ARTS
Architecture
Henning Larsen
(RIBA Heinz Gallery, till 22 June)
A clear light from Denmark
Alan Powers
Travelling into the centre of Copen- hagen from Kastrup airport, you do not see a single ugly building. The strength of architectural culture in Denmark is well- known, and it is not just a superficial gloss of good taste, or a melting-pot removing the sharp edges of outside ideas. As archi- tectural exports in the 1960s Denmark pro- duced such extreme opposites as St Catherine's College, Oxford, by Arne Jacobsen, with its cool concept of design extending to knives and forks, an obsessive totality beyond anything achieved by British architects, and the expressionist and almost unbuildable Sydney Opera House by Jorn Utzorn.
Henning Larsen, whose work is now on exhibition at the Heinz Gallery in London (21 Portman Square, WI), is Denmark's chief architectural exporter today, winner of ..the competitions for Compton Verney Opera House and a graduate residential building for Churchill College, Cambridge. His international fame was established with the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Foreign Affairsdn-Riyadh (1979-84), one of the few buildings in the Arab states which is gener- ally considered to rise above the get-rich- quick opportunism of Western architects working in the region. The plan is a simple triangle of corridors, indirectly lit and cool, with generous public spaces, and an exteri- or which plays up to the idea of a grand government building without losing humanity.
In this and later buildings, Larsen reveals a debt to classicism which emerged in con• trast to his preoccupation in the 1960s with the open-ended planning of complex uni- versity sites. The architectural magazine Skala which he founded in 1985 has joined the reassessment of Nordic neo-classicism from the 1820s and the 1920s. Images from the work of the Swedish architect Erik Gunnar Asplund, who led the Scandinavian world from classicism to modernism in 1930, have been pin-ups of the post-mod- ernist age, joining the long-acknowledged works of the Finnish master Alvar Aalto. A steady trail of American students arrives at the distant Faaborg Museum in Denmark, a tiny, temple-like building of 1915 by Carl Petersen.
Henning Larsen has managed to develop from these sources without over- intellectualising them, and is by tempera- ment opposed to the game-playing of post- modernism, although he knows how to stage-manage his buildings. At the Copen- hagen College of Business Administration, Frederiksberg (1982-88), the long spinal corridor is offset at a four-degree angle from the central rotunda to make the inter- nal vista more interesting. The Churchill College design includes a walkway slicing through the main longitudinal block at 45 degrees, at first sight a deconstructionist trick, but here a practical way of entering the building. His school building at Hoje Taastrup, near Copenhagen (1978-82) springs a sur- prise in its internal courtyard with a deck- chair-like roof in blue and white stripes. At Compton Verney, intended as 'the Glynde- bourne of the Midlands', the triple-height glazed foyers give panoramic views of the lake and the Capability Brown landscape in contrast to the solid, semi-circular 'Colos- seum wall' of the auditorium. The effect of the stripped colonnades and square flytow- er is reminiscent of the famous sketches of Friedrich Gilly, the short-lived genius of German neo-classicism. It is the sort of ideal commission that architecture schools once set as a subject, before they were sup- posedly brought down to reality. Will Christopher Buxton, the enlightened insti- gator of the Compton Verney project, be able to realise this vision?
As Larsen has said, 'When daylight is a scarce resource, architecture can be enhanced by carefully sweeping the scarce daylight around forms and in space in beautiful ways'. His interiors look almost too white, but have variation and depth of light. The nearest British equivalent is the new Law Courts in Truro by Evans and Shalev, one of the buildings which Prince Charles and the modernist establishment have combined to praise.
The achievement of a consensus without dilution of quality is not an unworthy aim and Larsen's work shows how it can be done, although his world seems far removed from the British reality of decay- ing towns ringed by cheap and shoddy buildings, and none of his projects on view in the exhibition deals with a dense urban site. Regrettably, the ability of this exhibi- tion to communicate to a non-specialist public is limited by the brevity of the cap- tions and the lack of a catalogue.
Model of Henning Larsen's design for an opera house at Compton Verney
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