kunstindustrimuseet before it was moved to Bredgade. The museum is now known as Designmuseum Danmark.

the building designed by Vilhelm Klein that was completed in 1893 and was the first home of the Kunstindustrimusset before it was moved to Bredgade in the 1920s

a BIG hotel for Tivoli

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Back in June, newspapers in the city published an illustration (above) to show the proposal for a new hotel that Tivoli want to build towards the north-east corner of the pleasure gardens - close to the back of the Dansk Industri / Danish Industry building - along with a scheme to close Vesterbrogade to traffic to create a new urban park across the front of the main entrance to Tivoli that has been drawn up by the studio of Jan Gehl.

This would link the gardens to the new square on the north side of the road - part of the relatively new development called Axeltorv designed by Lundgaard & Tranberg Arkitekter - and it would create a much more attractive route from the central railway station - a block west of Tivoli - to the public square in front of the City Hall to the east.

From the drawing it is difficult to judge the scale of the space but this part of Vesterbrogade - from Bernstorffsgade to HC Andersens Boulevard, the main road running north south between Tivoli and the square in front of city hall, is about 220 metres. Although the alignment of the front of buildings vary slightly - it is around 50 metres from the buildings on one side of the street to the front of buildings on the other.

The drawing suggests at least two obvious and major concerns that surely have to have very careful consideration.

The round tower for the hotel has been designed by BIG - The Bjarke Ingels Group - and, described as a pagoda , is shown with large terraces or balconies that are covered with greenery but neither the description nor the greenery disguise the fact that the building proposed would have eighteen floors and be around 70 metres high. There are towers within the gardens but these are relatively insubstantial - most formed with open frameworks of steel - and a tower here, so close to the north-east corner of Tivoli, and a building of this height and mass would block and compete with the views of the tower of the City Hall immediately to the east and with the silhouette of the SAS hotel by Arne Jacobsen to the north west that is just under 70 metres high.

The form of planting and hard landscaping along the street is schematic - this is simply an initial proposal - but is it appropriate for an urban context? Would a better model be the formal avenues of the King’s Garden with simple gravel walkways or the trees of Kongens Nytorv, at the east end of the old city, where the surface is cobbled and has double lines of trees to provide an area where people walk.

Are running water and meadow-like planting really appropriate for an urban and city-centre setting?

Cobbles over wider areas of pavement and double avenues of trees with space under the natural canopy for people to walk and creating space for occasional small-scale events would be more robust and provide a stronger but simpler foil to the buildings along the street.

Initially, traffic could be restricted to a lane in each direction along the centre for essential access and relatively short traditional lamp posts could provide a better level of good light at night. That is not to suggest something staid but lower lighting …. lower in height not in brightness … would compete less with the more important lighting of the gardens and of the electric advertising signs high up on the buildings.

If a major project to construct a tunnel - to take the heavy traffic from HC Andersens Boulevard down underground - and to create a landscaped area between Jarmers Plads and the harbour does go ahead then the two areas of new park would link together to create an extensive area of green from what are now some of the busiest roads in the city.

Tivoli press release

 

historic view of the entrance to Tivoli from Vesterbrogade.
the entrance was designed by Richardt Bergmann and Emil Blichfeldt and built in 1890 to replace an earlier gateway - note the wide pavements; large open area in front of the pleasure gardens - a deep but uncluttered set back from the pavement where people can meet and the relatively narrow cobbled road; low street lighting and double line of young trees

proposal from 2017 by Tredje Natur to divert most of the traffic from the city end of Vesterbrogade to create an area of trees and water across the front of the main entrance into Tivoli … published by Magasinet KBH

Magasinet KBH

looking across Vesterbrogade from Axeltorv to the main entrance to Tivoli
the problem is not just the traffic but the narrow and crowded pavements and the clutter of street furniture and bikes

 

Ⓐ City Hall
Ⓑ Rådhuspladsen Metro station
Ⓒ Vesterbrogade
Ⓓ Axeltorv

Ⓔ SAS tower by Arne Jacobsen
Ⓕ Central Railway Station
Ⓖ Main entrance to Tivoli
Ⓗ proposed hotel?