teglværkshavnen harbour housing, copenhagen, denmark 2003-2008.
architects: tegnestuen vandkunsten.
the architecture scene in copenhagen is a bloodbath these days, people being fired by the dozens and the first offices bankrupted by the crisis. and all I have to offer are more photos of buildings...bear with me. this, again, is the recently completed habour housing project by vandkunsten, the company I work for.
I put together the following text for john hill's archidose site which also features the professional photos of the project by adam mørk and a few drawings, check it out.
the project consists of 118 flats, half of them social housing and half of them private, and a communal house placed out in the copenhagen harbour.
it is result of a 2003 competition which had an unusual brief, partly in the 50/50 social housing-private ownership mix but not least in the fact that the copenhagen harbour authorities had donated an area of water for the competition as they wanted a model project to boost development of this part of the habour.
the idea was that the money saved from not having to buy land could instead pay for a large landfill that would accommodate buildings and cars. our proposal was to forget the landfill and to build an artificial island in the form of a one-story parking house to get rid of the cars that plague the spaces between our houses and to get closer to the water.
the sea-view has become an obsession in real estate but maybe looking at the sea is the least interesting and certainly the most passive way to enjoy living near water. our claim was that the spaces between our houses and the wooden decks around the parking island would encourage swimming, fishing, kayaking - and the great thing was that when the first residents moved in this spring, we saw people fishing from their balconies, swimming, even partying on a floating platform...
building on the water was a challenge, but once the island was established, the plan helped organize things: the floor of the parking house was dimensioned for a single, large tower crane on tracks and the houses were built one by one as the crane moved from one end of the island to the other.
the buildings are quite narrow and all flats receive daylight from two or three sides. windows span from floor to ceiling and are for the most part placed next to partition walls to reflect the at times limited nordic light into the rooms - and to make the most of the light reflected off the water.
the general structure is prefabricated concrete, but because of the difficult site elements like balconies, stairs and fully fitted bathrooms were also prefabricated and simply lifted into place.
this particular photo is somewhat earlier than the previous ones and people haven't furnished their balconies yet. today, the whole bookshelf-like arrangement against a neutral, black backdrop makes the residents' chairs and washing and plants stand out nicely. so far, you'll have to take my word for it.
www.vandkunsten.com
archidose.blogspot.com/2008/11/monday-monday_24.html
Tags: tegnestuen vandkunsten arkitektur architecture housing boliger copenhagen københavn denmark danmark house modern modernist modernism water harbor harbour building prefab prefabricated prefabrication concrete beton subsidized social counsil public almennyttig flats dansk danish nordic scandinavian architektur arquitectura arquitetura Architectuur Architettura gebäude bygning haus gebouw bouw batiment maison edificio huis casa boligbyggeri sømærk teglværkshavnen jenskristianseier seier+seier creative commons CC
today, the office I work for (as long as the crisis permits, I guess) was awarded the alvar aalto medal. anyone running an architectural office these days would be excused for prefering a commission to a medal, but the honour remains real and considerable.
the jury made a point of the fact that this is the first time the medal has been awarded to a collective rather than an individual, but could it be that the real surprise is that the office has never built a museum, concert hall or theatre in its 38 years?
tegnestuen vandkunsten has always specialized in town planning and housing - low-cost, social, and co-housing at that. the least glamourous side of architecture, but hardly the least important. a brave choice by the finns and maybe a sign of the times that one of the big prizes goes to a small scale office without a single dubai-style project in its portfolio.
the finnish press release
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvar_Aalto_Medal
www.vandkunsten.com
www.berlingske.dk/article/20090202/kultur/702020068/
politiken.dk/kultur/article641575.ece
www.canadianarchitect.com/issues/ISArticle.asp?id=95536&a...
archidose.blogspot.com/2009/02/today-archidose-284.html
the photo shows the view of christiania from the torpedo boat hall, a vandkunsten project in copenhagen.
Tags: tegnestuen vandkunsten architects architecture alvar aalto medal torpedohallen torpedo boat hall copenhagen holmen seier+seier creative commons CC
trudeslund cohousing community, birkerød, copenhagen, denmark 1979-1981.
architects: tegnestuen vandkunsten, copenhagen.
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.
we went here, the whole family, on an overcast autumn day to see if this was a place we would want to live. to my mind, the photos hold the answer, at least to a degree - this panorama is the best I have uploaded in a while. you should view it as large as possible.
it shows the gardens side of one of vandkunsten's co-housing communities from the early days of the office, a collective of thirty three families living closely together in row houses, sharing lots of facilities and eating together every night.
a brain-child of the 1960's left wing, the cohousing movement still lives, albeit quietly, while media and government have been preaching private ownership for decades, emphasizing the secret and mysterious benefits of living next to each other instead of together.
the sensitivity to the gentle curves of the Danish landscape shown in vandkunsten's early work is a visual clue that the socialism underlying vandkunsten's architecture at the time was romantic and even dreaming rather than marxist. it is tempting to say that it went nowhere, my hope is that the people of trudeslund would disagree and that for a dream that was essentially about people taking charge of their own lives it went quite far.
I work for vandkunsten, a company much changed since '81, but with the original partners still at the office. commissions for cohousing projects are few and far between these days - perhaps they always were, it always took a lot to go against the norms of the surrounding society - but we still try to include the lessons learnt from these communities when we build today.
more words, yada, yada, yada.
the vandkunsten set.
www.vandkunsten.com
www.jensthomasarnfred.dk
Tags: vandkunsten tegnestuen vandkunsten architects arkitekter trudeslund cohousing community collective bofællesskab housing architecture arkitektur modern modernism birkerød copenhagen denmark jenskristianseier seier+seier creative commons CC
dianas have housing, hørsholm, denmark.
architects: tegnestuen vandkunsten, 1991.
row houses tend to form some of the least dynamic architectural ensembles. I believe this has to do with the way the main direction of each individual unit runs perpendicular to the length of the whole building, creating a kind of instant equilibrium.
at dianas have, through the careful manipulation of gables and section in which the ground floor closely follows the uneven hill side, the buildings are given a clear sense of direction; they become vectors in the landscape, searching out their place among old trees and steeper parts of the hill side. as you walk through the area, this initial process of the architect's work can still be seen and understood.
finding your place is very much the key to the project. it is about place-making and as such about the balance between private and public life and the relationship between building and landscape.
there is the gravel access road on one hand and the troden path which cuts right through the buildings on the other. there are individual entrances to every home but the neighbours will have an all glass corner looking right at it. niches define a sheltered space for your terrace, yet it is completely open to the park-like landscape.
these precarious balances are always shifted in favour of the chance meeting and an awareness of the people you live with. in the words of the architects behind it, it remains so much easier to add an extra curtain than an extra window...
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.
www.vandkunsten.com
www.jensthomasarnfred.dk
Tags: tegnestuen vandkunsten architecture arkitektur dianas have modern modernism housing denmark danmark facade building row houses park forest autumn trees arquitectura dansk danish nordic scandinavian architektur bygning arquitetura Architectuur Architettura gebäude haus gebouw bouw batiment maison edificio huis casa modernist bolig boligbyggeri seier+seier creative commons CC
jystrup savværk cohousing community, jystrup, denmark 1982-1984.
architects: tegnestuen vandkunsten, copenhagen.
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.
shortly after trudeslund, another group of families approached vandkunsten for a cohousing community. their greater ambition and smaller budget made the resulting building the quintessential vandkunsten project of the period: a romantic, left-wing dream of togetherness realized in cheap, off-the-shelf materials. and black!
in jystrup, vandkunsten took the trudeslund plan one step further and developed it into a single house for all the families by covering the internal street in glass, a move which effectively disconnected the project from its small-scale village context. responding only to the contours of the landscape, jystrup looks like some giant D.I.Y. spacecraft crash-landed on the site, digging its wings into the soft soil.
arriving there on a sunny september day, we found the place seemingly abandoned, with all doors left open and plants taking over. the crisp blue interior I knew from old photos was completely overgrown. it felt as if we were entering a deserted space station, and I remembered the scene from stefano benni's great sci-fi spoof 'TERRA!' in which the protagonists discover an ancient soviet space capsule '...with strands of vine and strange mushrooms flowing in space like long, unkept hair.'
the anti-heroes of benni's 'TERRA!' find a 300 year old hippie inside the overgrown space capsule. surprisingly, we found no such thing. perhaps jystrup is a time capsule of sorts, but only in terms of ideas. most of the original crew has left, young families have taken their place.
and the residents were simply at work, their children at school. the doors were open out of trust, that rare commodity, and soon enough a few people turned up, surprisingly relaxed and welcoming at the sight of strangers in their home. we were even allowed into one of the private houses. my photo, an autostich, was taken from their roof terrace, a fine place to take a break from the demands of collectivity.
while the shared facilites make up a staggering 40% of the built area - the covered street, the workshops, main kitchen, extra rooms for guests and troubled teenagers, not to mention the refurbished buildings of the old saw mill that used to take up the site - it was the care taken to protect your need for privacy that struck me the most. in courtyards and roof terraces and even subtle changes of floor level, the individual can always escape to priviliged postitions above or beyond the reach of others.
in looking at housing, I find that what we might call the scale of privacy, running from perfect isolation to inescapable social exposure, is one of the most important and interesting aspects to chart. the past decade or two has seen an almost aggressive move towards the isolation of the individual or, at the very least, the family.
I recall a meeting with a Danish architect, partner in a major office here, and their otherwise brilliant collaborator from baumschlager & eberle. they were promoting the idea to the client that lifts or elevators should open into the individual flats, so you would never have to deal with your neighbours. a perfect nightmare to my mind, but on a more objective note, we could say that their project existed exclusively on isolation end of the privacy scale.
this, to the architects, was a luxury, and one which came at little or no cost to the client, the kind of luxury developers prefer. what the cost might turn out to be for future residents is a point worth considering, though. there are no easy answers here, our need for privacy varies from person to person and changes throughout our lives too, but once we take the social space, even the potential social space, out of our houses, our neighbourhoods, our towns, how will we ever regain it? on-line?
in that regard, the real beauty of jystrup - a project so dedicated to the social life of its inhabitants - lies in the care taken to cover the full scale of privacy, to include protecting the privacy of the very people it intends to bring together. sitting in the autumn sun on a roof terrace above the covered street brought that point home in the form of an epiphany: I could live here! it is a rare feeling, as I am sure you will agree, and only the impossible communte from copenhagen is keeping my family from jystrup even now.
regardless of ideology, jystrup remains a viable alternative to how most of us live today. of course, it is a child of its time, but it was a time before the idea of changing the world yourself had degenerated into just changing yourself, with all the ensuing horrors of self-help literature and positive thinking. the people behind jystrup were changing the world for themselves. when did we lose that ambition, that ability?
the vandkunsten set.
www.vandkunsten.com
www.jensthomasarnfred.dk
Tags: vandkunsten tegnestuen vandkunsten architects arkitekter jystrup savværk cohousing community collective bofællesskab housing architecture arkitektur modern modernism denmark seier+seier creative commons CC