Churches would probably not be the first buildings you would visit in Denmark. The country is not as wellknown for its churches as say Germany or France are, with their gothic churches or the Netherlands with their neogothic churches. There are probably few people who have even visited a church in Denmark. Most Danish churches are part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church community, the Danish church of state with its Queen as its head. It reminds you of the Church of England, which is the same, though headed by a king not a queen. As is occurring all over Europe, less and less people are members of a church, but in Copenhagen even today more than half of the population attend this so-called ‘Folkekirche’.
We visited two churches in Copenhagen; they are not too far apart. They are not the most well known churches with special spires in the city center, but two 20th century churches on the north side of town. They are both designed by Danish architects. Most people wouldn’t think they know any famous Danish architects. Yet, one of the most famous architects is Danish, Jørn Utzon, who designed the renown Sydney Opera House. There are more recent examples of well-known Danish architects, but they are usually better known amongst their professional peers. Jan Gehl, for example, is known as an urban designer and architect with great attention to the human scale in design. Also, a ‘new architect in town’ is Bjarke Ingels of the firm BIG, who works all over the world, as they show in their website. He was recently knighted. For Jørn Utzon, it eventually was an inconvenience to only be known as the architect of an iconic building. This is especially so because he actually gave back the commission of the Sydney Opera House to the Australian Government during its construction in 1966. A new political era had produced other demands for this building and the Government of the day even withheld payments from Utzon. He, on the other side, would not let go of his design principles. Considering the size of the project, Utzon’s wages and the fact that the whole world was looking, this was quite a brave thing to do.
Utzon won an open contest for the design of the Sydney Opera House (over 200 entries were received) in 1955, with a design incorporating sails. It was thanks to jury member Eero Saarinen that Utzon won the contest. The commonly told story is that Saarinen arrived in Australia after the first jury meeting, and on reviewing the entries that earlier been rejected, he found Utzon’s drawings and was ultimately influential in the decision for Utzon’s design to win the competition. The story goes that Utzon had the ‘audacity’ to choose a slightly different location on the Bennelong Point because he knew that it would suit his design much better. He had never been to Australia but recognized the landscape of his own country with capes and fjords in a site on the coast. Eventually, the Sydney Opera House was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1973. Utzon didn’t take part in that ceremony and after leaving the project never set foot in Australia again. However, Utzon did admit to being the leading architectural advisor during the major renovation of the Sydney Opera House (2016-2022), but he let his son do the work. A few of the adjustments made after Utzon left during the original project, were removed, and the acoustics were improved. Utzon has never seen the building in use, which is quite an odd thought for a building so iconic and famous.
I (Erna) at the age of 10, visited the Sydney Opera House just before my family was leaving Australia to return to the Netherlands after a four-year residency. I was so impressed by it. From afar it looked as if I could hold the balancing sails or shells in my hand. Once I was closer I climbed up a field of stairs to experience the majestic building. I was pulled towards the façade because I had to know how the shine – as if it were eggshells – had been made and I was flabbergasted to see that it had been made with tiles. Later I learned that more than a million tiles were used and that they were imported from Sweden. There is a tendency to consider an architect who doesn’t finish a commission as not fully-fledged. Utzon might have fallen out of sight by many, but he has built quite a number of buildings in Denmark, Mallorca and Kuwait. One such building in Copenhagen has really moved us.
If you enter Copenhagen from the north, you enter the quarter Bagsværd. Whilst this is not a particularly special part of the city, you can find quite a special here, designed by Utzon. The parish board had seen his work at exhibitions and thought he seemed the best choice of architect for their new church.
The site could be described as the inverse of the site of the Sydney Opera House, which was an open coastline and a historical precinct. Here, bordered by the very busy road Bagsværd Hovedgade, with no other special buildings in the area, it was quite a challenge to realise a special church building on this site. We expect that quite a lot of people would pass the building, not realising that it is a church. It looks like an industrial building, a bit like a silo and quite closed. Standing in the street you see a building 80m long without windows made of white and grey façade elements. The building has several different heights but that doesn’t help you understand what you are looking at on the outside, what is in it and what function it could possibly have. The only thing that is inconsistent with being an industrial building are the direct surroundings: white birch trees in a green bed of grass.
There is an opening underneath the west side of the façade that is covered with tiles. It takes you through a gallery to a door entering a courtyard, but that door was closed during our visit. If you walk around the building, you realise that the main door is on the southside (Taxvej). There you enter the courtyard to find a chapel and still don’t immediately locate the main door. It reminded us of convents because of the indirect way that you are led to the inner spaces. The main door to the church is also closed.
The southern façade is quite different than the one on the busy road. Here you will find a series of building elements that look like houses (two storeys high with a glass roof) with tiled walls and openings which are one storey high. None of the openings give you a direct view to a door; the entrance is always around the corner. Once you actually enter the building, you find yourself in a gallery with daylight from above. It appears to be part of a structure of indoor streets with roof lights, two storeys high, on the edges of the building and in between several rooms. The roof lighting with daylight gives a pleasant amount of light and helps you to find your way. The gallery is made of concrete portals, two storeys high with white concrete walls. The doors are not sunken in the wall but seem to be glued on the outside and are made of light coloured wood. We walk in a gallery from the southside to the northside and turn the corner at the end. The gallery structure ends quite naturally in what you might call the aisle of the church and is divided from the nave by concrete columns.
You then find yourself under a cloudy sky made of concrete. What a sensation. Utzon, after leaving Australia, lived in Hawaii for a while where he was a teacher at the School of Architecture at the University of Hawaii. His son Jan Utzon did all the management work from Denmark during the design and the building of the church. Utzon found his inspiration for this Danish church whilst in Hawaii. The waves in the Pacific are quite well known being up to 8m high and 3km wide; they always come from the same direction and are always there, day and night. This is quite different from Denmark where the wind comes from all directions and waves tend to have different kinds of shapes. The clouds, too, appear to be the same every day on Hawaii; big cotton balls floating against a blue sky. Lying on his back on the beach, Utzon found the concept for the church in Bagsværd, where the clouds represent the sky and the sunrays fall between them. The central space in the church differs from traditional churches being wider than it is deep. The effect is even more profound because of the ‘clouded’ ceiling with indirect daylight. The space is 17m wide, has no columns, and the concrete shell roof parts go from wall to wall and are 12cm thick. Utzon used to call this ‘a modern Gothic arch’.
You immediately find yourself sitting on one of the light-coloured wooden church benches to experience the space. You don’t want to stop looking up and around, and at the same time experience a great calmness, with the only daylight coming from the ceiling and not through windows in the walls. The is no distraction from outside.
The altar, baptismal font, pulpit, and bench at the alter so one can kneel down are all part of the design and are made of concrete, like a total work of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk as it is called. Open triangular concrete stones are used to divide the main church space from the separate prayer room, so that sufficient daylight comes into this room indirectly as well. There are balconies above the aisles on the first floor that can be reached by the staircase in the aisle. Only a couple of seats are situated here. There is a larger balcony with space for a choir above the altar, directly beneath the ‘clouded’ ceiling.
The interior is grey and white. The only other interior colours are in the fabrics on the altar and on the floor in the aisle. These are designed by Lin Utzon, Jørn’s daughter. The organ, furniture and the doors, even the piano, are all made of pale pine. Where the concrete needs a friendly end for the use of hands, like the edges of the balconies and the pulpit, curved tiles are used. These are white in the main hall, and blue in the staircase. The main hall puts your mind at ease even though there is so much to look at. Again we feel like being in a convent…separated from the world, not having a clue about what is happening outside. Here you can come to experience peace, no matter which religion is your own.
There are many other rooms necessary for the work of the parish in the 80m long building. The patio feels like it mirrors the main hall, connecting small rooms on each side. All rooms can be entered by the patio and by the gallery. The entrances to these rooms are shaped like small houses. Studying the plan, we notice that only the toilets have one door, all other rooms have at least two doors, one of which is always external. It is hard to leave this building. You want to slow down so that you can understand it all.
On our way to the center of Copenhagen we visit another church: the in the quarter Bispebjerg. You just can’t miss this building with its 49m high belltower. If we are to believe Wikipedia, this church holds 1800 in total, the largest capacity in Denmark. The church is part of what we architects and urban planners call an ‘ensemble’. In the urban plan the church is situated almost in the middle of a neighbourhood, having a green park on one side. The church is surrounded by houses built in the same material and colour as the church, blended yellow-grey bricks. The importance of the church is expressed by its position on a crossing of axes: one axis from the graveyard on the western side and an axis to the north, the Jeppes Allé. The road to the graveyard runs between two blocks of houses, with a higher building on both ends. There the houses are three storeys high. If you stand in front of the gap between these blocks, the church seems even taller. The church is built on the top of the mountain (bjerg); stairs take you down to the streets which connect to the front doors of the houses. Such an ‘ensemble’ is something we recognise in the Dutch building tradition built in the same period: beginning of the 20th century. Projects such as Berlage’s plan for Amsterdam-Zuid and the many projects in the so called Amsterdam School style of architecture. ‘Ensembles’ like these are less known in Denmark.
Peder Jensen-Klint is the architect who won the contest for this area in 1913. The first stone was laid on 8 September 1921, 138 years after the birth of the man after whom the church was named: the Danish priest, poet and historian N.F.S. Grundtvig. The belltower was completed in 1927 and the space beneath the tower was used for church services until the whole building was finished in 1940. The architect died in 1930 but his son Kaare Klint made sure that the building was completed. The belltower is impressive, and you are pulled towards it like a magnet. It is an abstract tower like an arrow shooting straight to heaven with a stepped gable ending.
The holes in the façade in front of the church bells are vertical, which emphasises the shape of the tower. There are those who compare the way the top of the tower looks with the front of an organ. The architectural style is called brick expressionism, like the Amsterdam School style, but with fewer details. The tower is symmetrical with round towers on both sides for the staircases. Reliefs resembling the Danish Gothic style are made by using holes and niches in the yellow-grey brick walls. You can also find these as the top of the facades of the chapels, on both sides of three of them. The entrance is designed as a triangle with three arches in which the small and relatively low doors can be found. The brick frames of the doors become just as small as the door. These frames on the side doors are not symmetrical but placed in such a way that the further you go, the less you see these doors, leading you to the centre one. However the design of the total is still symmetrical.
The church is quite impressive on the outside, so we are very curious about what we will experience inside. The entrance hall is quite small and low, only slightly higher than the entrance doors with their frames. The niches around the doors are the opposite shape of the frames outside and so is the main entrance to the central nave. You then find yourself standing in the three-naved church, which is quite impressive. You imagine being in a medieval Gothic church because of the long nave (a total of 76m), the impressive height and the cross vault. If the building was made to give you the sense of feeling very small, it has succeeded. Walking to the altar we are overwhelmed by an uncomfortable feeling. Where are we walking to, what am I experiencing on the way? The odd thing is you are not distracted by anything. Everything – floor, walls and ceiling – are all made of the same material, in the same colour. The windows are not coloured and the light is the same in the entire building. There are minimal details to distract you, as if nothing is to take your mind of this vertical splendour.
If you take a closer look you can see a difference in the use of the bricks on the bottom of the wall (they are used standing straight up instead of lying down with the wider part at the front). However that is one of only a couple of distracting details. The walls on the ground floor are closed with shallow niches; it is only at the chancel that the niches are opened. The altar is made of the same grey-yellow bricks. Only the baptismal font is different, being made of limestone from Fakse. The crypt is more comfortable being smaller and lower.
We leave the church slightly disappointed. We have the feeling that the promise of the outside wasn’t kept on the inside. We have such beautiful examples of churches in the Amsterdam School style in the Netherlands where both the exterior and interior are made of the same material. These are much more subtle in detail and coloured glass is commonly used. They are alive and sparkling. Also, the Calvinistic churches – where no statues are allowed – give you much more to look at.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church does not allow statues in their buildings either. Whilst there were no statues in the Bagsværd Church, that church gave us a completely different feeling. It was far from boring or scaring; it felt like a warm coat. The colours were cool but reminded you of sunlight on ice crystals. You were allowed to be somebody in the Bagsværd Church, to become part of the church without being swallowed by it. We stayed there for an hour and saw that others stayed there for quite a while as well. In contrast, nobody sat on a chair in the Grundtvigs Church. You walked from the entrance to the chancel and back, and that was it.
We noticed a book over the Grundtvigs Church lying in the entrance of the church, written by Thomas Viggo Pedersen in 2020. It could prove us wrong. It is only available in Danish but we understand that it is a book based on research full of anecdotes and footnotes. It is about the realization, the financing, and the construction of this building that is called one of the highlights of Danish mastership and architecture. We can’t imagine how you can need 800 pages for this building.
2022
