COPENHAGEN HARBOUR: STRUCTURES OF A CITY PART I

The harbour of Copenhagen is complex. An area of social juxtaposition, a mix of typology, ideology and scale, it is within this urban context that I found myself in August, tasked to create a film participating in Copenhagen Festival of Architecture’s summer school. This project never materialised, however, with three-fifths of my footage blank after sending it to be developed at a laboratory, but my investigation is presented here with it being reconstructed from a film project into a written project. My exploration of these relationships co-existing in the same structural environment through interviews and interactions forms the basis of my experience, and allowed insight into a transitory moment in the harbour of Copenhagen.

The area has been changing hands between military, industrial and public use, and its current composition is explained in deindustrialisation, the squatters movement and its most visible and continued existence in the asserted sovereign nation of Freetown Christiania. Professionals, students, artists, academics, chefs and tourists inhabit where heavy industry and the navy once dominated, and, in this transition, beauty occupies where it was once disregarded in the pursuit of industrialisation and national interests.

One space I visited contributing to the rich culture of the harbour can be seen along Kanonbådsvej, a collection of old boat sheds once occupied by gunboats of the Royal Danish Navy. Now populated by studios, offices and headquarters of various businesses, its character is now creative and corporate, and is where I found the studio of KHR Architecture. This is where I spoke to Kristian and Vicki, and discussed what I saw as a sharp contrast between this professional world that I found myself situated in and an anarchist commune just over one hundred metres across the water.

The relationship is a source of inspiration for the architects and researchers working on this side of the water. “Surrounded by many different typologies, Christiania is of of them”, Vicki explains, and further describes that “[Christiania] does not present these commercial aspects or solutions where money has a great power; where on the other side, you’ve got a lot of housing with a completely different ideology”.

On my trip by bicycle to this side of the harbour, I saw these grand architectural gestures under construction, projects in which economic relationships have greater authority than human relationships.

In many ways, the overarching influence of these developments on the harbour does make the studio of KHR Architecture and the world of Freetown Christiania feel closer together. In the relation of building scale, as Kristian informs, but also in the embrace of collaboration, seen in the non-hierarchical open plan of the office.

Architecture is a vessel, and this is displayed continuously within the harbour of Copenhagen. Ideology determines the nature of the built environment, and expressed in the architecture of Freetown Christiania is the inhabitant’s non-hierarchical, decentralised philosophy. “A different approach to life, and to how a day works, how a life works,” as Vicki describes.

One kilometre from the archway into Christiania declaring ‘You are now leaving the European Union’ is an opposing ideology and a very different perspective, one that is tax-deductible and funded by the foundation of Maersk’s tycoon founder, Copenhagen’s Opera House. Another layer to add to this complexity is Bjarke Ingel Group’s Copenhill, an industrial landmark unescapable in most views of the harbour, that can be framed with this Starchitect’s impression on the skyline of Copenhagen in the background, and a community that rejects the notion of private property dominated by nature in the foreground.

It is juxtapositions like these that continually present themselves when navigating the Harbour of Copenhagen, and allowed me in my final day of conducting interviews to visit an architectural studio, an anarchist commune, student accommodation, shake hands with the deputy prime minister of the Czech Republic and see the world’s most famous living architect, Bjarke Ingles, on his houseboat whilst cycling past. All within a couple of hours.

Continued on page 22