Centenary celebration. (View).

Arne Jacobsen was one of the defining architects of the twentieth century. He translated the traditional Danish Classical sensitivity to the Modern age.

This is thc centenary month of Arne Jacobsen's birth, and his lifework is celebrated in two exhibitions in Denmark, (1) and a new book. (2) The hook's two authors, professors at the Danish Royal Academy, cover the whole extraordinary variety of Jacobsen's expression, and chronicle his life from the days when he went to America as a cabin boy on a liner to his final years as the grand old man of Danish architecture.

Jacobsen was one of the two Scandinavian Modernists most sensitive to the essence of materials and their handling. The other was Aalto, but he was essentially a Goth, while Jacobsen remained a Classicist from his earliest years as a student at the Royal Academy to his last works. While Aalto's inventions could he rough and even wild, Jacobsen's work was always exquisite, almost like a jeweller's both in proportions and execution. In many ways, he did not strive for the same goals as the Finn, whom he regarded as the only truly original talent in Scandinavian architecture. (3) In contrast, Jacobsen refined and polished ideas, often ones initiated by others.

But he was no mere stylist. From the moment in the late '20s when he embraced Modernism, Jacobsen showed himself to be an original manipulator of form, space and construction -- though his debts for instance to Mies in many of the buildings are clear, and then are less obvious links to Ecro Saarinen and Charles Eames in the furniture. He very quickly developed mastery of detail, which can be seen in everything he did, from the way in which his door handles gently lit the hand to the construction of his curtain walls, which were both elegant and remarkably advanced constructionally. He was lucky to live in an age and society in which craftsmanship still flourished while industry was making a huge new range of materials and techniques available.

From his first large buildings, the town halls for Arhus and Sollerod, the precision and luminance of his planning was clear, but as his housing complexes like pre-war Bellavista and the Soholm scheme started in the '40s, (4) his domestic planning could be both ingenious and most sensitive to human emotions. This sensibility was crossed with his rigorous handling of large buildings to create the Munkegard elementary school, in which every pair of classrooms had private courtyard, each individually designed and planted. It is surely one of the finest post-war schools in the world.

Planting and gardens were lifelong preoccupations. Jacobsen's own garden at Soholm was possibly his best landscape: in which some 300 species were allowed to adopt their own habits, set off by linear clipped hedges and an orderly pattern of stone flags. A corollary to the landscape work was the fabric and wallpaper designs, based on the plant kingdom by Jacobsen (a brilliant watercolourist), made with great tenderness for nature and, at the same time, a thorough understanding of machine processes. Many of these were done in Sweden between 1943 and 1945 after Jacobsen, a Jew, had rowed in a small boat across the Sound to escape the impending extension or the Nazi Holocaust to Denmark.

Some of thc later work is less well regarded now than it was immediately after Jacobsen's death in 1971. That amazing Modernist Gesamtkunstwerk, the SAS hotel has been very badly treated over the years, with the destruction or the famous Orchid Bar and bad refurbishment and refitting (not just because many who dined there tried to secrete pieces of its specially designed cutlery into their sleeves). The National Bank, Jacobsen's last major work, is a forbidding, if elegant, piece of urbanism, perhaps a Modern echo or C. F. Hansen or Hack Kampmann's Classical period. But St Catherine's, Oxford, completed with equal geometric rigour in the mid '60s, remains genial and collegiate, and still retains its original furniture.

Most of Jacobsen's chairs have never been out of fashion -- though sometimes out of production -- from the Ant of 1952 to the late works of the '60s. In designing furniture Jacobsen was almost yet another person, using flowing organic forms in complete contrast to the Euclidean rigour of the buildings. Again, the process of constant refinement is made clear in Thau and Vindum's book, a tribute to an architect which has very rarely been rivalled in one volume. The text (if sometimes slightly waffly) has been translated into workmanlike American, and analysis of design development of the major works is both revealing and touching.

PETER DAVEY

1. The first, Evergreens and Nevergreens, is on his product design and opens at the Danish design Centre, Copengagen on 11 February. The second, more widely ranging one will be at the wonderful Louisiana Museum in the antumn.

2. Jacobsen, by Carsten Than, and field Vindum, Arkitektens Forlag, Copenhagen, DKK 598.

3. He later added Ulzon.

4. He lived in it himself and had his office-studio there.