Danish detail.

This little corner of that beautifully scaled city of Copenhagen has been exquisitely honed to both respond to the traditional grain, and yet have presence in itself.

Central Copenhagen is very much of a piece: the plan dates from the early nineteenth century (the British burned the city in 1807) and few ordinary buildings rise higher than six storeys. Amid this dense, decent, fundamentally Neo-Classical matrix, the strange copper spires of the old stock-exchange and the churches stand out. Traditional celebrations of God and Mammon orientate the inhabitants and the frenetic jostling for presence characteristic of the commercial architecture of North American, Asian and many European cities is nowhere to be seen in the inner city. (The only commercial tower, the Royal Hotel by Arne Jacobsen, elegant though it is, has been recognised as a postwar aberration and the experiment has never been repeated.)

This decent urban reticence and respect for history is not the result of provincialism or economic stagnation. The inhabitants of Greater Copenhagen enjoy the highest standard of living in the European Community and the Danes as a nation are the most contented with their lot in all Europe. They did not achieve their affluence and peace of mind without being able to command great technological and commercial expertise, as well as a sense of community and society that is the envy of many larger nations.

Of course, the urban form that such a society produces must be able to respond to the need for commercial display and presence. Yet, to work, these must be woven into the fabric of the city with a great deal of sophistication.

The little new building on the corner of Kristen Bernikows Gade and Grennegade is a few hundred yards west of Kongens Nytorv, the easterly termination of the long main inner city pedestrian route. The corner is only a small extension to the editorial offices of BT, Berlingske Tidene, one of the city's two serious newspapers. But the paper's proprietors were so concerned both to respond to the city and make a mark on it that they held an international competition for the tiny site.

It was won by Henning Larsen with a scheme of deceptive simplicity. The rectangular plan of a little ground floor entrance hall is projected up through four trays of office space to a top floor where a glass conference room under a wafer thin flat roof looks out over a terrace to the roofs and spires of Copenhagen. The corner has only two sides. To the north (narrower side), the office trays are exposed from top to bottom through glass walls. Here, the editors can look out and downover the busy street (and be seen obliquely themselves by the citizens whose lives they strive to capture).

The longer side, on Kristen Bernikows Gade is a much more mysterious affair. Its glazed facade is screened by a regular grid of approximately metre square stainless steel plates which are held 600 mm from the glass by an exostructure. This sounds like a repellent device in a street that, though busy with traffic, is still very much a pedestrian thoroughfare. Yet it is not, for the shiny steel plates are such a size and are so highly perforated with a multitude of small regular round holes that they not only have a grain that suits the site, but, close up, they seem almost translucent.

During the day you can glimpse the interior from the street between the plates or through the little holes. But at night as BT goes to bed, the life of the interior becomes projected onto the stainless steel screen in a shadow play. At the same time, the nature of the screen is emphasised by inserting tiny tungsten-tinted diode lights at the corners of the stainless steel plates: it is both veil and carapace.

The BT corner is very much part of Copenhagen, and like any citizen is both observer, yet observed; participant but individual; gentle, yet quietly and in a most elegant way assertive of the values of its owners and users.