C.F. Hansen.

Christian Frederik Hansen (1756-1845) was the most powerful figure in Danish architecture in the earliest years of the nineteenth century, and one of the finest Neo-Classical architects ever. He was the son of a Copenhagen shoemaker, but his eldest brother was a court servant who used his influence to start his siblings in life (another brother ended up as a bishop). He has now been celebrated in a magnificent monograph.

After training at the Royal Academy and the essential study tour to Italy, Hansen became provincial architect for Holsten Where he erected many elegant country houses and some of the key buildings in Altona, the delightful county town, just across the river from Hamburg. (The territory was seized by Bismarck in 1864 and some of Hansen's best buildings were destroyed by misdirected British bombing raids in the Second World War.)

Hansen returned to Copenhagen and was made responsible for rebuilding the Christiansborg Palace which had burned down. This Neo-Classical reconstruction largely on the old Baroque foundations is now lost too (apart from the royal chapel which burned down a year or two ago and is now being rebuilt). In 1800, Hansen was asked to build the city's combined town hall and law court building which had burned down the year after the palace. This at least remains to us, handsome and austere on the Nytorv with the inspiring inscription over the chaste portico 'Med lov skal man land bygge': the country will be built with law. Across a little street that opens from the corner of the square is the building for those who disagreed with the motto - the jail, as fierce an example of penitential building as exists anywhere. The whole complex is a microcosm of Enlightenment thought under an absolute monarchy.

In 1807, the church of Our Lady was destroyed in yet another fire, this time caused by the besieging British who used its spire as a marker for the naval bombardment during the siege. Hansen was asked to rebuild it as the state church, and he made it one of the most powerful statements of Protestant clarity ever achieved. The exterior is very plain, with a square tower under which is the entrance through a stern Doric portico. The interior is fundamentally a simple barrel-vaulted nave which terminates in an apse where light pours down on Thorwaldsen's sculpture of the Saviour. The arcaded walls are lined with sculptures of the saints and great divines (Hansen wanted to create a great spiritual museum). The whole is bathed in light with scarcely a moment of shadow. There is no room here for mysticism or mystery - or even the naughtiness of individual personality. The book ends with a collection of churches from Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark which show Hansen could be much more tender and gentle when not working directly under the king's eye.

The big two-volume work is one of the most splendid and sumptuous architectural books of the century. Lund and Thygesen have drawn on the extensive archives of the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen among others to show all Hansen's major works in the original drawings, supplemented in many cases with good modern photographs. Most of the illustrations are in colour, but carefully controlled so they are never garish; the print and paper are excellent, and there is an appropriate Neo-Classical feel about the type; the volumes are even gold blocked. The text is in Danish, but no serious architectural library should be without it - it is amazingly good value for the price.