Some thirty years ago, a leading Danish architect praised his country's architecture for being neither pretentious nor flamboyant. Danes, said Kay Fisker, "strive for an architecture that serves people, which conforms to nature." Danish architecture was then basically discreet, unintrusive. Danish architects sought to project a kind of anonymity, as it were, in their designs.
There was in those years in Denmark a tradition about shared values and ideals, what was aesthetic, what mattered. The country had but one School of Architecture - and also a single school of thought as to what Danish architecture should look like. This gave Denmark a singularly homogenous look in its contemporary dwellings and buildings, if very little variety in style. Overall quality was high. The majority of Danes lived and worked in solidly built, solidly designed structures surrounded by well-made, well-designed objects and utensils. Influences from other countries were felt, but they were always adapted to suit Danish tastes. An occasional fancy was permitted, but only one guaranteed not to perturb the harmonious whole. There were few exceptions to the rule. If the accepted values and ideals in the world of Danish architecture excluded any real "lows," so too did they restrict the possibility of any "highs." Danish architecture in the 1950s could not boast of many masterpieces or any really exhilarating buildings. Architects of genuine imaginations like Jrn Utzon were forced to go abroad. Utzon designed the remarkable Sidney Opera House in Australia. Most Danish architects, however, chose to remain at home and preferred being ensured regular work by producing conventional, acceptable buildings.
Broken Pattern
The pattern was abruptly broken when a combination of affluence and accelerated building in the 1960s and 1970s brought in high-rise concrete apartment blocks, a mass of low-cost, pre-fabricated one-family houses of mediocre design, and large impersonal shopping centers. All of this constituted a massive attack on the traditional values of Danish architecture.
Reaction, however, to these aberrations was rapid and effective. Architecture in Denmark today reflects a rebirth of the old values. And as well, Danish architects are showing the liveliest of interest in new ideas and a much greater variety in their work than before.
Morally and aesthetically, Danish architects are freeing themselves from the severity, not to say rigidity of earlier modernism, and displaying a singular spirit of inquiry along with a greater freedom of expression. Liberated from the restraints of simplicity, the aesthetic of "clean lines," and the narrowness of perception about the recent past, Danish architects today are concerning themselves with such matters as working on a smaller scale and finding a means of expressing the vernacular, the historical, the decorative, and the popular in their work. The results are exciting.
Virtually all of neo-Primitivism together with Brutalist concrete work form the 1960s and 1970s has vanished from Danish architectural projects in the 1980s. There is little Postmodernism in historical elements, nor are there many expressions of either the New Classicism or the New Rationalism that are apparent in contemporary architecture of other cultures, such as the United States. There is, however, I believe, a form of Modernism
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