Apartments, Copenhagen

Approaching this five-to-eight-storey waterside residential complex from the north via the harbour, you will see its shimmering white towers on the Havneholmen peninsula in line with the new theatre, also designed by Lundgaard & Tranberg. The two landmarks define this small but increasingly self-confident city. The architects have not opted for the strident architectural language that repeatedly calls for buildings to be clad in new fashionable disguises in the style of the 'Bilbao effect'. The fascination lies in the fact that contemporary solutions have been developed using the very quiet tones and simple materials of a refined modernism, which build formally and functionally on recent developments in architecture. And yet these attempts at continuity result in highly expressive and immediately convincing architectural solutions.

To date, attempts to resolve the problem of urban density have never led to spatially appealing and socially inspiring results. Neither Le Corbusier’s urban park landscape with its individual tower blocks and integrated shopping streets, nor the garden city movement brought into being by Ebenezer Howard over a hundred years ago could replace the charm of a real, dynamic and spontaneous city. Briefly put, the aim of both concepts was to find alternatives to urban planning, in the former by making use of free-floating residential 'ocean liners', and in the latter by means of allotment gardens. And the more recent phenomenon of the Gated Community model spawned by the USA's New Urbanism movement has proven to be equally anti-urban. It is therefore of vital importance to the discussion to incorporate historical types and ideas relating to city dwellings into a Häuserhaus – a 'house of houses'. The remarkable thing is that, since Le Corbusier, with several peaks of activity in the 1960s and '70s, almost everything essential has been thought, said and designed. But with the exception of a few very occasional, often long forgotten experiments, there is a lack of built examples. The Harbour Isle Apartments by Lundgaard & Tranberg are one such exception, and represent an important building block in this development process.

When building apartments in the city nowadays, it is important to tackle the question of how to reconcile the demand for individual living, with the attributes of the detached house, with the environmentally necessary densification of the city and its infrastructure. Lundgaard & Tranberg have successfully combined the white modernism of the 1920s with the individualism of the 21st century. The architects even based their design on traditional Danish housing models, in the form of the apartment blocks with sloping roofs constructed when the old city centre was redeveloped in the 1940s. But these apartments were built with small double-pitch roofs, which made them appear even smaller with their screened ribbon windows. Lundgaard & Tranberg have solved this problem with long-span mono-pitch roofs and a facade that fairly shimmers with variety. The architects repeatedly created new variations as part of an architectural melody, whose notes are formed entirely by windows and open spaces. Except for the delicate teak window frames, variations in materials and colours play no role in this design. It is hard to imagine a greater contrast with the highly conventional new apartments on the opposite bank, where only MVRDV's converted silo apartments eschew the variety of materials and colours that seem to be de rigueur in contemporary architecture.

Nearby historical reference points for the architectural language of the 236 Harbour Isle Apartments located on this former industrial site can be found in the Bellavista complex (1935) by Arne Jacobsen, as well as in the completely different material language seen in the Sea Ranch (1965) by Charles Moore. This comparison even extends to the double courtyard and long-span mono-pitch roofs. In Copenhagen, this urban planning concept gives rise to a wide variety of moods and situations – ranging from the dramatic waterside frontage with spectacular two-storey apartments at the very top, to the classic street front in the vicinity of a huge shopping mall, between which lie the calm oases of the garden courtyards lined with little canals. In those parts of the building that ascend the river bank, the apartments, built in pairs over stairways, with open living space, kitchens and dining areas, face south-west and north-east, with spacious, highly practical balconies on both sides. The various rooms are individually connected to the everyday living area. Sliding doors allow the flowing ground plan to extend into every last corner of the apartment. Access from the stairway makes it possible to enter the living area directly without having to pass through any intermediate space. Overall, each of these apartments, regardless of its dimensions, radiates the generosity of modern individual living. This is a place where you can quickly forget your detached house outside the city with all its traffic problems and lost time.