It is extraordinary that two cities of approximately the same scale, and both capitals of countries with much the same population size, should be as different in appearance and character as Dublin and Copenhagen.
The Danish city can offer its Irish equivalent a great many lessons in good urban design. Copenhagen, for example, manages to accommodate car drivers but not at the expense of pedestrians and, despite a climate which is considerably harsher than that of Dublin, the abundance of cyclists on the streets is a striking sight. Similarly, the preservation of the city's architectural heritage seems to have been managed much better in Copenhagen than in Dublin; the former's historic centre looks remarkably free from ill-considered and insensitive intrusions over the past half century and while there have been some unfortunate developments, these are far fewer than has been the case in our capital.
That this should be the case in Copenhagen is not a matter of happy chance but instead the result of a conscious and state-sponsored effort to encourage the awareness and practice of good design. The Danes are a relatively conservative people, but they embraced the tenets of modernism far more quickly than the Irish, thanks to the presence of a group of forward-looking architects and designers who worked in the country from the 1920s onwards. Of these, the most important and best-known was Arne Jacobsen, remembered outside Denmark more for his furniture - such as the Swan and Egg chairs from the late 1950s - than the buildings for which he was responsible.
In Copenhagen today, these structures have assumed iconic status; Jacobsen's 22storey SAS Royal Hotel, for example, begun in 1956, is currently undergoing meticulous restoration with one room - number 606 - being kept exactly as it would have looked when the building first opened in the early 1960s. Here Jacobsen was responsible for every detail of design, not simply the hotel itself - the light fittings, furniture, fabrics, even the cutlery were all his creation.
Similarly, in a coastal suburb north of the city called Klampenborg, Jacobsen's houses and apartment blocks of Bellevue and Bellavista dating from 1932-34, with their accompanying restaurant and theatre, are carefully preserved and highly prized.
What makes this attention paid to Arne Jacobsen - more than he received for much of his life, incidentally - all the more unusual is that his work was always unabashedly in the international modernist vein and made little reference to Copenhagen's traditional building forms in which either red brick or else colour-washed stucco have been almost the universal norms. The SAS Royal Hotel, for example, is not only much taller than any of its neighbours but, in addition, employs completely different materials - a shell of concrete surrounded by a curtain wall of oxidised aluminium and glass.
Similarly, the polished stone exterior of the same architect's last building - the National Bank - quite clearly makes it stand out from the older work in the same quarter of the city.
This ability to incorporate contemporary architecture successfully into a long established district is one which seems to have been inherited by the post-Jacobsen generation of architects. There are a number of instances in Copenhagen of landmark buildings which during the past decade have undergone substantial change or augmentation without fundamental damage being done to either the spirit or structure of the original work.
Among the most noteworthy instances is the extension to the Statens for Kunst (the Danish National Gallery) which in the past decade has virtually doubled the exhibition space in this institution. The original gallery is a monumental block in brick and stone dating from the last decade of the 19th century, its grandiose appearance - epitomised by the broad flight of steps leading to the entrance - embodying that era's attitude towards high art. An equally grand staircase filled the entrance hall, but this was removed when the building underwent certain modifications which were designed to increase the number of galleries and undertaken in the late 1960s.
Nonetheless, within 30 years it was apparent that only a radical expansion could resolve the Statens for Kunst's space problems; the same solution having also been adopted for the National Gallery of Ireland where the new building is now approaching completion. In Copenhagen, the architects who won the job to design this addition were Anna Maria Indrio and Mads Moller.
Their solution was to leave the old building almost untouched and to construct a new one to the rear, the two linked by a narrow, glass-roofed arcade; the galleries in each section are reached by means of bridges that criss-cross this arcade at different levels. Open to the public since November 1998, Indrio and Moller's building is notable for the central wall of glass that looks out over a park and acts as the backwall to a tiered auditorium descending from what was once the conclusion of the old gallery structure. A large number of exhibition spaces have been accommodated on either side of this space, which rises the full height of the new development and which, thanks to the combination of large windows, pale limestone floors and white walls, provides the entire site with a superabundance of natural light.
Indrio and Moller's design is not without problems - seemingly the auditorium's acoustics have proved less than satisfactory - but the fundamental intention of their brief, to provide plenty of exhibition space, has been more than adequately met.
The same is also true of another newly expanded institution in central Copenhagen, the Royal Library. Interestingly, the National Library in Dublin is also in the process of acquiring new space, and when this opens later in the year comparisons can be made between the two organisations. It is very unlikely that the Irish option will be as dramatic as the Danish.
Designed by architects Schmidt Hammer & Lassen and completed in late 1999, this is an enormous riverside block which, thanks to its exterior of glass, steel and polished black granite, has come to be called the Black Diamond. The library it supplements dates from 1906 and was designed in traditional Scandinavian revival style using red brick and tile and a great deal of arts-and-crafts ornamentation. The old building and the Black Diamond are totally different in character but manage to work comfortably together, probably because they are not bonded together but instead linked only by a first-floor covered walkway passing over a busy four-lane road.
While the new block holds a number of large open-plan reading rooms, it also holds four conference spaces, a chamber concert hall, a large bookshop, a cafe and a restaurant, as well as the National Museum of Photography. Schmidt Hammer & Lassen is the firm which is at present completing work on a new museum of art in Arhus, Denmark's second largest city, on a site close to Arne Jacobsen's justly renowned town hall.
In a similar fashion to the Statens for Kunst, one very substantial section of an outer wall in the Black Diamond is composed entirely of glass, allowing for terrific views across to the old Christianshavn harbour quarter which is currently undergoing regeneration. While much of the area is made up of former warehouses, a key riverside site here almost directly opposite the Black Diamond was cleared for the construction of the massive Unibank headquarters designed by Denmark's leading architect, Henning Larsens.
On what used to be a shipyard now stands four six-storey glass-fronted blocks each pointing directly towards the harbour, and an even more substantial U-shaped block which acts as an entrance to the entire complex and contains a five-storey lobby. All the buildings are joined to each other by walkways and their massed effect, particularly when viewed from a distance, is extremely impressive.
Larsens is currently working on a new opera house for Copenhagen, scheduled to open in four years' time. He is capable of designing more intimate work than the Unibank headquarters which can be seen by a visit to yet another of Copenhagen's cultural institutions, the NY Carlsberg Glyptotek. This was built in the 19th century by the founder of Denmark's most famous brewing company to house the collection of art he had donated to the state.
The Glyptotek's most striking feature is a large and luxuriant winter garden filled with trees and palms growing beneath a vast glazed dome. The exhibition rooms are filled with an enormous collection of ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman statuary, paintings from Denmark's "Golden Period" (the first half of the 19th century) and work by the French Impressionists. It was to provide more space for the last of these that Larsens designed an ingenious sequence of infill galleries, squeezed into a narrow site between two sections of the older building.
As is so often the case elsewhere in the city, one priority has been the provision of ample natural light - a precious resource here as winter darkness lasts longer in Scandinavia than elsewhere in Europe.
So the narrow arcade that wraps and climbs around the new rooms is top-lit and its walls and floors are finished in the palest tones. This contrasts strongly with the three-storeys of galleries which are artificially lit and in which Copenhagen's exceptional collection of Impressionist art - the finest outside France - is displayed to wondrous advantage. Not all of Henning Larsens' recent work deserves equal admiration; ironically, one of his less successful commissions during the past decade has been for the Danish Design Centre, diagonally opposite the Glyptotek and facing Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens. Opened just over a year ago, this five-storey block is frankly a disappointing exercise in standardised modernism, its glass-panelled exterior dull but better than the functional interior fitout.
Seemingly, budgetary constraints were responsible for this lacklustre block but it does seem a pity that a work intended to celebrate the best of contemporary Danish design should itself be so lacking in interest or innovation.
Finally, worthy of mention as a building of enormous interest and as an example of proto-modernism in Copenhagen is the Thorvaldsen Museum, built in the middle of the 19th century to house the work of Denmark's most famous neo-classical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. This is a fascinating structure, which opens with a towering entrance hall from which run two long wings enclosing an open courtyard containing the artist's tomb. Other than a series of pilasters, the structural decoration is almost non-existent although almost all the gallery ceilings are painted with Pompeian-style frescoes and the walls washed with rich, dark colours. Still, the Thorvaldsen Museum is an early instance of Danish design at its most simple and effective.
