Danish Building Heritage Archive
Danish buildings read through the archives.
Each study takes one building and reads the architecture: why it looks as it does, what it is built from, and what it teaches about building today.
Published
Copenhagen Central Station
More than a hundred thousand people cross this floor every day. Few have the time to stop and look at “something Danish”.*
Published
Copenhagen City Hall
Copenhagen City Hall took thirteen years to build and has stood for a hundred and twenty. This study is about what it is made of and who made it, in twenty-two chapters.
Published
Grundtvig's Church
At the end of the street on Bispebjerg stands a wall of pale yellow brick forty-nine metres high. It steps up like a gable and it is ribbed like an organ. It is the memorial to N.F.S. Grundtvig, the priest, poet and hymn writer whose hymns are still sung in every Danish church and whose ideas gave Denmark its folk high schools.
Published
Østerport Station
Østerport opened in 1897 as a temporary station. A newspaper wrote that it was "not being built for eternity". But the building Heinrich Wenck drew in 1896 left room under itself for a railway that did not yet exist. When the line came in 1917, the station stayed.
Published
Palace Hotel
On 14 March 1908 a Copenhagen paper put it on the front page. It can be said with every probability that there will be no Palace Hotel.
Published
Tivoli's Main Entrance
Everyone photographs Tivoli's gate. Few look at what stands on either side of it. Those are two brick buildings full of shops. Tivoli built them in 1889–90 to pay the rent on ground it did not own. The gate between them was the one part meant to earn nothing. It became the picture of Tivoli.
Your property has a history too
We do the same research for your address: history, current status, building rights, and three scenarios.