WHEN THE FROGS SET THE AGENDA
According to chief architect Kurt Jensen from the architectural practice C.F. Møller, it was the large advertisement frogs that determined the building programme, for they were scheduled by the local authority because the district’s inhabitants wanted a guarantee that the frogs would not be taken down when a new building went up. The architectural challenge was therefore both to build new and restore parts of the existing confectionery factory, around the chimney of which the preserved neon frogs still dance.
A LANDMARK IN THE CITY
Anna Maria Indrio, co-owner of the architectural practice C.F. Møller, explains: “With this project we have tried to find a solution for a corner of the city that is distinctive from a town planning point of view. We wanted to create a building that appeared from the outside as a single building complex in which new and old were in dialogue with each other.” The drawing office placed the new building right out at the edge of the road in order to pull the urban structure up from 19th century Copenhagen. At the same time, the architects tried to get into a dialogue with the modern city by lying close up, both visually and as regards scale, to the modernistic idiom of the nearby university.
IT PAYS TO RESTORE
Architect Kurt Jensen says, “It has paid to restore. Financially, it has been no more expensive than building something new and it has meant that we have been able to preserve the old confectionery factory’s unusual loft, which has up to two layers of rafters in some places.”
According to Anna Maria Indrio, the design is based on the theme fusing new and old. The task has been solved by joining and separating the old part and the new by a 96m long, glass-roofed interior street, which is crossed by narrow bridges. The fusion has meant that a large part of the original confectionery factory has been restored. It, therefore, stands today clad with the same materials as the equally large newly built part. Rendered walls, dark grey window frames, dark merbau wooden floors and a slate roof. One cannot directly distinguish the new from the old.