Society focus.

This proposal for Copenhagen centre shows an admirable attitude to the old fabric: robust, yet sympathetic without being deferential. It adds to the city with great sensitivity.

The Kunstforeningen (Art Society) has a very fine eighteenth-century Baroque house on the Gammel Strand (Old Shore), a quayside marketplace in the middle of the city overlooking the Slotsholm Canal, the marvellously decorated neo Egyptian Thorvaldsen Museum and, behind that, the Christiansborg Palace, the early twentieth-century Baroque parliament building and its chapel by C. F. Hansen (just restored after yet another Copenhagen fire). The Kunstforeningen complex runs north back from the Gammel Strand past a courtyard to another building on Laederstraede which, up to now has not been used by the organisation.

The Society is a thriving focus for artists and laypeople interested in the arts, but is perhaps rather inward-turned. A competition to make better use of the site and integrate the institution with the life of the city was held in 1994. It was won by Korshagen Arkitekter with a simple but strong scheme that makes use of the court to link the Gammel Strand to Laederstraede (now a pedestrian street which relieves pressure on the roughly parallel Stroget and captures a little of the magic of that street when it was first pedestrianised). The court is to be glazed over, and a new gallery will be inserted at second floor level. The existing galleries in the Gammel Strand mansion will be linked to new ones in the back building by ramps, and the court itself will become a semi-public space which will serve as thoroughfare, exhibition gallery and ticket office. The route will link across Laederstraede to the Klostergang, a new pedestrian alley that has been opened between that street and Stroget, exposing some previously hidden medieval fragments and making little semi-public gardens in the heart of the city. From the artists' court, there will be magnificent views over the canal to the Thorvaldsen Museum and the church, as well as up the ramps to the galleries.

At present, only the first phase of the scheme (renewal of the Gammel Strand building) has been executed, but it is to be hoped that the Society will soon find funds to build the whole proposal. It is exactly the kind of intervention that the old centre of the city needs: bold and not overawed by the old fabric, but sympathetic to it and able to offer previously unexplored aspects to enrich the life of the city.