A Patchy History of Copenhagen from the Architectural Perspective
The classroom for 2:50pm '20 & 21st century Danish architecture' in Vestergade 7, can only be reached by laboring up 4 flights of a spindly spiral staircase. There are two options: the indoor stairwell with it's yellow steps--so steep and sloping that one day, some poor student will slide from the glazed enamel to their death in the DIS basement, or, there's the metal cage out in the courtyard that hosts these narrow steel rungs which curl around in such a dizzy way that they instill the feeling one is about to plummit onto the cobblestones below. The 2:50 class is proud to boast a casualty count of zero so far.
It might be nice to be up so high, to look out over the tiled Copenhagen rooftops from Vestergade 7, but there's only one window that's visible from the corner where I sit, and it's so narrow that only a sliver of skyline peeks through the rippling glass. It's the kind of window that makes you itch to tear down the adjoining wall and reveal the 360 degree view of the bustling city energy below. But, alas, that would probably result in a hefty fine and a plane ticket back to the U.S. The boundary does create a kind of freedom though; an opportunity to imagine endless scenes extending from the red brick image that's visible, so it's perfect for daydreaming. I stare out the little square of light while the velvet voice of my history professor spins the tales of Copenhagen's structural past with her proud accompanist, the "Powerpoint."
The city was first formed because of its convenient proximity to the harbor, hence shipping/trade routes and all that good business.
In the Middle Ages, it expanded a little bit in an organic and messy fashion until around the 17th century, when Christian IV decided to put up a bunch of hefty stone walls as defense against any armies that wanted to mess with the Danes.
This sort of backfired because the city was pretty popular, so a bunch of people moved in and were trapped within this fortification barrier. Consequently, it got crowded and gross with people going to the bathroom all over the streets and creating a perfect brewing ground for infectious disease. This peaked with a Cholera epidemic that wiped out a bunch of Copenhagen's inhabitants. Then there was a war later in the 17th century where 30,000 Sweds moved in and built a city bigger than Copenhagen on a hill outside of old Christian's fortification and tried to take down the harbor town by flushing them out like hungry chickens.
Apparently the walls were pretty well defended though and the city stood her ground and eventually the Kings made peace and all was well for the time. Then there were a few fires in 1728 and 1795 that wiped out a bunch of the city and made people think, 'Hey, all this timber we're using is preeeettttty flammable!'
Housing was pretty slim pickings now too, so the the king used a some money (or
gold or something valuable) to build a bunch of really bad housing. (I
guess some people might try and defend the dignity of their homes but my
professor was pretty disgusted about what went down to try and
accommodate the expanding population.) Constructors started to think about fires more consciously when they were building too--even today you can see that the corners of the buildings in Copenhagen are cut off so firetrucks can come screaming around a tight turn at top speed on their way to those timber frame fires.
After this point the town was still a real dense mess so this plan was enacted called the "Five Finger Plan" in 1947--a city plan of train lines and new housing that expanded out of the city like the fingers of a hand, and kept green space in the gaps between phalanges.
This plan worked out pretty well, except that now the inbetween gaps that were sposed to be shared landscape are kind of filled in with more town.
From here on out, the lecture dissolves into a jumble of architecture terminology, from Baroque at the start to Renissance with old Christian the (fortifying) Fourth to Neo-Classicism melding into Functionalism and Modernism. I spose it's a great progression to know, but it gets a little dry and memorizational and frankly I still can't articulate the difference between Functionalism and the Functional Tradition. The Powerpoint illustrates that there are a lot of cool buildings out there, and the Danes really place value and investment in structures that will last. If I let my eyes glaze over, the rooftops peeking out from that thin window dissolve into the ornate, 17th century Renaissance beauty....then, fire licks at the timber frames, and then structures are reformed with concrete and metal. Layers upon layers of history stacked outside Vestergade 7. Land that was cherished and fought over. Burned and rebuilt.
The clock chimes 4. Class is dismissed.
It might be nice to be up so high, to look out over the tiled Copenhagen rooftops from Vestergade 7, but there's only one window that's visible from the corner where I sit, and it's so narrow that only a sliver of skyline peeks through the rippling glass. It's the kind of window that makes you itch to tear down the adjoining wall and reveal the 360 degree view of the bustling city energy below. But, alas, that would probably result in a hefty fine and a plane ticket back to the U.S. The boundary does create a kind of freedom though; an opportunity to imagine endless scenes extending from the red brick image that's visible, so it's perfect for daydreaming. I stare out the little square of light while the velvet voice of my history professor spins the tales of Copenhagen's structural past with her proud accompanist, the "Powerpoint."
The city was first formed because of its convenient proximity to the harbor, hence shipping/trade routes and all that good business.
In the Middle Ages, it expanded a little bit in an organic and messy fashion until around the 17th century, when Christian IV decided to put up a bunch of hefty stone walls as defense against any armies that wanted to mess with the Danes.
This sort of backfired because the city was pretty popular, so a bunch of people moved in and were trapped within this fortification barrier. Consequently, it got crowded and gross with people going to the bathroom all over the streets and creating a perfect brewing ground for infectious disease. This peaked with a Cholera epidemic that wiped out a bunch of Copenhagen's inhabitants. Then there was a war later in the 17th century where 30,000 Sweds moved in and built a city bigger than Copenhagen on a hill outside of old Christian's fortification and tried to take down the harbor town by flushing them out like hungry chickens.
Apparently the walls were pretty well defended though and the city stood her ground and eventually the Kings made peace and all was well for the time. Then there were a few fires in 1728 and 1795 that wiped out a bunch of the city and made people think, 'Hey, all this timber we're using is preeeettttty flammable!'
After this point the town was still a real dense mess so this plan was enacted called the "Five Finger Plan" in 1947--a city plan of train lines and new housing that expanded out of the city like the fingers of a hand, and kept green space in the gaps between phalanges.
From here on out, the lecture dissolves into a jumble of architecture terminology, from Baroque at the start to Renissance with old Christian the (fortifying) Fourth to Neo-Classicism melding into Functionalism and Modernism. I spose it's a great progression to know, but it gets a little dry and memorizational and frankly I still can't articulate the difference between Functionalism and the Functional Tradition. The Powerpoint illustrates that there are a lot of cool buildings out there, and the Danes really place value and investment in structures that will last. If I let my eyes glaze over, the rooftops peeking out from that thin window dissolve into the ornate, 17th century Renaissance beauty....then, fire licks at the timber frames, and then structures are reformed with concrete and metal. Layers upon layers of history stacked outside Vestergade 7. Land that was cherished and fought over. Burned and rebuilt.
The clock chimes 4. Class is dismissed.
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