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Abstract
In this article, I argue that despite its limited appearances, stylistic and planning oddities, poor building quality, and current pariah status in terms of building heritage, Copenhagen’s postmodern architecture is an intrinsic part of the Danish welfare architecture urban development. I wish to show that Copenhagen’s postmodernist development has been criticized largely for the wrong reasons, and that the period can offer alternative visions that do not inevitably yoke livability and urban quality of life to economic growth and consumerism. Moreover, I argue that this reinterpretation gives us a more differentiated understanding of the architecture that emerged at the turning point when Copenhagen went from being deprived and anonymous to become the prosperous yet livable urban center we know today, thanks to infrastructural investments following the 1989 government report Hovedstaden, hvad vil vi med den? (“the capital, where should it go?”).
Notes
1. Anne Tietjen, ed., Forstadens bygningskultur 1945–1989 (Copenhagen: Realdania/Dansk Bygningsarv, 2010); Københavns Kommune, “Den tværgående analyseenhed/Københavns Kommune: Status på København 2021,” https://www.kk.dk/artikel/noegletal-og-analyser (accessed September 6, 2021).
2. For a discussion of neoliberal planning tendencies across various Western countries in general, see e.g., Kristian Olesen, “The Neoliberalisation of Strategic Spatial Planning,” Planning Theory 13, no. 3 (2014): 288–303; for a discussion of Denmark in particular, see Kristian Olesen, “Strategic Spatial Planning in Transition: A Case Study of Denmark” (PhD diss., Aalborg University, 2011).
3. For a seminal study on postmodernism in Danish architecture and its international ties, see Marianne Olsson Ilkjær, Postmodernismen i dansk arkitektur: International baggrund, dansk debat og praksis (Copenhagen: Byggeriets studiearkiv, 1987).
4. For a recent publication on postmodernism internationally, see Owens Hopkins, Postmodern Architecture: Less Is a Bore (London: Phaidon, 2020); on postmodernism in Danish architecture, see Kasper Lægring, “Gensyn med postmodernismen,” Arkitekten 2–3 (2021), https://arkitektforeningen.dk/arkitekten/gensyn-med-postmodernismen/ (accessed September 9, 2021). For an early publication detailing the shift to a neomodernist urban building and planning paradigm, see Claus Bech-Danielsen and Jens Schjerup Hansen, eds., Modernismens genkomst (Copenhagen: Arkitektens Forlag, 2001). For recent research on Danish welfare architecture, see work that has come out of two projects: “Spaces of Danish Welfare,” KADK, https://kglakademi.dk/spaces-danish-welfare (accessed September 9, 2021); “Reconfiguring Welfare Landscapes,” University of Copenhagen, https://ign.ku.dk/english/welland/ (accessed September 9, 2021).
5. Lægring, “Gensyn med postmodernismen.”
6. The journalist Gudrun Marie Schmidt wrote an amusing account in the newspaper Politiken of this bad image of Copenhagen—and how hard it is to imagine now, only two decades later. Schmidt, “Da København var Udskudsdanmark,” Politiken, July 1, 2015, https://politiken.dk/magasinet/feature/art5581467/Da-København-var-Udskudsdanmark.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, Meningen med velfærdsstaten (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2017); Ellen Braae and Henriette Steiner, “Expanding Danish Welfare Landscapes: Steen Eiler Rasmussen and Tingbjerg Housing Estate,” in Landscapes of Housing: Design and Planning in the History of Environmental Thinking, ed. Jeanne Haffner (London: Routledge, 2021), 146–167.
10. An example is the British architecture practice Office S&M, who adopt a formal language that points to postmodernism and have a low-cost, high-quality, resource-sensitive ethos. Catrina Stewart and Hugh McEwen, “More with Less: Responding to Austerity,” Architectural Design 91 (2021): 40–47, https://doi.org/10.1002/ad.2651.
11. I am drawing on the postwar welfare state model developed by the Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen in his book The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Esping-Andersen later took the temperature of this model in “After the Golden Age? Welfare State Dilemmas in a Global Economy,” in Welfare States in Transition: National Adaptations in Global Economies, ed. Esping-Andersen (London: Sage, 2004), 1–29. In fact, some scholars argue that the Nordic, universal model has since been completely dismantled and has given way to neoliberal regimes (see e.g., Hans Thor Andersen and Erik Clark, “Does Welfare Matter? Ghettoisation and the Welfare State,” in Voices from the North: New Trends in Nordic Geography, ed. Jan Öhman and Kirsten Simonsen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 91–102), whereas other scholars suggest that it is still intact, albeit under siege (see e.g., Nanna Kildal and Stein Kuhnle, eds., Normative Foundations of the Welfare State: The Nordic Experience (London: Routledge, 2006).
12. See Olesen, “Neoliberalisation”; Maroš Krivý and Leonard Ma, “The Limits of the Livable City: From Homo Sapiens to Homo Cappuccino,” Avery Review 30 (2018), https://averyreview.com/issues/30/limits-of-the-livable-city (accessed June 7, 2021).
13. See for example Duo Dickinson, “Building Madness: How the Boom and Bust Mentality Distorts Architecture,” Common Edge, December 5, 2017, https://commonedge.org/building-madness-how-the-boom-and-bust-mentality-distorts-architecture.
14. For a reflection from a US perspective on architecture and how economic booms and busts have influenced the discipline since the late 1970s, see Duo Dickinson, “10 Years On, How the Recession Has Proven Architecture’s Value (and Shown Us Architects’ Folly),” ArchDaily, May 17, 2017, https://www.archdaily.com/871522/10-years-on-how-the-recession-has-proven-architectures-value-and-shown-us-architects-folly.
15. For a publication on this practice, see Jeffrey Kipnis, Perfect Acts of Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001).
16. Herbert Muschamp, “Ground up: Paper Architecture,” Artforum 30, no. 2 (1991), https://www.artforum.com/print/199108/paper-architecture-33722 (accessed September 9, 2021).
17. Ellen Braae and Henriette Steiner, “The Sustainable Nordic City of the Future Is the City We Already Have,” in Nordic Working Papers: Opportunities and Challenges for Future Regional Development—Notes from an Open Seminar, September 12, 2019, ed. Kjell Nilsson (Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers, 2019), 31–39.
18. Kirsten Stallknecht and Initiativgruppen om Hovedstadsregionen, Hovedstaden, hvad vil vi med den? (Copenhagen: Statsministeriet, 1989).
19. Ibid., 6.
20. Ibid., 7.
21. Uddannelses- og Forskningsministeriet, “Nyt regeringsudspil: Stærkere lokalsamfund og 25 nye uddannelser uden for de største byer,” https://ufm.dk/aktuelt/pressemeddelelser/2021/nyt-regeringsudspil-staerkere-lokalsamfund-og-25-nye-uddannelser-uden-for-de-storste-byer (accessed June 4, 2021); Stallknecht and Initiativgruppen, Hovedstaden, 27.
22. Stallknecht and Initiativgruppen, Hovedstaden, 15.
23. Ibid., 15–17.
24. Although it was possibly somewhat halted by the increasingly anti-Copenhagen attitudes of both left- and right-wing governments when government jobs were moved away from the city center.
25. See Kjældgaard, Meningen med velfærdsstaten, 44.
26. Stallknecht and Initiativgruppen, Hovedstaden, 20.
27. ING, “En tur gennem ingeniørhuset,” https://ing.dk/artikel/en-tur-gennem-ingeniorhuset-13988 (accessed June 7, 2021).
28. Henriette Steiner, The Emergence of a Modern City: Golden Age Copenhagen 1800–1850 (London: Routledge, 2014).
29. Berlingske, “Arkitekturanmelderen: Her er de fem mest grelle eksempler på fejlslagen arkitektur i København,” https://www.berlingske.dk/aok/arkitekturanmelderen-her-er-de-fem-mest-grelle-eksempler-paa-fejlslagen (accessed June 7, 2021).
30. Lægring, “Gensyn med postmodernismen.”
31. Berlingske, “Arkitekturanmelderen.”
32. See e.g., Timothy Mennel, Jo Steffens, and Christopher Klemek, eds., Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York (New York City: Municipal Art Society and Princeton Architectural Press, 2007).
33. See Kjældgaard, Meningen med velfærdsstaten.
34. See Braae and Steiner, “Expanding Danish Welfare Landscapes.”
35. Jan Gehl, Life between Buildings (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2011).
36. See the discussion in Krivý and Ma, “Limits of the Livable City.”
37. See my discussion of these slippages in the context of another case study: Henriette Steiner, “Gigantic Welfare Landscapes and the Ground Beneath Høje Gladsaxe,” Landscape Research 46, no. 4 (2021): 527–541, https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2020.1808953.
38. Before the advent of CCTV cameras, this parking lot—which was open at night—was a site for prostitution; it was just a short drive from Skelbækgade on Vesterbro, one of Copenhagen’s best-known street prostitution areas.
39. Natalie Gulsrud and Henriette Steiner, “Winding City Visions,” Topos 93 (2016): 24–31.
40. Gehl, Life between Buildings.
41. Braae and Steiner, “Sustainable Nordic City.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Henriette Steiner
Henriette Steiner is Associate Professor at the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Copenhagen. She holds a PhD in History and Philosophy of Architecture from the University of Cambridge, UK, and has been a researcher or visiting scholar on different design programs including at ETH Zurich and MIT. She is joint project leader (with Svava Riesto) on Women in Danish Architecture 1925–1975, a three-year research project that aims to provide a more just and complete understanding of architecture history by highlighting women’s contributions to the architectural disciplines in Denmark (http://www.womenindanisharchitecture.dk/). Steiner’s most recent books are Tower to Tower: Gigantism in Architectural and Digital Culture (MIT Press 2020) and Touch in the Time of Corona: Reflections of Love, Care and Vulnerability in the Pandemic (De Gruyter, 2021). Both books are co-written with Kristin Veel.