How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark Read online

  “We had to ensure this change from an old industrial city, with a lot of brown-field sites,” says Skovbro, “to an efficient, knowledge-based city with new housing development and a sustainable infrastructure.”

  The beginnings of a subway system were set in motion. New neighbourhoods to the north and south of the city were planned – and they’re now reaching completion. Further investment was put into cycling lanes, and more green spaces were created. Flats were knocked together to create bigger living spaces, and three new architectural jewels were built at strategic intervals along the waterfront – a new opera house, a national library and a theatre. And to pay for all this, the city sold off large tracts of land to the south of the city at Ørestad, in a Faustian pact that has seen the emergence of a very un-Danish, neo-Ballardian development on the city’s southern fringes. But more on that later.

  The urban revival came hand in hand with a cultural one. Most obviously, there were the Dogme film-makers – Lars von Trier and Thomas Winterberg are the most successful – and then there were the art dealers. Copenhagen’s National Gallery and Humlebaek’s Louisiana Gallery had long housed impressive collections, but there were very few commercial galleries. In the late 80s, Mikael Andersen was one of the first Copenhageners to establish one.

  “It was difficult. Copenhagen was very provincial 25 years ago,” he remembers. “We didn’t have a gallery system. At the time, artists would show their work at an institution every year, as a group. We live in a very social democratic society, and people were suspicious of commercial art. They thought commercial galleries were just trying to get money out of artists.”

  And when he opened his space in Bredgade, only a mile from Strøget, people scoffed at him for straying so far – as they saw it – from the centre. But Andersen had the last laugh. There are now ten galleries within 100 metres of his, and at the private view I attend, there are collectors from all over the world. These days, though, the trendiest galleries are on the other side of town, not far from the former red- light district in Vesterbro. What’s happened here mirrors what’s happened in Copenhagen over the past two decades: Vesterbro has been transformed from a gritty, working-class neighbourhood into the place where all the cool crowd hang out. The centre of this transition has been the old meatpacking district, which still functions as such today, but now also houses an array of bars, galleries, cafes and clubs. If you turn up there at four in the morning, you’ll see clubbers tottering home to sleep, and butchers rolling up their shutters to start the working day. It’s a meat market in more ways than one.

  I’m A Kombo, the pop-up chefs in Chapter two, have their kitchen there. A few metres away, there’s the Karriere bar, founded by the artist Jeppe Hein – whose work was shown at the Hayward Gallery in 2012 – and his sister Laerke. Once one of the hottest joints in town, it’s crammed with furniture designed by Hein’s artist friends – Carsten Holler, Dan Graham and Olafur Eliasson among them. Hein built the bar itself, which drifts very slowly sideways as the night goes on. If you don’t keep an eye out, your drink will end up half a metre north of where you left it.

  Coming to a place like Karriere, you realise how Copenhagen could have become so hip, so quick: everyone knows each other, and many of them share a camaraderie that helps speed up change. Next door to the bar is the V1 Gallery, run by the Heins’ friend Jesper Elg. Tonight, Elg’s holding a party for a new show. If he’s in town, the architect Bjarke Ingels will probably be there. As the night wears on, Trentemøller, the DJ whose work can be heard in the latest Almodóvar film, will spin a few tracks. When Trentemøller goes on tour, he’ll be joined on the drums by the fashion designer Henrik Vibskov, who – wait for it – knows Elg from their art school days in London in the late 90s. To round off the set, there’s Thomas Fleurquin, busily finalising preparations for this year’s Distortion festival, a week that’ll see 130,000 ravers engage in activities that – in a blog titled “Distortion and the Decline of Civilisation” – the right-wing broadsheet Jyllands-Posten will later label: “infernal noise, senseless drinking, vomit, piss, fornication, and – above all – destruction.”

  A mural by Kissmama in Vesterbro

  It’s an article that neatly encapsulates Denmark’s contradictions. Denmark is at once a deeply conservative place and a very tolerant one. It spawned the Muhammed cartoons in 2006 – and yet in 1989 it was the first country to legalise same-sex partnerships. It’s a dichotomy further illustrated by two demonstrations that snaked past city hall on consecutive weeks in May. The first highlighted Denmark’s darker side – a protest at Denmark’s harsh treatment of asylum seekers. The second was a march in celebration of marijuana that followed a float of dreadlocked reggae singers all the way to Christiania, the military base turned semi-autonomous anarchist commune. Home to 850 Christianites, as well as several bars, shops and meditation rooms, Christiania has long housed an open drugs trade to which the authorities turn a blind eye. It’s a place of great symbolic importance to the hippies of Europe. If the government ever did seriously try to smash it, one local claims, every stoner on the continent would come to defend it.

  As the march dissipates outside the gates of Christiania, I take a look around. Lots of Copenhageners come here to relax by the lake, or find cheap food – but before long I find the thing that the place is most famous for: the Green Light District, a market filled with stalls that sell rocks of hash for a tenner. A shirtless man lies vomiting on the floor, and as I follow the puke I see its cause – a wheelbarrow full of weed that teenagers are gulping down with the help of a fat glass bong. Dizzy and bloodshot, they then slope to the floor – but only the topless chap is particularly worse for wear. At some point, someone somewhere calls for an ambulance, and after a few minutes the paramedics arrive. Mainstream Denmark has a strained relationship with the Christianites (a reporter who recently tried to film a drug deal was stripped naked and unceremoniously ejected) and so they won’t enter the Green Light District unless it’s absolutely necessary. As a result, there’s an awkward few moments while the medics linger on its perimeter, tentatively gauging whether their presence is really needed. It’s fraught – but it also somehow feels very cooperative, very Danish. The foot soldiers of the welfare state on the one side, the hippies on the other – and both of them trying to resolve the stand off through silent diplomacy.

  This delicate relationship between state and counter-culture hasn’t always been so carefully managed. In 2011, the site was temporarily closed to visitors after a disagreement between the Christianites and the government about its future. In December 2006, the biggest riots in Danish history broke out in Nørrebro after the authorities announced plans to evict another non-hierarchical community: the Ungdomshuset (or ‘Youth House’). Thousands of protesters set up burning barricades and threw fireworks at the police, who shot back – to much outrage – with tear gas. Nearly 300 rioters were arrested, but it wasn’t until the following March that the Youth House was finally evicted. Special Forces stormed the building with a military helicopter, and then coated it in foam to protect it from Molotov cocktails. It didn’t help. The barricades returned, rioting resumed, a school was ransacked and 690 people were arrested inside three days in what Le Monde Diplomatique called “a laboratory experience in police repression”.

  Copenhagen’s smallness is the secret to its creativity. But on the flipside, it has also forced Danes to look overseas for their inspiration. “Because this is a small country, we are focussed on what’s going on outside,” says Vibskov, sitting in his studio, hunched over a dust-coated MacBook Pro as interns rush to and fro carrying blocks of wood. They’re putting the finishing touches to an art installation that will shortly be transported to Mallorca. “If something is popular outside Denmark, music-wise, people accept it inside Denmark. And it’s such a small society that if one thing gets accepted, everyone does it.” It’s an attitude that can be constraining, he says. “If something is wild or crazy, it has to be accepted by others before it is accepte
d here. Some of the stuff I do is not particularly Scandinavian, maybe a little strange. But if I show it in Paris, people here go: ‘Ohhh, I see. It’s really good.’ The Raveonettes were a Danish band living in New York. And when they got picked up by Rolling Stone magazine as the best new band, suddenly everyone here went: ‘Oh yeah! Cool.’ ”

  But Elg thinks this international outlook has also had a positive effect: it’s given his generation wider horizons, and in doing so has made them much more ambitious than their forebears. They’ve thrown off the constraints of the Jante Law – a traditional Danish mindset that is critical of anyone who has ideas above their station – and instead they’ve tried to compete with what’s going on elsewhere in Europe. “It’s this experience of seeing things happening in other parts of the world and realising: ‘Okay, we can actually do this in Copenhagen.’ There’s this wish to change Copenhagen and make it more interesting for those of us who live here.”

  Danish self-confidence is improving, says Søren Sveistrup, the man who created The Killing. “Now, young people think they can conquer the world. It wasn’t like that 20 years ago.”

  No one represents this newfound swagger better than the architect Bjarke Ingels. In the space of just six years, the 38-year-old and his firm BIG (pronounced like the adjective) have become the most talked about young architects in the world. In New York, he’s building a pyramid-shaped skyscraper, while in Copenhagen he tried (unsuccessfully) to plonk a large ski-slope on top of a power station. He’s building a new museum in Mexico, a national library in Kazakhstan, a new city hall for the capital of Estonia, and at some point, Ingels has found the time to draw a comic book about his architectural ideals.

  He does all this with a brash confidence that can wind people up the wrong way. “He’s rude, he’s loud, and he builds skyscrapers,” one prominent London-based architecture critic tells me. “He’s breaking all the rules. It’s a case of killing the father.”

  Traditionally, the fathers of Danish architecture were obsessed by the context of their work – the role buildings play in their surroundings. They all read Jan Gehl at architecture school, and so they were brought up to make their buildings blend into their environment, and to create nicer public spaces. That’s why you didn’t see many tall buildings in Denmark till recently – they weren’t considered to work very well in context.

  In the past, Danish architects also exercised unusual control over a building’s internal ‘detailing’. When Arne Jacobsen built the Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, he also designed everything from the doorhandles to the cutlery.

  Bjarke Ingels' VM Building

  “Danes are totally nuts about detailing,” says Nille Juul-Sørensen, the head of the Danish Design Centre and the man who designed Copenhagen’s metro stations. “We have this idea that God will see everything, even when the lights are out, behind the wall.”

  Bjarke Ingels changed all that. In the late 90s, Ingels worked for Rem Koolhaas, an enormously influential Dutch architect who – in very simplistic terms – believes in concept rather than context; how buildings look, rather than how they fit into their surroundings. “The street is dead,” wrote Koolhaas in his 1995 book, S, M, L, XL. “Planning makes no difference whatsoever.”

  When Ingels returned to Denmark, he found that the Danish architecture scene was quite a closed shop. Big firms like CF Møller and Henning Larsen got much of the work, and it was very hard for newcomers to win contracts. Ingels and his generation realised that in order to attract business, they would have to do things differently. As a result, they followed two routes: they focussed on green, sustainable designs – and they drew significantly on the very un-Danish ideas of Koolhaas, creating buildings that are exciting in their own right, but don’t sit well together.

  “The first thing I read at architecture school was Life Between Buildings,” says Dorte Mandrup, another rising star whose offices sit directly below BIG’s. “But everyone was quite tired of it – this romantic, quite boring, not-so-flashy view of city life. So I think a lot of people were reacting against Jan Gehl and his sensible studies.”

  Ingels and his contemporaries are most famous for their work at Ørestad, the controversial new development far to the south of Copenhagen’s old town. It’s basically one five-kilometre-long highway, lined with humungous, eccentric, hypermodern offices and residential blocks. There’s a hotel built by 3XN that looks like a massive V-sign sprouting from the ground. Two kilometres down the road, there’s a giant blue box that doubles as the new home of Danish Broadcasting, and which cost so much that it sparked 300 redundancies. Further on is another futuristic cube, Ørestad High School – a sixth form without any classrooms.

  Ingels has built three things here. There are the Mountain Dwellings, a sloped development that resembles a hillside made from residential flats. Next door is the VM Building, a block of flats – each stabbed by a jaunty series of knife-like balconies – that sits upon a carpark. Finally, right at the far end of Ørestad, stands the 8 Building – another high-rise that looks like a gentle rollercoaster.

  You can see why they’re the talk of the architectural world. There’s no denying it – these are bold, fascinating sculptures. But that’s also their problem: they’re sculptures. They’re one-offs. They look good by themselves – in a photograph or on a Powerpoint presentation – but they don’t really relate to each other. In fact, they needle each other. Each feels like a stylish Porsche that someone’s parked awkwardly on a kerb, and then reversed into the Ferrari behind. Walking among them, I can’t work out what they look like, or where best to view them from. It’s a bit like swimming in the New York’s Hudson River. You can glimpse the Empire State Building, and you can just about see the Statue of Liberty. But you can’t get a good look at either, and all the while you’re gulping down water – or, in Ørestad’s case, car fumes. It’s like drowning in architecture.

  “People should definitely go out there and look at it when they come to Copenhagen,” says Thomas Dickson, the author of Dansk Design. “But if you’re thinking about it as a place to go to school or have an apartment, I don’t think it’s up to the best of Danish and Scandinavian traditions of how to build a neighbourhood.”

  It probably hasn’t helped that the whole area was financed by a series of different private developers. In order to pay for the construction of a new metro system, the local government sold off bits of Ørestad to different people, all of whom wanted a unique design, but weren’t so concerned about how that design related to its surroundings.

  “Private clients are usually more interested in building and selling as quickly as possible, because that’s where the profit is,” says Mandrup. “So it’s extremely market-orientated, and the market-orientated scene in architecture will always be very focussed on making it as visible as possible, and not necessarily so focussed on long-term urban life.”

  Ingels turned down a couple of requests for an interview. But judging from his previous statements, he would argue that Ørestad strikes exactly the right balance between concept and context.

  “Architecture seems to be entrenched in two equally unfertile fronts: either naively utopian or petrifyingly pragmatic,” Ingels writes in his comic, Yes is More. “We believe that there is a third way wedged in the no-man’s-land between the diametrical opposites… A pragmatic utopian architecture that takes on the creation of socially, economically and environmentally perfect places as a practical objective.”

  He has his fans, too. First off, 6000 people have their homes there, a figure that looks set to triple. I can’t imagine that it’s the most sociable place to live – there are few shops or places to hang out – but people seem to manage. Bigwig critics have also praised the buildings. For a start, says Nille Juul-Sørensen, they’re fun. “The detailing is not so good – but who cares?” he asks. “Look at the 8 Building, the VM Building. They involve you. You have to walk in funny ways to get to your flat. You can bike around, you can have your morning run inside your block. They didn�
�t revolutionise architecture, but they changed the whole paradigm for what architecture could be.”

  7. AFTER THE KILLING…

  “It was my ambition from the very start to do the world’s best show”

  – Søren Sveistrup

  A few kilometres north-west of Ørestad, back in the centre of Copenhagen, there’s a little coffee shop called Café Holberg. Most mornings at the café, the same big-eared man sits sipping his espresso, hunched in a hoodie in the corner. If he looks suspicious, he shouldn’t. He owns part of the shop. He’s also Søren Malling, one of the city’s most famous actors. In 2007, he played Jan Meyer, the cop who partners Sarah Lund in the first series of The Killing.

  If this was England, the celeb-spots would end there. But this being tiny Denmark, they don’t. From time to time, in walks a woman with a sharp brown bob. She lives on the same street as the café – but she’s no ordinary neighbour. This is Piv Bernth, the producer of The Killing, and now head of drama at DR (the Danish BBC), which also puts her in overall charge of Borgen. If you’re lucky, you might also see Sofie Gråbøl, the actor who plays Sarah Lund. She lives two streets away.

  It’s yet another example of the smallness of Copenhagen’s creative scene. But at the same time, it shows just how big Danish TV has become. Before The Killing, Søren Malling wasn’t particularly famous. Then he was cast as Meyer, the show went global, and a star was born. And with fame came fortune – and a stake in a coffee shop called Café Holberg.

  Like Danish architecture, art, food and fashion, Danish television is on a roll. The quality of kids’ TV is second to none – and then there are the crime thrillers. First came The Killing, in 2007 – which saw 40% (forty per cent!) of the Danish population sit down to watch Gråbøl and Malling every Sunday night. It wasn’t so much a cult hit as a state religion. One day, Gråbøl was approached by the relatives of a woman dying of cancer. The woman feared she’d die before the show revealed its central secret – who killed the schoolgirl mentioned at the beginning of this book. “So I wrote her a note and put it in an envelope,” Gråbøl told the Guardian. “She read it and tore it into little pieces so the nurse couldn’t find out who did it. The following day she died.”