Architectural moves.

Copenhagen's architecture school has moved across the harbour from its ancient home in a palace to the former royal naval dockyards, and so has established an extension to the inner city.

Copenhagen has a curious shape. The harbour runs roughly from north to south, a thin piece of sea that divides the old centre of the city in the west from Christianshavn,(1) a fortified part of the neighbouring island of Amager. Founded by Christian IV in 1618 as a separate port, the area became immensely important after 1658, when Denmark lost Scania, Halland and Blekinge, 10 years after Christian IV died. Instead of being comfortably in the middle of a large empire, Copenhagen was on the eastern border of a truncated state with a hostile power to be seen just across the narrow Sound. It was obvious that the Swedes (or Russians) should not be allowed to get any closer to the city, and though the whole coastline of Amager could not be defended efficiently, Christianshavn could, and its defences were increasingly elaborated for at least two centuries while the place became formally part of the city and the headquarters of the Danish Navy.

So in effect the northern part of the inner city, which includes the royal palace of Amalienborg and much of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century parts, looked over the harbour to an area dead of normal urban life. It was a most unsatisfactory state of affairs, and as Jan Christiansen commented 'in recent times the Danish Navy's number one enemy has never been the threat from the east - nor the defiant neighbours in Christiania,(2) but on the contrary - the architects. This group of professionals who time and again have doggedly attacked the Navy's pride and permanent bastion, the Holmen(3) dock area'.(4)

The Navy beat the retreat from its beloved docks in 1991, leaving a huge area of what is in effect inner city thirsty for new uses. The buildings left behind were eminently practical big spaces created with great economy of means and elegance of execution. Plainly, they had to be preserved and given new functions. The main one chosen has been institutions for higher learning in the arts, ranging from the state academy for drama to the 'Rytmisk Musikkonservatorium'.

The architecture school has been the first one to move to Holmen. It has unhappily been severed from its sister visual arts in the Charlottenborg Palace, a splendid seventeenth-century grand hotel particulier built for Frederik III's son, the governor of Norway, on Kongens Nytorv(5) which since the middle of the following century has housed the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. As one of the two schools of architecture in Denmark, the architecture department was evidently outgrowing its shell, and it was quite impossible to alter the fine building, so the school had to move.

Its new location on Holmen is less than a kilometre away across the harbour, though if you go by road it seems much further, almost a different city.(6) The Vilhelm Lauritzen office was asked to convert the naval buildings to an architecture school and they have done so with much grace, altering the splendid utilitarian buildings as little as possible. Philip de Lange's austere eighteenth-century northern warehouse, 150 metres long, defines the northern edge of the school in excellently built massive brick walls under a sensuous shiny black roof. This very long and dignified building was echoed to the south a hundred years later in a somewhat similar building by Ferdinand Meldahl for the Navy's blacksmith's shop, a set of huge spaces linked enfilade and illuminated by great wrought iron windows. Between the two are rather more obviously utilitarian buildings from the last part of the nineteenth century and the first decades of this one, by no means bad in themselves, but nowhere near as distinguished.

Lauritzen's seized the wonderful site with relish and respect. They were required to reflect the buildings' previous uses in their conversions, and their touch has been very light. The de Lange building, with its comparatively small spaces, was easy to turn into an enfilade set of congenial studios, in which students have well-lit boards set side by side in pairs. The great structural timbers are exposed (painted white like the walls - was this wise?) and the pine floors are scrubbed with lye.

The Meldahl building has been converted into the main auditorium, the gallery and lesser lecture theatres. There are apparently problems with the acoustics in the big space, but surely these can be overcome by putting in more absorption, either on the wall surfaces or by hanging soft and woolly things from the roof: the problem should not be impossible to conquer in an architectural school as lively as this one.(7)

Lauritzen's key obvious contribution to the complex has been to rip up the utilitarian Navy asphalt and replace it with slightly raised lawns, cobbled footways and lime-tree alleys (landscape architect was Jeppe Aagaard Andersen). The whole complex is brought together as a kind of campus by this very sensitive and robust urban landscaping, which is part of a very distinguished twentieth-century Danish tradition.

So the boarding of the Navy's great flagship by the architects has been an almost unalloyed triumph, from which both parties can gain much credit. But there are worries about Holmen as a whole. It must become more than simply a huge higher education campus. It must acquire normal urban functions like housing and commerce to balance and enrich the excellent institutions that are being moved to the island complex. There is a sketch of a plan for this. But the Navy is desperate to rid itself of its remaining responsibilities in the area, and there are signs that it is selling off its peripheral holdings piecemeal. This must surely stop until a clear and integrating plan for the whole area can be created: the opportunity is far too good to waste, and the first moves, like this one, have been so impressive.

1 Christian's harbour.

2 Southern Christiania is delightful, and as well as elegant eighteenth-century streets, includes the 'free city' of Christiania, a hippy alternative society forged in 1971 on a piece of disused Navy land. After many scandals and abuses, the community still exists and flourishes with some dignity.

3 'Holm' in eastern Scandinavian means 'island'.

4 Christiansen, Jan. 'Arkitektenere indtager Holmen', Arkitektur DK 4/5, 1996, p205.

5 The king's new marketplace.

6 A fast ferry now connects the two sides of the harbour.

7 I came across Kenneth Frampton a week after seeing the school this summer. He had been there just before me, and both of us old troupers round the architecture schools of the world agreed that Copenhagen produces work of quite exceptional quality in a wonderful setting.