the work of vilhelm wohlert
For Vilhelm and Bidda
Louisiana and Beyond
Louisiana and beyond The Work of Vilhelm Wohlert John Pardey
Edition Bløndal 2007
Contents: Foreword 4 Preface 6 Introduction 8 The Discipline of Craft 16 Louisiana – A Pavilion in the Park 46 Brick and Timber – Houses 108 Louisiana and Beyond – Public Buildings 162 A Blue Room and Louisiana on the Water 200 Architect’s Conclusion 212 Author’s Conclusion 213 List of Buildings and Projects 214 Notes, Bibliography 214
Foreword
During the summer of 2004, after completing the layout of a new book on Jørn Utzon’s Majorcan houses and with an afternoon on my hands, I took the train from Copenhagen to Humlebæk to visit Louisiana again. This had always been one of my favourite buildings – the way it used simple materials as a backdrop for high art, and the way it meandered through the beautiful grounds to culminate in a café overlooking the Øresund and Sweden beyond – an architecture that seemed so effortless, yet so timeless. Later, on the way back to town, I wondered what had happened to the two architects of Louisiana, Wohlert and Bo, who were hardly known outside Denmark and even then only amongst the architectural fraternity. I knew of a beautiful pavilion building that one of the two had built for the physicist Niels Bohr that had been such a great vehicle for teaching the idea of timber construction in schools of architecture during my days as a lecturer. My interest had undoubtedly been fuelled by my father, who was a skilled carpenter and joiner that as a young apprentice had learnt his craft building plywood motor-torpedo boats during the war. During my childhood, I had spent most Saturdays with him in the workshop where I learnt to understand the nature of wood, and how to make things, while he whistled Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ endlessly. I also knew of a group of courtyard-like houses somewhere north of Copenhagen and began to wonder what else the architects of Louisiana had done and the idea came to me to find out more. Returning to England, I called my Danish publisher and asked if he knew what had happened to Louisiana’s architects – he answered that Bo had died some years previously, but offered to contact Wohlert as he knew where he lived. Two weeks later, an excited publisher called and said that he had met Wohlert and had mentioned my interest in his work and in a wonderful coincidence, Wohlert and his wife were travelling to England a week or so later to visit their daughter who was unwell and in hospital in Southampton, not twenty kilometres from my home. I called Wohlert and we arranged to meet in the foyer of the Dolphin Hotel, a short stroll from the dock where the Titanic had departed nearly a century before. So we met in Southampton, two architects a generation apart but united in a love of craft and talked about Louisiana, the Niels Bohr Pavilion, and the architect Mogens Prip-Buus who had worked with Wohlert back in the 50s and whom I had met while working on the Utzon book – and it slowly transpired that this intensely modest man was about far more than one museum. My suggestion that it may be possible to make a book on his work met with a combination of credulity and surprise, but Bidda, his effervescent wife, winked at me and so we agreed to talk again on the telephone after a few weeks. A month or so later, I met the Wohlerts at their seaside home north of Copenhagen and the story, of Louisiana and beyond, began to unfold. John Pardey, January 2007
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Preface A brief introduction to the architect Vilhelm Wohlert
A glance back at the period 1900 to 1935 will provide a frame of re ference to the architect Vilhelm Wohlert and his later activities. The turn of the 20th century saw a series of striking sudden transitions and reactions to out-dated ideals. People at that time started going in for simple and genuine regional architecture and good workmanship and became increasingly interested in applied art reflecting quality, durability and good materials. The Arts and Crafts Movement in England, the School of Building and the movement known as Better Building Habits were the places in which these ideas and principles were formulated and through which an attempt was made to convey them to wider social groupings in the cities and out in country districts. The architecture and applied art of the Shakers, both of them profoundly functional in conception, were other sources of inspiration. Rural architecture provided many good examples of how construction, materials, colours and textural effect could redeem form and functional content. Architects became increasingly familiar with a Danish tradition and developed it sensitively. With the half-timbered building as an example and archetype, it was possible to describe the constituent parts of the building culture. Primarily the use of brickwork and wooden structures. The beam was placed on the top of the wall. The rafter was raised on the beam. The lath was placed on the rafter. The tile was hung on the lath. Then there was the limewashed wall and the tarred wooden structure. As a young student, the architect Vilhelm Wohlert encountered these fundamental principles in the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts under Professor Kaare Klint. In the Academy and the newly established Association of Architects, they talked of the “Klint School”. During the 1920s, Kaare Klint had established a school of furniture in which usability and durability were placed in a design context with sophisticated craft traditions. Architects and cabinet makers worked hand in hand in introducing furniture design into the annual exhibitions of the Guild of Cabinet Makers. The meeting with Kaare Klint was of very great significance for Wohlert, who himself has told how one day in the Academy he was visited by Kaare Klint while working at the drawing board. Klint cast a quick glance at Wohlert’s drawing of two buildings abutting each other with a complicated inward turning corner. Without commenting on this, Klint talked for two hours about the importance of the detail for the whole. “A brick prefers to be placed in a salient corner and only very reluctantly in an inward turning one. The joints become ugly in inward turning corners and so we should attempt to avoid such.” Very few inward turning corners are to be found in Wohlert’s buildings. Wall surfaces are finished simply and instead meet a window or a section of glass. Already as a student, Wohlert was appointed to Kaare Klint’s Drawing Office and thereby received further very high level training that also encompassed decorative art, furniture and fittings. Wohlert managed to become a partner in Kaare Klint for a brief period and continued the Drawing Office. In a way, Wohlert himself has founded a school, partly as professor in the Academy with a special interest in restoration and with a modern and rejuvenating approach to this difficult and demanding area – and partly thanks to his many years working in the drawing office. “Tradition and Renewal” has been a constant theme for Wohlert – right from his graduation project in
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Kaare Klint: Sheet containing studies of proportions for factory-produced furniture, 1918
the Academy, through the restoration of historical buildings to a major series of new buildings in the spirit of modernism. The drawing office today continues under the name of Wohlert Associates. A splendid example of how it has been possible to pass on Wohlert’s spirit and high professional level can be seen in the Visitors’ Centre at Jelling. 7
Ole Schultz, 06.08.06
Kaare Klint did not seek to find a magic formula that could solve all problems, but he wanted quite scientifically, by means of investigations, to determine the elements architecture has to work with and to see how they can be brought into harmony with each other again, not according to some relationship determined beforehand, but by means of simple divisibility so that there are no remainders.
Steen Eiler Rasmussen, 1957
The Discipline of Craft
Niels Bohr Pavilion, 1957 8
Niels Bohr, father of quantum theory and winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize for Physics, had met Wohlert through a friend while they were both working at the Ny Carlsberg museum. He recalled that it was: ‘During the winter of 1957, I met Margrethe and Niels Bohr when visiting my old friends Grete and Jørgen Gudmundsen-Holmgreen. At that time Jørgen was working on the impressive bust of Bohr which is now placed in front of the Copenhagen University.’ Niels Bohr went on to ask Wohlert to carry out a restoration of his house in Tisvilde on the coast of North Zealand. The job also involved the design of a new guest wing, that led Wohlert to state that, ‘the programme was simple, four rooms, two by two for children and adults and a fifth for a maid or nanny.’ The ‘wing’ became a freestanding pavilion in the garden, sited north of the main house and turned away from it by an angle of sixty degrees that was, he relates, to provide ‘guests a fair opportunity of isolation without loss of contact with the old estate’. At that time, Wohlert was busy with another restoration project on a manor house called Louisiana, that was aimed at becoming a new art museum, and so he brought in his most capable student, Mogens Prip-Buus, to make the drawings for the pavilion, largely working over nights and weekends. The design appeared deceptively simple – a floating, timberclad box that was closed to the north and open to the south – but not quite that simple, as the building could be shut up into a completely closed form and opened in stages by means of hinged doors and shutters. This building was conceived as a seasonal place that may hibernate throughout the cold Danish winters, and then partially opened in the spring to be finally awoken and thrown open during the warm summer months. Recalling this early project, Wohlert was to write that: ‘My work was still very much influenced by my time in California where my family and I had spent a couple of years. The houses by the Bay of San Francisco, shown to me by my colleagues at the School of Architecture at Berkeley, impressed me by their close association with the luxuriant nature around them that enhanced them and made them significant. The drawings for the simple house, which is elevated slightly above the green sward, describes the process from the initial idea of opening and closing the house with the help of shutters. During the summer the top-hinged shutters are bolted to a horizontal plank thus serving as sunshades. The black-stained house opens its white-painted interior to the sun and to the wood with the lovely smell of pine.’ This mysterious closed box, some fifteen by four metres in plan (fifty by thirteen feet), is sandwiched between the two floating horizontal planes of timber deck and a projecting frame, or outrigger, to the front – the roof itself provides a further plane lifted off the box by a clerestory. The pavilion brings Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House completed some seven years earlier immediately to mind, but Wohlert and Prip-Buus insist that this is merely a chimera: Danish architecture they explain, is a ‘different way of thinking’. So it is the Bay Area architecture and its link across the Pacific to Japan, that is perhaps of relevance. In many ways, the pavilion is better seen as a piece of furniture, a beautifully crafted cabinet – and the module for the construction is in fact the width of the timber cladding boards – a module of exactly two hundred and eight millimetres (eight inches). Fifteen boards to each bay creates rooms three metres, twelve (twelve feet), multiplied by five rooms; twenty boards front to
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back make a depth of four metres, sixteen (seventeen feet) – and this dimensional logic ensures that every door and shutter fits within the whole without a single cut board. The boards are rough sawn; they have bitumen between the joints and are treated with a black tar preservative. The pavilion rests on three, twenty-five centimetre (ten inch) wide concrete foundation beams running the length of the building and set into the ground to form tramlines that sit some thirty centimetres (one foot) proud of the earth; the outer beams are set well within the perimeter. Timber floor joists cantilever half their span beyond the concrete tramlines and are tapered to a narrower profile at their ends increasing the sense that the building floats. Wohlert asserts in a typically understated way that the idea was simply to save money by making minimal foundations to avoid the need for waterproof details at the junction with the ground.
The sawn external woodwork was to be stained black. The planed wooden cladding inside was to be painted white. I couldn’t decide on the precise spot for the transition, and so I asked Vilhelm for help. He was also unable to find the point with certainty and said that we had better ask Niels Bohr about it when we saw him at the end of the week. Niels Bohr looked briefly at the sketch, took a pencil, placed it on the paper and said, “Just here, of course.” Vilhelm and I glanced at each other and smiled.
Mogens Prip-Buus, 1957
The building is set on a datum of two metres, eight (six feet ten) – the height of the top-hung shutters – with the underside of the roof a half a metre above that, creating a zone for the clerestory glazing that allows light into the rooms even when the building is closed. In plan, the rooms are paired and each pair is arranged symmetrically with a side-hung shutter and glazed inner door and a square, top-hung shutter to the front. A storage unit with basins within one of the pairs of rooms restricts the room to a single bed arrangement. The side-hung shutters provide a modest screen between one pair of rooms and the next onto the timber deck, as well as allowing sufficient daylight into the room when the shutters remain closed. In summer, the large shutters are manhandled up into the horizontal and bolted to the underside of the outrigger frame providing shade and shelter from the occasional shower. The glazed doors swing inwards to lie against the inner walls so that the connection between inside and outside is completely unimpeded.
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Once opened, the closed black box is exploded, like an oyster shell revealing a refined, smooth and white interior that contrasts with the rougher, dark carapace. This revelation increases the sense of the pavilion being a large cabinet, a jewel-box in the garden. The smooth boarded, white-painted interior stops at the datum height with a flush surface above to the ceiling, also painted white, but decorated with a frieze formed by coloured motifs based on a Japanese pine, as Wohlert explains: ‘When Professor Edvard Thomsen in the Twenties arranged the old estate, he also used a wonderful French tapestry. In order to maintain the same atmosphere in the pavilion, I used Aagaard Andersen’s tapestry in lithograph. With a strong desire to emphasise the sub-division of the partition walls in level, I needed five colours corresponding with each room in the new house, for which reason, I had to print by means of lino-cut engravings, having meticulously studied a Japanese pine-twig (parasolgran). These tapestry friezes are the only elements of colour in the white painted rooms.’ The pavilion stands as one of the first built examples of the new Scandinavian Modern style, with its reliance on modest materials and a modular construction that is heavily inspired by traditional Japanese architecture. This Physicist’s cabinet, crafted and refined in his garden, is perhaps apt testimony to the genius of Niels Bohr who after all, was the man to unlock the secrets of small things.
Louisiana – A Pavilion in the Park
Knud W. Jensen was an art lover and the heir of a cheese exporting business and had become well established in Copenhagen as both a business and civic leader, taking his father’s dairy business through a rapid expansion as Denmark had emerged from the war relatively intact, to become something of a farm serving post-war Europe. As early as 1946, Jensen had travelled to America and established business contacts with the giant dairy corporations of Kraft and Swift. At the same time, he nurtured his literary interests and became part of Copenhagen’s bohemian com munity of writers, poets and painters, establishing with a friend, Ole Wivel, a small publishing house for contemporary literature. In 1948, he helped finance the launching of ‘Heretica’, which was to become Denmark’s foremost literary magazine, and then in 1952 he acquired Gyldendal, the distinguished publishing house founded in 1770. Jensen wrote ‘I very much enjoyed the business. I loved the morning drives out to the country, the conversations with the farmers, the stimulation of commerce… But I was living a sort of double life. I loved being with the writers, even though I was no writer myself.’ With his acquisition of Gyldendal and the completion of a large cheese factory and warehouse, by the early fifties he found himself forging an association with forty Copenhagen companies to carry out a programme he named ‘Art in the Workplace’ – an attempt to involve the working man with works of art by pooling resources to buy from young Danish artists that then went into worker’s canteens and rest areas in a series of travelling shows. Meanwhile, the Danish Museum of Fine Art had lost its longstanding director and it was a matter of public debate about its future direction: Jensen was invited to discuss this on a radio show and in preparation, he revisited the Royal Museum. He was horrified by what he saw: ‘It was a true horror cabinet, very much the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie’s exaggerated view of its own importance, manifested in the transcendent value of the art it prized.’ During the radio interview, Jensen criticised the museum, saying that it was a relic with nothing to do with the art of the day. Pushed by the journalist to say what he proposed, he suggested that ‘they ought to move out into the museum’s large park, get a good architect, build a low pavilion, with not too high ceilings and good lighting, and move all the modern stuff out there.’ The idea began to possess Jensen. He thought about such a museum outside the city, as Copenhagen already had twenty museums, but people seldom visited these during the working week while at weekends, most did everything they could to get out of town. He had recently moved to the outskirts of Humlebæk, a small town on the coast north of the city. In his autobiography, Jensen recalls how: ‘One afternoon in 1955, my dog and I were taking a stroll about a mile up the coast, when we came upon an old, deserted estate. The entrance was boarded up, the villa itself was fairly run down, and the grounds had become fantastically overgrown. My dog and I jumped the fence and began exploring. It was like a poetical, enchanted wilderness. I lost my heart at once.’ He had found Louisiana. The estate had been founded in 1855 by the Master of the Royal Hunt, a certain Alexander Brun who had married three times, each time to a woman by the name of Louise, and had named the manor house in their honour. Its most recent owner
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We spent two wonderful weeks in the autumn of 1956 when, lodged in the old Louisianas building and in close co-operation with the builder we made the sketches of the present building. Every day we could look at the terrain, the woods and enjoy the view over the Sound, and we were surrounded by the works of art for which we were going to create the setting. There were two essential problems to deal with, namely – How to combine the old house with a new building in a natural way, and how was the new building to be placed so that the exceptional qualities of the park were turned to account without having to divide it in an unfavourable way. We chose to use the old building as a pavilion through which to enter the new one, and in this way it has got a natural function.
Bo and Wohlert, 1958
While working on sketches in the old main building, we discussed the lighting. Knud W. Jensen asked for a nail and a hammer, took a painting and led us out into the park, where he hung the painting on the trunk of one of the larger trees, its foliage forming a dome, and said, “This is the kind of light I want. This is how the painting must be seen.�
Mogens Prip-Buus, 1958
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Realizing that the collection is a live organism the building, as a whole, has been designed with a view to the fact that all rooms are to hold all sorts of works of art (painting, the graphic arts, sculpture and applied art) and, furthermore, that they shall be able to form the setting of works of art from various epochs. Great importance was attached to creating rooms of varying character. One walks through a rhythm of open and closed shapes of rooms. One has endeavoured to avoid the institutional stamp of museum and dogmatics. 53
Bo and Wohlert, 1958
a raised plinth: flanked by laminated timber beams, it draws the eye and pierces the ceiling. Beyond a low, painted and finely shuttered concrete wall, the space drops away to form a large double-height volume that culminates in a fully glazed wall that draws the viewer out into the pale green waters of the treefringed lake outside. Like the corridors, the glass wall is based on a one metre, forty (four feet) module with slender hardwood mullions attenuating the view into a vertical rhythm that counterpoints the horizontal emphasis of the building, but in this unexpectedly tall room the window slices the lake into seven tall segments that perfectly complement the collection of gangly Alberto Giacometti sculptures that came along a few years later. Descent is by means of a flight of cantilevered, grey marble-faced concrete treads that are set behind a delicate veil of timber slats, that are in turn set into delicate metal shoes onto the floor. Now known as the ‘Giacometti room’, this space provides a rare and perfect harmony between art, architecture and nature with the elongated sculptures, the earthy simplicity of brick and timber framing the backdrop of lake, trees and sky.
Villa Henny, Huis ter Heide, 1916. Robert van’t Hoff
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The ‘sixties saw Wohlert build one more house, this time in Sweden and with another slight change of emphasis that was to form the basis for his last two house designs that would have to wait until 1983. The ‘Jerkers House’ in the town of Bjärred, Sweden was completed in 1967. The client was a furniture salesman and agent who Wohlert recalls, ‘thought that the project should be considered a gift. I never got my salary and was too busy to go to court’. Looking at the north façade of this house towards the entrance, there is an immediate correspondence with the Malmmose House, with a long masonry wall and a glazed upper storey at one end – but here the white-painted brick was abandoned in favour of a dark purple-red facing brick. The house overlooks the Øresund enjoying the view across towards Denmark and is defined by two L-shaped brick walls. The first runs north-south from the entrance and returns across the sea façade, the second east-west at right angles to the first, with its back to the entrance but instead of being right-angled, it is hooked at an angle of forty-five degrees. A large house, the somewhat complex plan is essentially a single-storey wing nestling behind the north-south wall, containing service rooms, with a parallel bank of two-storey accommodation that provides living spaces at ground floor
3 Jerkers House, Bjärred, 1967 8
Courtyard House (project), 1938. Mies van der Rohe
The church appears as a giant portal formed in red brick piers, with a deep concrete beam framing a blank, convex wall and an open access way into the site. Here, the brickwork is even closer to the Lewerentz paradigm, with its flush mortar joints, while the cast concrete lintels and copings echo the language of Louis Kahn that exerted a strong influence on Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, a former assistant of Wohlert who had several new churches under way at that time. In plan, the church is a rectangular space with a semi-circular apse that rises up to allow light in between it and the nave. These spaces are attached to a linear block that runs along the eastern boundary and contains meeting rooms and a priest’s house. Inside, there is no delicate timber inner lining as seen at Stengürd, only brick and concrete, with the
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semi-circular apse built as a giant relief of stagger-bonded, projecting header bricks – a familiar theme from earlier houses and the ‘Mogens wall’ at Louisiana. Once off the street and through the portico, a large, slightly sunken courtyard space forms the nucleus for church, priest’s residence and the Hoffmanns Minde nursing home – the church faces this space as two concrete framed glazed portals, one in front of the other and set behind a third in the form of a large table-like canopy. This church, turned quietly away from the street and built in such natural materials and without a bell tower, is an understated architecture that relies on its use of a single material and form for its power as a sacred place. 177
Hoffmanns Minde Nursing Home, Brønshøj, 1972
Workshop school, Monastir, Tunisia, 1967 8
The brick and concrete architecture of the churches offers a different aspect of Wohlert’s work that had been founded on the extension of the craft of the cabinetmaker to find a language of brick and timber, into a series of buildings that explored the horizon; with weightier materials, the architecture became static, orientated vertically from earth to sky. This sense of place-making is evident again in a Workshop School for cabinetmakers in Monastir, Tunisia that was built in 1967. Working again with Bo, this project was their first commission outside Denmark and was part of the Danish government’s programme to assist developing countries. The starting point was the traditional buildings of the region – Wohlert had toured the area just after the war and made sketches of the Great Mosque in Kairouan, with its castlelike walled enclosure riven by deep slits. He translated this into
a white, cubic design for the large workshop building, expressed as seven blank-walled bays that rise up to collect light from above. The workshop building sits to the south of a linear plan with a walled courtyard house to the north for the Director of the centre, linked by a long freestanding loggia formed by an elevated concrete slab, balanced on central ‘T’ shaped supports. Between the two buildings lies a large courtyard, framed to the front by an entrance and exhibition block, to the sides by dormitories for fifty joinery apprentices, and to the end by a dining hall and activity space. The courtyard is enclosed by the same Tshaped loggia structure and contains four circular, raised water basins together with trees providing shade from the sun. This architecture of place and masonry was revisited fifteen years later, this time working with Hans Munk Hansen, in a second Workshop School in the town of Sonelec, Algeria.
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Technical Training Instutute, Ksar el Boukhari, Algeria, 1982