Carl Petersen and the Faaborg Art Museum
Carl Petersen (1874–1923)
Carl Petersen is one of the most interesting and important architects of the Nordic Classical Movement. His most famous building – the small Faaborg Museum on the Danish Island of Funen – was one of the first completed works of Nordic Classicism, and while he continued to design and build for many years after its completion, none of his further works came close to the quality of this, his first major building. Largely self-taught, highly influential as an architect, writer and teacher, unlike most of his contemporaries, he was also absolutely consistent in terms of architectural style, neither commencing his career in National Romanticism, nor ending it in Modernism; he remained committed to Classicism throughout his relatively short life and career.
Carl Petersen was born in Aarhus, Denmark, in 1871, the son of a local guide (Figure 5). He was orphaned at the age of eight and brought up by his aunt, Betty Schlegel, in Copenhagen. She was part of an artistic circle, who greatly admired the work of artists of the early nineteenth century, Danish Golden Age, such as the painter Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, the sculptor Hermann Ernst Freund and the architect Michael Gottlieb Bindesbøll.1
FIGURE 5 Carl Petersen, Credit – The Royal Danish Library.
Presumably inspired by this domestic environment, the young Carl developed an early interest in the arts and was fortunate enough to have the painter Christen Dahlsgaard as his drawing master in secondary school. Dahlsgaard clearly made quite an impression on the young Petersen, as he himself related: ‘As we know from his paintings, Dahlsgaard loved bright, pure colours. I remember that in one of the rooms in his lovely house the walls were painted cobalt blue, the purest colour I know. Dahlsgaard’s love of bright colours stemmed directly from the movement during the Golden Age of our art as expressed in Thorvaldsen’s Museum.’2
Petersen was admitted to the School of Architecture of the Copenhagen Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1896 but left before graduating in 1901 to pursue his growing interest in ceramics. It was in this medium that he developed his thoughts and understanding both of colour (from Classical antiquity) and increasingly of texture (from the ceramics of China and Japan). He initially combined his work as a potter with his early architectural career, selling his ceramics to the Wertheim department store in Berlin, while working as an architectural assistant firstly for Martin Borch and then Martin Nyrop (on the Copenhagen City Hall) before joining the Danish State Railways Architecture Department.3
In contrast to many of his architectural contemporaries, he had neither the funds nor inclination to travel to Italy, and instead he focused more and more on the local neoclassical work of Christian Frederik Hansen and Michael Gottlieb Bindesbøll (1800–1856), which he studied along with friends Hans Koch (1873–1922), Ivar Bentsen (1876–1943) and Povl Baumann (1878–1963). In 1909, these four young architects, and a further eight including Edvard Thomsen (Ch 10), started the Free Architects Association, which was committed to the development of a new Classical architecture. By 1910, the influence of his interest in both architecture and ceramics was clear when he wrote that ‘our age possesses neither Classicism’s complete mastery of line and form nor the brilliant treatment of colour and textural effects of the Far East’.4 By 1911, it appeared that it was the world of ceramics, rather than architecture, which was going to claim Petersen when his work attracted the attention of Bing and Grøndahl, the ceramics studio in Copenhagen, who hired him as their new artistic director.
Fate however intervened that same year when Carl Jacobsen, the heir to the Carlsberg Brewery fortune, proposed to further improve the Copenhagen skyline by adding a baroque spire to CF Hansen’s Vor Frue Kirke (1817–1829) (supported by Hack Kampmann (Ch 6), who must have faced a conflict between his friendship with Jacobsen and his own admiration of Hansen’s work). This proposal was strongly opposed by the Free Architects led by Petersen, who wrote articles and organized an exhibition of CF Hansen’s drawings as part of their protest. Their efforts were successful, not only in saving Hansen’s typically restrained Classical church from the imposition of a baroque steeple, but also in renewing a wider interest in Hansen’s Classical architecture.
The Free Architects were part of a younger generation of artists in Copenhagen, which included both the realist Funen school of painters, who spent their winters in the city, and the sculptor Kai Nielsen (1882–1924), who like Petersen also supplied Bing and Grøndahl and, by 1912, was working with Ivar Bentsen on the redesign of Blågårds Plads in the city (1912–1916). The Funen painters were led by Peter Hansen (1868–1928) and Fritz Syberg (1862–1939) and were based in Hansen and Syberg’s hometown of Faaborg in the south of Funen Island, where their major patron was successful local industrialist, Mads Rasmussen (1856–1916). He had plans to build a gallery to exhibit his collection of regional painting and sculpture, and it was Peter Hansen who introduced Carl Petersen to Rasmussen and proposed him as architect for the new gallery (or Faaborg Museum, as it has become known).
Petersen received the commission in 1912, thus finally giving himself the opportunity to move from study, theoretical development, ceramic design and the role of architectural assistant to the creation of a building of his own design in which he could express his vision of a new Danish Classical architecture. The scale of the project and site were far from promising, but nevertheless Petersen produced a series of spaces and a fresh new approach, which proved highly influential and, in retrospect, became acknowledged as one of the first examples of the new Nordic Classicism.
Completed in 1915, the museum established Petersen as an important and highly influential architect both in Denmark and beyond. The Faaborg showed that this new Spartan Classicism was capable both of responding to contemporary challenges and the architectural and social traditions of the Nordic region. For the Free Architects, it was the first built expression of their ideas, and variations on the museum’s understated, rendered Classical entrance facade would appear again and again in their work through the next ten years, including various villas by Povl Baumann (villa for Aage Lunn of 1916) and Aage Rafn (villa for Dr Brøndum-Nielsen at 22 Gammel Vartovvej, 1919–1920) amongst others. More important, however, than the specific architectural elements of the museum were the key themes of Nordic Classicism that it established – a new Classical architecture with its roots in the region’s vernacular, a Lutheran restraint; a free and unconstrained interpretation of Classicism; the use of the pure geometric forms of Classicism; and the creation of a complex architectural route which led to an ultimate goal.
Something of a myth has subsequently developed that the Faaborg was Carl Petersen’s only completed building, but the reality is that he undertook a considerable number of commissions throughout the remainder of his career, although never again achieving the quality of his Faaborg Museum design. The design of the Faaborg is dealt with in detail later.
While the museum was still under construction, Petersen undertook several further commissions for modest homes for friends, including painters Ellen Sawyer and Johannes Larsen in Kerteminde (1913), for magazine editor Sven Poulsen in Østerbro, Copenhagen (1913), and others later in Hellerup, Copenhagen and Hornbaek. These were invariably single-storey, rendered cottages, below simple, tiled, pitched roofs with dormer windows, much in the style of the Faaborg entrance elevation but without the Classical details. When a site became available across the road from the museum in Faaborg, Petersen was commissioned and he produced a rather ordinary three-storey block of apartments in brick with a heavily dentilled cornice below a clay-tiled roof (1916). Further commissions from this period included a piggery for Fuglsang Manor (1916–1917) and a bank in Horsens (with Hans Foch) (1919), complete with a heavily rusticated stone ground floor, which owed more to the medievalism of National Romanticism than the restrained Classicism of the museum.
In 1917, he was commissioned to remodel the interior of an existing office building in Central Copenhagen to create a new gallery for Danish art (Dansk Kunsthandel 1917–1919), and he and Kaare Klimt, his assistant on the Faaborg, collaborated once more, producing a very elegant sequence of interior exhibition spaces. Petersen drove a new diagonal axis from the street-corner entrance doorway through the building, which led from a circular, rusticated vestibule on through an L-shaped reception room to a glass-covered atrium gallery at the rear of the site. The interiors were richly detailed with panelled walls, mosaic floors and coffered ceilings in which Klimt used the Faaborg chairs once more and extended the range of his furniture designs to include desks, benches and leather sofas – all in the new restrained Classical style. Unfortunately, while most of the furniture remains, Petersen’s interiors have been lost.
In addition to these commissions, there were, of course, the perpetual architectural competitions entered by any aspiring architectural practice of the time, and Petersen, like the other members of the Free Architecture group, was an active participant. In 1918, he and Ivar Bentsen entered and were runners-up (to Edvard Thomsen) in the ‘Banegaardsterraen’ competition for workers housing in Copenhagen on the site of the old railway station. Their proposal (like Thomsen’s) proposed a solid mass of apartments, which took up two entire city blocks into which courtyards were cut and through which grand entrance arches linked the courtyards to the surrounding streets. The influence of Camillo Sitte’s theories of urban design was clear with Petersen believing that his bleak, five-storey, undecorated rendered facades would provide ‘peacefulness in the urban scene’ and ‘a restful contrast to the large public buildings’.5 Fortunately for Copenhagen, neither Thomsen or Petersen’s schemes were built although they did later go on to become much studied by New Urbanists such as Rob and Leon Krier6 and the leader of the Italian Rationalists, Aldo Rossi.
In 1921 (with Hans Koch), he entered the competition for a new National Museum in Copenhagen for which they offered a simple, elongated gallery building above a ground-floor colonnade around the edge of the Rosenberg Castle Gardens on Gothersgade (much in the style of CF Hansen’s arched arcade at Christiansborg). Unlike his Banegaardsterraen design, Petersen developed this proposal in some detail – it was beautifully drawn and detailed, and the fine proportions of their colonnade with its views to the park would have been a considerable asset to the city.
Despite his limited output, such was the admiration for the Faaborg Museum, his standing within his profession remained high, and in 1918, he was elected as a member of the Royal Danish Academy, became a professor of architecture at his former School of Architecture and – appropriately for an architect who had been so influenced by Bindesbøll and Hansen – was appointed as architect to the Thorvaldsen Museum in 1919 and commissioned to carry out a refurbishment of CF Hansen’s Copenhagen Courthouse in 1920.
As professor of architecture at the Royal Danish Academy, his influence was significant, and he was able to provide what he saw as an appropriate grounding in Classical architecture to his students. Three of his lectures on ‘Textures’, ‘Contrasts’ and ‘Colours’ were published in Architekten DK between 1919 and 1923 in which he expounded his approach to both architecture and ceramics. These texts give an insight into Petersen’s thinking and approach both to art and its teaching. He stated that he found it ‘heart-breaking to see how frequently even talented artists who have something to say cannot express themselves because they are unused to employing artistic effects with logical clarity’, that ‘in all strict art, certain rules apply. It is of the utmost importance that the consciously-working artist has a knowledge of these rules’ and that in all art ‘proportions must be preserved and contrasts established’.7
In 1923, the Copenhagen General Housing Society commissioned Carl Petersen, Ole Falkentorp, Peter Nielsen and Povl Baumann (all former members of the Free Architects Association) to design the Ved Classens Have workers housing. While there are echoes of the Banegaardsterraen competition entry with five floors of perimeter housing surrounding a courtyard that is reached through a grand archway from the street, the roof is now tiled, the walls in red brick and the courtyard landscaped to provide a much more humane solution. By the time Petersen received this commission, his health was already failing and he had been forced to resign from the Royal Danish Academy. He died in June 1923, before the project was completed, aged only forty-nine.
Was this the life of a great architect cut short? Had he already fulfilled his potential, or might we have seen other buildings of the quality of the Faaborg Museum had he lived longer? Was his interest in ceramics and the other arts a distraction from his architectural practice and development? The truth is that with the design of the Faaborg Museum, he achieved a place in the history of architecture, contributed hugely to the development of Nordic Classicism and established his professional reputation. His influence during his lifetime was considerable throughout Scandinavia, and to be appointed professor of architecture, despite his own unconventional architectural education, was evidence of the high regard in which he was held. He had lived long enough to see Classical architecture established once more in the Nordic countries and knew the part which he had played in that achievement.
Faaborg Art Museum (1912–1915)
Mads Rasmussen was a relatively wealthy industrialist, who lived and worked in the small provincial town of Faaborg on the Danish island of Funen. As he grew more successful, like many industrials then and now, he became a patron of the arts – in his case, his particular interest being in the local contemporary painters of the island. The Funen Painters (or Fynboerne as they were known) included Fritz Syberg, Peter Hansen, Jens Birkholm (1869–1915) and Johannes Larsen (1867–1961), and their Realist paintings of everyday life were recognized and appreciated well beyond Funen.
FIGURE 6 Faaborg Museum Plan, Credit – John Stewart.
FIGURE 7 Faaborg Museum Section, Credit – John Stewart.
Rasmussen had opened his collection to the public in several rooms of his summerhouse in 1910 and in 1912, encouraged by Hansen and Syberg, he decided to build a new gallery to better display his burgeoning art collection. For a site, he looked no further than a long, thin, sloping vacant strip of land, further along the lane from his factory, and appointed the young Carl Petersen as his architect (on the recommendation of Peter Hansen, as noted earlier). Petersen started work on his design in 1912, and by 1915, the museum, his first significant building design, was completed. There can be few examples of such a small building so successfully, and apparently effortlessly, establishing so many key themes of a new architectural movement.
The entrance elevation (which is almost the only external elevation of the building) combines the Scandinavian vernacular clay tiles of the roof with the sandstone, Tuscan Doric columns of Italy, in a composition of such elegance and simplicity that it was rarely bettered by any of Carl Petersen’s Nordic Classical successors over the next twenty years. The simple palette of materials – clay tiles, stucco walls, sandstone columns and steps, and the timber doors with fanlight over, create a new Classical architecture that is stripped down to the bare essentials of Classical form and proportion. Yet within this purity and simplicity is a composition of great subtlety: the elegant swoop of the roof, the shadow of a frieze which oversails the columns before the arch over the doors is cut sharply in to it; and the gently encircling arms of the wing walls, drawing one into the tiny courtyard. This is no small town provincialism, but architecture of the highest order, rooted in Denmark, but connected to a wider ancient Classical world (Figure 8).
FIGURE 8 Faaborg Museum Entrance, Credit – martin8th/Flickr.
The shallow courtyard in front of the entrance turns out to be just the first in a series of remarkable spaces. Faced with the long, narrow site which his client had chosen (apparently more for its proximity to his canned food factory than its suitability as the setting for an art gallery), Petersen created a series of linked spaces through which the visitor progresses from entrance hall to garden room at the far end of the building. Far from this being a dull Classical enfilade with the visitor passing on axis from room to room, each space has an individual and richly varied character in plan, section, lighting and colour; indeed the variety of spatial experiences which Petersen has achieved, despite (or perhaps in response to) the constraints of the site and the scale of the building, is extraordinary.
From the dimly lit vestibule, one enters a strikingly bright, top-lit gallery – square in plan with a central roof light running from end to end, continuing the axial entrance route. A richly patterned ceramic-tiled floor meets a high black skirting, above which, the paintings are hung on cinnabar red walls (Figure 9). Directly ahead on axis in the next space is a black granite statue of the client, Mads Rasmussen, framed by two ionic columns (echoing the twin sandstone columns of the main entrance) against a background of cool cobalt blue.8 One’s first impression is that these two contrasting gallery spaces constitute the Faaborg Museum, this first gallery housing the collection of paintings and the room beyond, the sculpture of their patron. It is only as one enters the cool blue, hexagonal space with the pantheon-like coffered dome above that one realizes that there are further galleries beyond and the hexagonal plan has been used to introduce diagonal routes to either side of the rear of this space. Thus, Mr Rasmussen also changes his character from being the apparent, slightly pompous focus of the building to being our host, offering his visitors further artistic delights beyond. As a result of a slight shift in angle of the side boundary of this very constrained site at this point, Petersen was unable to continue the entrance axis further into the site and therefore elegantly introduced the hexagonal space and diagonal routes to conceal and thus solve this problem (Figure 10).
FIGURE 9 Faaborg Gallery, Credit – martin8th/Flickr.
FIGURE 10 Mads Rasmussen, Credit – martin8th/Flickr.
At this point the scale changes: the entrances to the next gallery are constrained – curving, arched slots, painted black inside, which lead down short, spiral staircases to the room below – another larger, rectangular top-lit gallery, this time with walls of burnt sienna, which appears to be symmetrical about the entrance axis but has imperceptibly actually shifted a couple of feet off it. And so the journey continues, descending once more: the site steps in again to intervene and the new axis now becomes central to a corridor, which runs down the edge of the site with high side lighting to a series of alternating square and rectangular vaulted galleries, this time with walls of ancient colcothar, and finally to the release of the sculpture hall and garden room with views out of the building for the first time.
This is the first of many Nordic Classicist architectural promenades in which the route is carefully considered in terms of its impact on the visitor. ‘Why bother to embark on a journey through a building, the prescribed purpose of which is to be stimulated and engaged, when everything appears to be on offer within the first few metres of entering? Journey. Destination. Reward. Orchestrated space requires all three to succeed.’9 In Petersen’s later lecture on ‘Contrasts’, he had stressed the need to vary spaces along a route to create impact and compared unfavourably the tall ticket hall of Copenhagen Central Station (1911), which led from an equally tall concourse, with Martin Nyrop’s Copenhagen Town Hall (1905), where the impact of the main hall is heightened by entering via a low entrance hall.
Throughout the spaces, the detailing is restrained, carefully considered and beautifully executed. With the exception of the garden room (with its rather strange chinoiserie murals of birds and trees by Johannes Larsen), the colours throughout are those of antiquity – earth colours: cinnabar, cobalt, colcothar and sienna. Petersen wrote that ‘in the Nineties, when studying at the Royal Danish Academy, I attended a lecture by Francis Becket during which he spoke of the colours with which the Greeks decorated their temples. It had been scientifically proved that they had painted their figure compositions and the architectonic features of their buildings in bright, pure colours.’10
The furniture too was part of Petersen’s commission, and this was designed by a young man – who was articled to Petersen – Kaare Klint (1888–1954). Together they produced the elegant (and extremely comfortable) Faaborg armchairs, which are still in use in the building, are still in production and indeed have gone on to establish their own position in the history of international product design. (Klint, who was the son of the architect Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint (1853–1930), later went on to become the first professor of Furniture Design at the Royal Danish Academy in 1924 and worked again with Petersen on both the Kunsthandel and at Thorvaldsens Museum as well as completing his father’s extraordinary expressionist Grundtvig Church in Copenhagen,1921–1940, after his death.)
While the overall composition of Petersen’s design of the museum is highly original, the internal spaces owe a huge debt to Bindesbøll and in particular the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen, which Petersen had studied in depth. From the Thorvaldsen comes the combination of richly tiled floor (though unglazed and thus slightly more rustic in the Faaborg) with contrasting, high black dado and the strong wall colours above as a backdrop to the exhibits (albeit that the strong colours made a more dramatic backdrop to the white marble sculptures and plaster casts at the Thorvaldsen). Similarly, the view along the long gallery with vaulted spaces off has a strong echo of the enfillade arrangement of galleries at Bindesbøll’s museum.
At Faaborg, however, there is none of the applied decoration of the Thorvaldsen; the plan and section are more richly varied, and the simplicity of the elements and materials connects directly with the Scandinavian vernacular architectural tradition. Just as the interiors owe much to the Bindesbøll, so the tiny entrance facade, highly original though it is in its composition, owes as much to CF Hansen’s buildings, which Petersen had also studied so closely – particularly some of Hansen’s smaller villas and farm buildings with their simple rendered walls and clay pantile roofs.
Accepting these debts to his predecessors does not detract from Petersen’s achievement. This remains an art gallery whose artistic intensity outshines its contents. The contrasts of light and shadow, the richness of the route, the variety of spaces, the elegance of transition from space to space, the colours, the textures and his success in achieving an architecture which is in turn monumental and intimate, drawing on both the spirit of its region and the ancient Classical tradition, make this not just one of the first Nordic Classical buildings but also one of the movement’s finest.
Sadly, as we have seen, Carl Petersen died, just eight years after its completion.