Great Danes.

Copenhagen is the cultural capital of Europe this year; unusually for cities so celebrated, it has already managed to complete some buildings (and initiated many more) to celebrate its status. This issue looks at the texture of the uniquely fine Danish capital and reviews the major completed projects.

One of the remarkable things about Copenhagen is how young it is. Almost all the fabric we now see was made in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, though the structure of the centre is like a palimpsest, with much of its pattern made on the ruins of previous buildings and streets. Like a partly scraped parchment, this is a modern city that often reflects immemorial traces, with here and there a fragment of the eighteenth century (and even earlier times) left intact after the fires and bombardments.

Even more curious is the fact that most of the texture of the city, right out to the motorway ring at Rodovre and Gladsaxse, still has a scale based on horse-drawn transport and the railways. There was no massive destruction in the Second World War, and perhaps as a result, none of the dreadful '60s tabula rasa planning mania which sorely afflicted the so many old European towns ranging from Britain to Finland. Of course, the city has come to terms with the internal combustion engine, and in many ways does so well. But there has been no kowtowing to the unrestrained demands of the car by making urban motorways which rip cities apart, or parking lots which bomb the corner sites off the blocks. This is the almost universal pattern of late twentieth-century development which has been adopted by cities as poor as Cairo and as rich as Tokyo - and to a limited extent (to their great disgrace) by cities with fragile inherited structures like Paris and London.

The delicate scale of the city that derives from the repeated overlayering of pedestrian and horse-drawn routes has been preserved by the railways and their careful integration with the city's development. The 1947 finger plan was a brilliant riposte to the conventional notion of the ever exploding concentric city. It remains one against the now fashionable poly-nucleated conurbation, which results when centres collapse and edges become fuzzy. The finger plan itself may be becoming a bit blurred, but the essentials remain, and the rail arteries that serve the communities in the fingers have not been complemented or replaced by urban motorways.

If a contemporary city is to retain coherence as an interlocking lattice of places rather than being an undefined mess, its first requirement is for an effective and responsive public transport system that reduces dependence on the individual car. In this respect, it is encouraging that the plan for Orestad, the proposed new city sector (AR June 1995), starts with the notion of the red line of the metro down the long green strip on Amager, connecting the linear suburb to the centre of Copenhagen, with social nodes formed round its stations and growing out into the parkland. I hope that Orestad will be built, if only to reduce development pressure on the green webs between the fingers of the city that stretch out to the north and west.

Orestad is one end of a very broad spectrum of the city's consciousness of the importance of the public realm which runs from city planning to the design of street furniture and public open spaces. I must confess to no longer being a whole-hearted fan of Stroget which, when it was first created, was quite outstanding - the most distinguished pedestrian street in Europe. Many of the fine individual shops that used to line it have been replaced by branches of multi-national chains with their cheap universal signage and vulgar products. The once quite unforgettable aroma of flowers, good coffee and kringler can only occasionally be caught in a Proustian moment. Now, Stroget is permeated by an almost universal Euro-pong, a blend of popcorn, hamburgers and cheap scent. But a few of the well-loved commercial landmarks remain, and so of course do the public ones, and here the municipality has set an admirable model in its renovation and reworking of the street and its associated squares with new paving and very carefully chosen street furniture. This excellent programme - which attempts to restore to pedestrianised central Copenhagen a sense of being in a series of places, rather than a tatty chewing-gum covered open-air shopping mall - promises to culminate in the redesigned Radhusplads which brings that rather isolated public place back into the more general conversation of the city, and by its references to Nyrop's original design gently reinforces reminders of debts to Siena (p98).

Between pedestrian space and infrastructure in the spectrum of urban creativity are the buildings, and Copenhagen is most unusual as a contemporary affluent capital in having a family of buildings in which (on the whole) members plainly respect each other. This must be partly to do with height restraint. From a distance, it is the spires and towers of the ancestors which dominate. Just as the modern city respects and enhances its inherited urban spaces, so the skyline is preserved and gently added to. The famous and notorious exceptions of the two SAS hotels, the first a splendid example of Jacobsen's late work and the other a product of '70s international vulgarity must, if the city is to retain its character, remain aberrant. But now, some of the tall developments further out from the centre than the second SAS hotel, places like Bellahoj and Hoje Gladsaxse, can be re-evaluated, and seem to a foreigner to be models of high-rise social housing. Perhaps Orestad could be a proving ground for experiments in the type which could be as challenging in our time.

Decent conversations

In the centre, height restrictions have ensured decent conversations between buildings of many different ages: Anton Rosen's 1907 Art Nouveau office block sits happily with its earlier neighbours in Frederiksberggade (Stroget), as does Jacobsen's daring Modern Movement Stelling Building (1938) in Gammeltorv. The parallel in our time is Henning Larsen's delicious, delicately veiled little corner for Berlingske Tidene in Kristen Bernikows Gade (AR June 1995). Apart from the latter, it is difficult to single out any new commercial work in the centre - though there is interesting work in the suburbs, for instance the offices for E. Pihl & Son by KHR at Lyngby (p34), and Tegnestuen Vandkunsten's Ikea at Gentofte (surely the most memorable and architecturally enjoyable emporium in the Swedish empire - p46).

Back in the centre, the public sector seems most important, with many new projects for the state, the municipality and institutions. The scale of investment in such buildings suggests comparison with the Paris of the Mitterrand era. Both societies have been prosperous, culturally confident and concerned to project their sense of well-being to citizens and visitors alike. But in Paris, the Grands Projets were mainly intended to celebrate the sometimes autocratic reign of the president the French nicknamed the 'last of the Pharaohs'. The results were certainly large and monumental but have not been very successful in adding to the quality of Paris. Perhaps the most tragic example of Mitterrand's grandiosity was, by coincidence, designed by a Dane, poor Otto yon Spreckelsen - his Grande Arche at La Defense is a monument without meaning, made out of an office block which is remarkably unpleasant for its users. Celebration of nationality, culture and civitas has been approached in a much more sure and democratic sense in the Danish capital. The effort has gone not into just a few great and showy buildings but a large number of works which range from the House of the Architects by 3x Nielsen (p54) to the extension of the Royal Theatre by Sverre Fehn (perhaps the most contentious of all the new projects, but far less aggressive or ostentatious than any of the Paris monuments - and the competition entry that best fulfilled a very demanding brief). One of the most important aspects of the new work is how much of it adapts and extends old buildings. Perhaps the pressures of height restriction and having to work with a large number of buildings which are preserved by law has distilled a special sensibility in architects who build in Copenhagen - not one that makes them deferential to the past, as the Prince of Wales would like British architects to be, but an attitude which is sympathetic to the work of the ancestors without feeling the need to copy their forms. Henning Larsen's jewel casket extension to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (p28) is one of the most splendid examples of interaction between old and new in which neither is compromised, but both respect each other. There are many other instances of this approach: the city is a treasure house of creative examples of relationships of ancient and modern.

Robust respect for the past can be very clearly seen in re-use of old buildings. Holmen (the Royal Dockyard) has proved a test of civilisation. When the Navy moved out, suddenly a very large area was available for other uses. Instead of deciding to throw this quarter open to commercial exploitation (it is in effect part of the centre of the city and must have a huge market value), the authorities decided to allow conversion of the fine naval buildings into an educational complex. The first result of the decision, the school of architecture (p50), is a triumph. The long simple old buildings have adapted very well to conversions into studios, laboratories and classrooms. It is one of the finest schools of architecture that I have ever seen in terms of its buildings (I have seen a lot) - and, judging by this year's exhibition of final year work, it is one of the very best in terms of the education it offers. Other tertiary educational institutes will join the architecture school. But, however well the old buildings are integrated with new uses, a question must be raised about the use of the whole area as a huge teaching plant. One of the splendid things about Copenhagen is that it does not conform to the Charte d'Athenes/American capitalist diagrammatic reduction of the city into carefully bounded functional zones. A very serious challenge for planning imagination is to work out how to make what was previously a segregated naval area into one that has a richer mix of uses without destroying its essential character.

Throughout Copenhagen, in old and new work, in centre and suburbs, there is a degree of urban decency that surpasses any other great city I know. There is little of the '80s American PoMo fashion of making buildings as sets for a consumer drama (except at Hoje Taastrup), and there is almost nothing of the dreadful Parisian segregation between the centre of the city (within the Peripherique) and the awful suburbs (though some of these, like the Egebjerggard at Ballerup - p23 - are distinctly on the twee side).

Yet serious problems may be looming over the horizon. The new developments proposed for Kalvebod Brygge, which will seem to be an almost autonomous chunk of city with a scale very different from the rest of Copenhagen, show how sensitive and understanding of the nature of the capital is the proposal for Orestad by the Finnish team: Artto, Palo, Rossi, Tikka and Kaijansinkko. The Engineers' House at Kalvebod Brygge by Kieler Arcitects and Niels Brons ApS seems to echo the posturing scalelessness seen in the saddest and most reductive Italian Rationalism of a couple of decades ago. The hotel and office complex by Arkitektgruppen i Aarhus looks from the drawings as if it will be one of the most depressing and daunting parts of the whole city. Kalvebod Brygge should have had a proper urban plan and not be allowed to descend into a northern equivalent of La Defense or London's Isle of Dogs. I do not agree with the argument that every modern city needs an architectural cesspit, but I suppose that Kalvebod Brygge will be Copenhagen's unless radical measures are taken soon to make the area more like a city quarter and less of a business park. Even in the centre, the annexe to the Royal Library by Schmidt, Hammer & Lassen will ungraciously thrust its twin dark prismatic monoliths into the harbour, setting a precedent for new development that may give a wholly wrong and inflated scale to new developments on the waterside.

I am far from uncritical of Copenhagen's past (or its future). There are very serious threats to its complexity and human scale. But in the Danish capital, there is a suggestion that a city is to be enjoyed by all its citizens: a proposal of the modest, generous, kindly, varied community that expresses its ethos in clearly made, honest buildings that understand the nature of materials, space and light, and how these can be used to relate the individual to society in multifarious ways. The city's history, and its presence today give hope that its humane ethos is strong enough to tame and absorb even the most destructive of contemporary trends.