Hack Kampmann and the Copenhagen Police Headquarters
Hack Kampmann (1856–1920)
Though relatively little known today outside Scandinavia, Hack Kampmann was the outstanding architect of his generation in Denmark, completing over 100 buildings, which ranged from schools and customs houses to a royal tomb and palace. Born on 6 September 1856, he was one of the oldest contributors to Nordic Classicism and yet he designed one of the greatest works of the movement – the Copenhagen Police Headquarters (examined in detail below), which was completed just after his death. Throughout his career, even in his fine early National Romantic buildings, there was always a thread of Classical order and formality in his work, which reflected both his training and extensive travels throughout Greece and Italy. Hack Kampmann (more than even Carl Petersen) built on Christian Frederik Hansen’s Danish Classical architectural heritage with increasing restraint, finally developing into full-blown Classical architecture by the final stage of his career. His public buildings are amongst the most successful of Nordic Classicism and, at their best, equal the quality of CF Hansen’s architecture.
Kampmann was born in the small town of Ebeltoft in Jutland, where his father was the priest (Figure 31). When Hack was eight, the family moved North to Hjørring where his father had been appointed as Dean. It was in Hjørring that he grew up, and where he initially embarked on an apprenticeship in stone masonry which gave him an insight into the skills and methods of the masons, whom he would in future direct. It seems unlikely, however, that he completed his apprenticeship as his architecture studies commenced at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1873, when he was still only seventeen. At the Academy, he was taught by Hans Jørgen Holm (1835–1916), who enthused equally about both the Classical architecture of Italy and Greece and the traditional vernacular architecture of Denmark. Hack quickly developed into an outstanding student, gaining the school’s gold medal for his design of a ‘Swimming Bath in the Italian Renaissance Style’ on his graduation in 1878. After graduating, he worked as an assistant for both Hans Jørgen Holm and Ferdinand Meldahl (1827–1908), another of his teachers.1
FIGURE 31 Hack Kampmann, Credit – The Royal Danish Library.
In 1882, Hack travelled to Paris where he enrolled at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, which at that time was the world’s leading school of architecture. Studies there focused almost exclusively on Classical architecture, and indeed the output of their students was so consistently formal and Classical (and often overblown) that their work, whether city planning or architecture, became known around the world as ‘Beaux-Arts Style’.2 On the completion of his studies in1883, Hack then stayed in Paris for a further year, working in the office of Jacques Hermant (1855–1930), who had been his professor at the École des Beaux Arts.
The next few years were largely spent travelling throughout both Europe and Scandinavia including Italy, Sweden, Germany, France and Greece – paid for by a combination of occasional work as an architectural assistant and a number of scholarships. This period of travel and study was crucially important to Hack’s architectural development and future success for three main reasons. Firstly, he spent a considerable time in Greece whose ancient architecture, more than Italy’s, was to become a constant influence on almost all his later work. Secondly, he visited Greece and discovered its art and architecture in the company of the young Carl Jacobsen (1842–1914), son of the founder of the Carlsberg brewing company, whose love of Classical sculpture would result in one of the greatest of the world’s collections and who would soon become one of Hackmann’s most important clients, and thirdly, during his travels he developed his unique ‘wet’ watercolour style which captured both the spirit and the essential features of the buildings and scenes which he witnessed (e.g., the Temple of Concordia, Greece of 1886) and was later much imitated by many of his contemporary Danish architects including Aage Rafn (1890–1953), Steen Eiler Rasmussen (1898–1990) and eventually Arne Jacobsen (1902–1971). Finally, in 1888, at the age of thirty-two, after an astonishing fifteen years of study, work as an assistant to various architects and extensive travel throughout Europe, he settled in Copenhagen, both establishing his own practice and marrying Johanna Holm, the daughter of Hans Holm, his old professor.
Despite his base in the capital, his first commissions were dominated by opportunities in his home town of Hjørring in Jutland, where between 1888 and 1892, he completed the new Central Hospital, Technical College and Savings Bank until in1890 his friend Carl Jacobsen commissioned him to design a new villa for him at Ny Carlsberg, Copenhagen, and to refurbish and extend the first Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.
While work on the villa was under way in 1891, Kampmann completed the first building that was to attract real interest in his work – the new North Jutland Provincial Archives in Viborg. The internal arrangement of the archives was prescribed to Hackmann, and so he focused his energy on the external treatment of the building, which became his first essay in regional Classicism. The two-storey building was executed in the traditional local red brick but organized in a symmetrical plan with the windows of both storeys linked to create a shared larger order below a heavy frieze and cornice. Local limestone was used for the base, window and door surrounds and quoins to each corner of the building. The detailing was rich and meticulous, and the combination of materials and the way in which they were used to best advantage showed Kampmann’s mature understanding of construction and architectural expression. Hack’s focus however was very much on surface treatment, rather than form and space, and this language of finely detailed and intricately decorated brick and limestone, which he developed in the Archives building, was to serve him for yet some time to come.
With the completion of the Jacobsen villa in Copenhagen, in similar style, the next year in 1892, Kampmann was identified as a new and original contributor to the development of architecture in Denmark. At this time his Danish architectural contemporaries were split roughly into two camps – the National Romantics such as Martin Nyrop (1849–1921), Carl Brummer (1864–1953) and his father-in-law Hans Holm, and those who represented the unbroken thread of Danish Classicism such as Thorvald Bindesbøll (1846–1908) (the son of Michael Gottlieb Bindesbøll, the architect of the Thorvaldsen Museum (1838–1848)) (NB: his lasting legacy is the design of the Carlsberg beer label) and Jens Vilhelm Dahlerup (1836–1907).3 Kampmann, unusually, perhaps as a result of his broader education and extensive travel throughout Europe, appeared to have a foot in both camps. He appears to have been convinced (and later confirmed in his teaching) that while he believed Classical architecture to be universally relevant, he was also equally convinced that architecture should respond and contribute to the individual character of its location, and thus each town, city, country and region should have an individual character or genius loci which should be celebrated and reinforced by any new buildings. For a number of years, this was rationalized by Kampmann into a hierarchy of style in which Classical architecture was employed for major public buildings in the cities, while National Romantic architecture was deemed more appropriate for more modest building types and provincial locations.
As a result of his growing reputation within Denmark, Kampmann was appointed the Royal Inspector of Listed State Buildings in Jutland in 1892 – a post he held until his death. This meant a move to Aarhus, where he was to spend the next sixteen years in one of the most productive periods of his career. As Inspector of State Buildings he was responsible not only for the maintenance and improvement of the existing state buildings but also the development of all the new public buildings required within the region. In addition to this appointment, he was also allowed to continue to oversee his developing private practice, thus allowing himself to undertake a very stimulating and diverse range of building design and construction projects throughout this period, both for the state and for his own private clients.
One of his first public commissions as Royal Inspector was for a new Royal Customs House for Aarhus (the Toldboden), which was completed in1897. The site was an important one, and the new building became very much the public face of the city – a dramatic presence overlooking the activities of the docks, which at that time were the point of arrival for most of the city’s visitors, either from passenger or commercial steamships. Two octagonal brick towers stand sentinel to a massive square central tower which could be seen approaching Aarhus from the sea and which dominates the space in front of it. This is a National Romantic building with few hints of any interest in the Classics. Steeply pitched roofs dominate the relatively plain brick walls, once more punctuated by limestone details to the openings. Despite its National Romantic roots, it is a restrained design, devoid of the excesses of boulder stone, complex carpentry and mythical monsters of many of the other National Romantic edifices of the period. It is an authoritative building nevertheless, and few would dare to leave its presence without paying their dues.
Shortly before the completion of the Customs House, Hack began work (with Karl Hansen Reistrup (1863–1929)) on what was to be one of his most significant buildings from this period – the new Aarhus Theatre, which would eventually be completed in September 1900. The project was a major undertaking for the city, which was intended to reflect its growing wealth and status as the largest city in Jutland. For Kampmann, it represented a huge stride towards the Classical architecture, which would later dominate all his work.
The plan is formal and absolutely symmetrical, from foyer, through auditorium to fly tower (with matching wings to either side providing vertical circulation and backstage activities). The principal elevation, which faces the square, is dominated by a giant Classical portico, or more accurately a giant triangular pediment, below which is a highly original composition, once more in richly decorated limestone. At ground level, two arched entrances cut deep into the base, while above, at first-floor level, a double-height Classical portico with balcony provides a glazed foyer overlooking the square. Below the pediment (which is richly decorated with Reistrup’s colourful mosaic scenes of local history), a similarly colourful frieze runs around the entire building, linking the stone entrance facade with the supporting red brick wings. While these are very much in Kampmann’s well-established, brick and limestone language (albeit more richly decorated as befitted the extraordinary project budget), the entrance facade is a new departure. On one level this is a Classical pedimented facade, but within that framework, Kampmann has freely responded to the requirements of a modern theatre and introduced not just local symbols and scenes but also a traditional Nordic double-arched entrance at ground-floor level, which give this Classical civic building a distinctly regional feel. There is a new complexity and maturity in the theatre design in which the care and imagination which he has previously brought to surface treatment have begun to find greater expression in three-dimensional form and space – the deeply cut entrances, the advancing balcony and receding window plane to the foyer and above, the deep cornice which becomes more traditional roof than simply Classical motif. Internally, ‘the ceiling of the auditorium was particularly admired, with its white swans against a fading blue background around the golden sun. The auditorium shone with gold – a little too much, in the view of some scandalized visitors from Copenhagen’.4 The completion of the theatre (which remains the largest provincial theatre in Denmark) in 1900 was a triumph both for Aarhus and Kampmann.
By this time, work was already underway on Kampmann’s next major public building for the city – the Aarhus City Library, which on its completion in 1902 represented a further development of his architecture with its elegant dramatic, vaulted interiors (with a significant debt to Henri Labrouste’s (1801–1875) Bibliothèque nationale of 1860–1867, which Kampmann would have seen during his studies in Paris). Kampmann also found time to design a new house for his own family, Villa Kampen (1901–1902), in which his developing Nordic Classicism was briefly overwhelmed by his obvious admiration for the domestic architecture of the English Arts and Crafts Movement. When the Danish people decided to give the Crown Prince Christian (1870–1947) (later Christian X) and his consort Princess Alexandrine (1879–1952) the very generous wedding gift of a new palace, a site in Aarhus was chosen and Kampmann was the obvious choice of architect. His Marselisborg Palace (1899–1902) was the result – more a large, white Danish manor house than Palladian villa; it is still used as a summer residence by the Danish royal family today.
In 1901, at the request of his old friend Carl Jacobsen (and no doubt lured by the prestige of a major commission back in Copenhagen), Kampmann entered and won the competition for a major extension to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. The Copenhagen Glyptotek was first opened in1896 and was primarily a sculpture museum (as indicated by the name Glypto; from the Greek ‘glyphein’, to carve, and ‘theke’, a storing place), the focal point of the museum being Jacobsen’s collection of antique and contemporary sculpture. The original building was designed by Jens Vilhelm Dahlerup in a typically late nineteenth-century combination of new technology (in its vast cast iron, glazed winter garden) and historicism (in its unusual arched and decorated blank stone facades). The extension, which Jacobsen now required to house his burgeoning collection, was to include both further galleries and a new auditorium for lectures, small concerts, symposia and poetry readings, the total volume required actually being larger than that of the original building.
Kampmann’s design (now the Kampmann Wing) represented a further development of his Classical architecture and with it, his final abandonment of National Romanticism. Kampmann organized the new galleries around the auditorium on axis with Dahlerup’s original entrance and winter garden with the auditorium treated as a grand top-lit atrium, surrounded by a colonnade of ionic columns with a Danish ‘Temple of Nike’ (420 BC) providing a backdrop to the stage. The colonnade’s debt to antiquity is reinforced by the copies of Roman statues and sarcophagi within it, and as in Thorvaldsen’s museum, strong colours are used as a striking and effective backdrop for the white marble statues and plaster casts. Externally, the treatment of this central section was, if anything, even more dramatic with Kampmann providing his own reconstruction of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (353–350 BC) in Central Copenhagen. The great stepped pyramidal roof supported by an ionic colonnade above a solid rusticated podium is a breathtaking composition, whose perfect proportions provide a fitting monument to house the ancient sculpture within.
No doubt, inspired by the contents of the Glyptotek, this was pure Classicism, but much more importantly, in terms of the development of his architecture, this is a design which now provided a quality of three-dimensional form and space, which was missing from his earlier work. The relationship between the internal spaces and their external expression, the subtlety of the route through the extension, which builds so effectively on the central spaces of the original building, and the brilliance and subtlety of his use of the ionic order is far removed from his early play with combinations of materials and surface decoration. Finally completed in 1906, the building was a reminder to his peers that the Inspector of State Buildings in provincial Jutland was quite capable of delivering one of the capital city’s finest new buildings.
While work on the Glyptotek extension was underway, Kampmann (and his growing practice) had hardly neglected their duties in Aarhus, completing the new St. Johannes Church (consecrated 1905), the new Post and Telegraph Building (1904) and the Jutland Business School in 1905, as well as the extension and renovation of the Aarhus Cathedral School in 1906.
In 1908 at the age of fifty-two, he was appointed Professor of Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, and he and his practice moved back to Copenhagen from where he could discharge his new responsibility more effectively. He was now widely recognized as the most successful Danish architect of his generation, and for the next ten years, he managed to combine his role as professor with his continuing prolific output as an architect. In his lectures, he specialized in both domestic architecture and the architecture of ancient Greece with particular reference to the optical effects of colour and proportion. His architectural practice used its new base in Copenhagen to undertake projects throughout Denmark and began to focus more and more on public building commissions. Between his move to Copenhagen in 1908 and 1920, he completed Customs Houses in Skagen (1907–1908), Viborg (1910, demolished), Horsens (1911–1913), Frederikshavn (1913–1915), Silkeborg (1920) and Ebeltoft (1920); Post Offices in Aalborg (1908–1910), Langå (1910), Hurup (1910), Hadsten (1910), Sindal (1911), Løgstør (1913–1918), Skørping (1918) and Brædstrup (1919–1920), as well as completing a new Governor’s House in Hjørring (1909–1910), Hornslet Police Station and Courthouse (1910 – his last project in Jutland), Police Headquarters in Frederiksberg (1915) and the courthouse in Frederiksberg (1919–1921); the new St Paul’s Church in Hadsten (1918–1919); and even a memorial sepulchre for King Christian IX and Queen Louise in Roskilde Cathedral (1911–1919). The majority of the public buildings were designed in a restrained Classical style, which varied in materials between brick, render and stone, depending on its location and the local vernacular tradition as Kampmann consistently used his architecture to reinforce the existing character of each Danish town or city in which he built.
The workload of directing both the School of Architecture and his own large office must have been intense, and during this period he was joined in his practice by both his sons, Hans Jørgen (1889–1986) and Christian Kampmann (1890–1955), who had graduated in architecture from the Academy, and Johannes Frederiksen (1881–1960) and his brother Anton (1884–1967) with all four actively engaged in the workload of the office and in the development of the Nordic Classical style, which soon characterized all their work as the decade progressed. This culminated in three buildings which are amongst the finest examples of the style – Viborg Cathedral School (1915–1926), Randers School (1918–1926) and the Copenhagen Police Headquarters (1916–1924) – all three designed by Hack Kampmann and completed after his death by his team.
Viborg Cathedral School is one of the oldest secondary schools in Denmark established in 1060. The original school buildings and its Latin Garden were adjacent to the Cathedral in the centre of the city and by the start of the twentieth century were becoming increasingly cramped and unsuitable. A site on what was then the edge of the city was selected, and in 1915, Kampmann was appointed to design the new school buildings. His solution was a U-shaped three-storey building with extended wings to the rear of the main block. What raised the design from the simple and elegant to something much more important and dramatic was Hackman’s use of the sloping site. By setting the back of the ‘U’ at ground level, from where the ground fell away, he created a great terrace or tabula rasa upon which the buildings were located and from which a double staircase led down to the playing fields below. The buildings are approached along the front of this terrace from where a colonnade of double Doric columns gives covered access to the courtyard within the ‘U’. The courtyard itself is an almost perfect square with rows of trees to left and right echoing the entry colonnade. Above a red sandstone base, the yellow brick elevations are exquisitely detailed with deep horizontal banding to the ground floor, stone surrounds to windows and doors, and a simple stone frieze below an orange clay-tiled roof. The views from the courtyard through the Doric colonnade appear endless, as a result of the playing fields being one level below. This is Kampmann’s first use of an engaged Doric colonnade, here providing the subtlest of entrances and enclosures to one side of the courtyard (with a balustraded terrace on its roof). The detailing throughout is restrained, perfectly proportioned and superbly executed – whether the refinement of the main entrance door and steps, the mannerist doorways that gives access to the colonnade’s first-floor terrace or the coupled Doric columns of the colonnade itself (as used by CF Hansen at Christianborg). Completed in 1926 after Kampmann’s death, this is an elegant and sophisticated example of what is now a mature Nordic Classicism.
Randers School designed by Kampmann in 1918 (also completed in 1926) adopts the same language. Again, the plan is completely symmetrical about the school’s entrance with masters’ houses and the playing fields subordinate to the main school building. This represents a further development of Viborg with the building organized once more around a courtyard – on this occasion, fully enclosed with the colonnade running around all four sides. Here we have a two-storey building, again in brick with stone dressings around a perfect square courtyard with the colonnade of coupled Doric columns with balustrade over, providing covered circulation. Again, as at Viborg, low windows light the basement, with the ground floor raised half a level above the courtyard, which allows the colonnade to be both well-lit and perfectly proportioned, rather than being restricted to a single-storey height. The treatment of the eaves is simpler than at Viborg with a shallow frieze below stone dentils. We are to see many of these details and a similar play of pure forms in Kampmann’s next and, as it transpired, final building design – the Copenhagen Police Headquarters, which builds on the language developed in these two schools to create one of the most important of all the Nordic Classical buildings and one which includes perhaps two of the most dramatic external spaces of Western architecture. The Police Headquarters building is dealt with in detail in the next section.
Hack Kampmann died at the age of sixty-four, in 1920, before the completion of either of these, his three last buildings. He had relinquished his professorship two years earlier but led his architectural office until his death.
Copenhagen Police Headquarters (1918–1924)
Like most Scandinavian cities, Copenhagen was growing dramatically in the late nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, doubling in size from 1880 to 1920.5 Its public buildings and facilities were struggling to cope with the impact, and in 1916, it was decided that the old Police Headquarters (1815), which formed part of CF Hansen’s brilliant Court and Prison complex on Nytorv, needed to be replaced with a new, much larger specialist facility. A trapezoidal site was selected on an infilled harbour basin, west of the city centre, between the railway station and the docks. While this may have been convenient for many of its customers, it represented a rather uninspiring context for one of the city’s important new public buildings, with only the widest side of the site on Otto Mønsteds Gade, having been then developed with several blocks of flats and the remaining surrounding sites, being largely industrial wasteland.
FIGURE 34 Copenhagen Police Headquarters Section, Credit – John Stewart.
Hack Kampmann was commissioned to undertake the design of the building, and he started work in 1917 with construction commencing on site in August 1918. Kampmann had four main challenges – the trapezoidal site; its rather grim surroundings; the brief, which required several hundred day-lit cellular offices; and finally, the need to provide a building with suitable civic gravitas in this uninspiring context. His response (much influenced by Camillo Sitte’s City Planning According to Artistic Principles)6 was to develop the entire site to its boundaries, thus creating a solid urban block into which courtyards were then carved to provide light and air to the offices. In a master stroke he then turned the building inside out with the exterior facing the docks and wasteland, treated with the utmost simplicity, to the point of severity, and the interior courtyards, treated as the civic face of the building. For the two major courtyards, Kampmann used the pure forms of Classical architecture (as at Viborg and Randers Schools), selecting a pure circle for the first main courtyard and a perfect square (with a golden section roof opening above) for the second. He arranged both on axis with the main entrance facing Mitchellsgade, with four minor courtyards (or light wells) taking up the irregular shapes of the site in each corner.
The circular courtyard sits within the widening angular trapezoid shape of the site, and it is a huge credit to Kampmann and his team that, far from this creating a series of difficult and unusable leftover shapes and spaces internally, the whole plan is elegantly resolved by inserting circular and oval staircases at the junctions between the circular and linear forms to provide the vertical circulation. In the majority of cases, the corridors wrap around the courtyards, which both allows almost all of the cellular offices to have views out to the city beyond and at the same time creates a circulation system around the building which must be the most elegant and pleasurable of any police station in the world. As we have seen again and again in the greatest Nordic Classical buildings, the route to and through the buildings was of paramount importance to the architects, being used to create an emotional journey of anticipation, surprise and reward, and in the Police Headquarters (as in Stockholm City Library), this was taken to a new level.
The exterior of the building is severe with grey render above a red sandstone base and a strict pattern of unadorned window openings on all four elevations (the original proposal of stone cladding having proved to be beyond the budget) (Figure 34).
FIGURE 34 Copenhagen Police Headquarters Entrance Elevation, Credit – martin8th/Flickr.
As a result, it has often been criticized as being fortress-like and forbidding. It is certainly understated but no more so than many of CF Hansen’s buildings in even more central sites in Copenhagen or, indeed, Hansen’s former professor, Caspar Frederik Harsdorff’s Prince’s Palace (c. 1760), just a few streets away (now the National Museum of Denmark), which shares the same grey rendered exterior. The plain external facades have just two variations – the entrance elevation facing Mitchellsgade where a plain three-storey portico steps forward from the block and on Otto Mønsteds Gade where the rear of the building faces the existing apartments to which Hackman responded with a ground floor, one and a half storeys, partly recessed arcade to either side of the recessed portico, which forms the rear entrance. The front entrance has seven arches cut into it at ground-floor level (implying a portico), the outside two of which are gridded with symbolic iron cages and topped by gilded stars that represent the spiked maces of the city’s former watchmen.
The five arches serve a long lobby, which almost spans the whole facade. Here, the materials begin to change from the bleak grey render of the exterior: walls of smooth limestone beneath a beautiful, deeply coffered ceiling – but still no entrance doorway – with two blank doors at either end framed with elongated mannerist scrolls, and a further row of recessed arches, providing little encouragement. The only suggestion of what lies ahead was a glimpse of daylight above through the central arch (now sadly blocked by the insertion of a later security gatehouse). At either end of the lobby one or two steps are just noticeable in the furthest arches which lead us on. As we enter the stairway and ascend, there is a further hint of daylight ahead, and turning through 90o once more on the half landing, we get a first view of stone columns and the extraordinary sunlit central space of the building above and beyond. Back on axis, at the top of the stairs, the drum of the great circular courtyard now lies before us with a colonnade of exquisite coupled Doric columns, receding off around the space to right and left. The grey rendered exterior, unwelcoming lobby, obscure staircases and indirect route have so lowered our expectations that to suddenly arrive in this elegant brightly-lit, circular outdoor space, which feels more like a royal palace courtyard than a police station, comes as a completely unexpected surprise. This wholly intended, intensification of our experience has been brilliantly orchestrated by Kampmann (Figure 35).
FIGURE 35 Copenhagen Police Headquarters Circular Court, Credit – Astrid Rasmussen.
It is only as we navigate around the colonnade to the opposite side of the courtyard that a further opening is revealed once more on axis. Again understated, a simple stone shaft cuts through the building from the circular court to the dimmer light of a further external space beyond. Through the darkness once more into the light, but this time it is less the daylight which provides the drama – more the soaring stone Corinthian columns on either side of this atrium, which extend to the courtyard’s full three-storey height. This is the dramatic conclusion to the axial route, which finally ends in a shallow semicircular niche below the open atrium roof of the courtyard (Figure 36). This promenade architecturale is a tour de force – a totally unexpected drama played out within what at first sight appears to be a rather drab, uniform city block.
FIGURE 36 Copenhagen Police Headquarters Memorial Court, Credit – Astrid Rasmussen.
The inspiration for (and authorship of) the circular court has been much debated with both the Pantheon being suggested as one source and the circular Doric colonnade of the Palace of Charles V in Granada another. Certainly the diameter of Kampmann’s circular court is almost identical to that of the Pantheon (a parallel which a Classicist like Kampmann would value), but I would suggest that the more likely explanation for this pure circular space is that it came as a natural development of Kampmann’s work to date – from the colonnade at Viborg School with its coupled Doric columns and balustrade, which was further developed in Randers School into a complete colonnade surrounding the four sides of the square courtyard. In both schools, the elegant proportions of the colonnade are achieved by its height being equivalent to one and a half storeys with low horizontal windows to the basements being provided below the vertical windows to the ground floor. In the police station, the proportions of the colonnade are the same with the ground-floor height being increased to achieve the same effect and the memory of the low windows being expressed in boldly detailed blank panels, which support the windows above. The balustrade above the colonnade used in both schools appears once more above the second floor at the police station, terminating the drum (although now alternating solid and void to relate to the windows of the wall below into which it is integrated). If inspiration was needed, surely the more likely source was the work of CF Hansen, whose Courthouse, Church and Palace a few streets away provide so many of the details, including the coupled columns, the soaring triple-height columns supporting the coffered ceiling of the second court, the stone dentils, egg and dart friezes, and mannerist door and window surrounds. The police headquarters represents both the natural development of Kampmann’s mature Classical style (with due debt to Hansen) and, on its completion, his greatest architectural achievement.
Despite the irregular shape of the site, the plan of the building is beautifully and apparently effortlessly resolved into an efficient machine in which the giant wheel of the circular court drives the cogs of the staircases, which in turn distribute this radial energy through the corridors to the offices (Figure 37).The detailing throughout the building is exquisite, both inside and out, and is a great credit to Kampmann’s team who oversaw construction after his death. The walls of the circular court and atrium are of sandstone – crisply detailed in a restrained Classical language. The internal spaces are starkly monochromatic – white walls with a simple cornice, black door surrounds and doors, black terrazzo floors, plain iron handrails and elegant bronze light fittings – all simply and imaginatively designed (even the urinals in the men’s toilets are set in tall marbleized niches). From the ground-floor colonnade to the first- and second-floor corridors which encircle the court, up and down both round and oval top-lit staircases, the circulation spaces have a quality of natural light and a simple dignity rarely found in twentieth-century public buildings.
FIGURE 37 Copenhagen Police Headquarters Staircase, Credit – Astrid Rasmussen.
At first floor the corridor follows the circular court above the colonnade until it hits the central axis above the main entrance to the building, where it opens out into a rectangular lobby, which is a prelude to the conference room and police commissioner’s office. The entrance to these important spaces is marked by a grand door case, flanked by green and cream marble pilasters and surmounted by a dramatic cream scallop shell – a baroque flurry, which was surely the design of Hack’s assistant, Holger Jacobsen (1876–1960). Placed to either side of this astonishing door case are rows of Classically inspired Roman bronze camp chairs by Aage Rafn (1890–1953). Through the door and beyond, a further circular vestibule – its ceiling, a great fluted black disc – leads to the conference room. Inside, the walls are boldly rusticated in dark brown and cream wood below a dramatic hexagonally coffered ceiling in similar colours. This is the richest and most intense interior space within the building and, as one of the last to be completed, must also be attributed to Kampmann’s very capable team. Throughout the building, every detail is refined and sophisticated with the mace or star motif much used, as well as further scallop shells, egg and dart mouldings and swastikas.
The swastika motif was a regular feature in the Classical vocabulary as a symbol of good fortune (even once used on the Carlsberg beer label designed by Thorvald Bindesbøll). Sadly its later adoption by the Nazis has changed its meaning forever and, indeed, must have made them feel at home when they occupied the Politgarden twenty years after its completion, following its unsuccessful armed defence by the Danish police during the Second World War. Over two thousand members of the Copenhagen police force were murdered by the Nazis, and the second open atrium court became their memorial after the war with Einar Utzon-Frank’s (1888–1955) sculpture ‘the snake killer’, which celebrates the victory of good over evil, assuming a new meaning.
On its completion, the architectural reviews for the police headquarters were mixed with many viewing it as ‘almost inhuman formalism’.7 There were concerns that all national identity had now been lost within the Nordic Classical Movement, and Poul Henningsen (1894–1967) (of reflective lamp fame), architect and editor of the magazine Kritisk Revy (Critical Review), was particularly negative, characterizing the police headquarters as backward looking.8 With the benefit of almost 100 years’ hindsight, however, it is clear that this is one of the finest examples of twentieth-century Nordic architecture. It is brilliantly conceived, elegantly resolved and beautifully executed inside and out. The combination of drama, sophistication and human understanding exhibited in the police headquarters was perhaps only equalled at this time by Asplund and Lewerentz in Stockholm. It was, and remains today, the most elegant and dignified working police station in the world, and the two great courtyards have taken their place amongst the greatest external spaces of Western architecture.
Addendum
One issue remains – the authorship of the design. Large buildings are designed by large teams, and it’s not unusual for there to be disputes as to the authorship of designs or, more usually, elements of designs. In most instances, where an office is clearly and actively led by an individual architect, such as Kampmann or Asplund, all credit rests with the principal. In the case of the police headquarters, Kampmann’s death prior to its completion on site led to a number of claims and counterclaims as to authorship. I have so far read that following Kampmann’s death, the completion of the project was overseen by variously his sons, Christian and Hans Jørgen Kampmann, Holger Jacobsen, one of his assistants, and Aage Rafn, who joined the office shortly before the start of work on the project. Amongst these Aage Rafn later personally claimed authorship of the overall strategy for the project and, most significantly, the idea of the circular court and contrasting exterior elevations.9 Let’s examine the facts.
Firstly, Hack Kampmann was responsible for one of the largest architectural practices in Denmark at the time of his death. While the office may have expanded marginally to deliver the police station project (as well as all the other major projects then ongoing), it was already a large team by the standards of the day. Kampmann’s ability and experience by this stage of his career were unquestionable; indeed he had taught most of his team while Professor of the Academy. He had relinquished his professorship at around the time at which he received the police station commission, and there is nothing to suggest that at sixty-two in 1918, he was incapable of once more leading the project design team. Almost all the team who supported him on the police headquarters project – Holger Jacobsen (42), Christian Kampmann (28), Hans Jørgen Kampmann (29), Anton Frederiksen (34) and Johannes Frederiksen (27) – had been working with him for a number of years and were actively involved in the other projects in the office at the same time as working on the police station project (including completing the Randers and Viborg Schools). Aage Rafn (another of Kampmann’s former students) joined them in 1918, on completion of his Bornholm Railway Stations project (with Kay Fisker (1893–1965)). To suggest, as has been done, that he was specifically appointed to undertake the Politgarden design for Kampmann seems highly unlikely in this context – not only was he one of the youngest members of the group at twenty-eight, but he also had little practical experience of designing a project on the scale of the police headquarters or even of working with Kampmann.
Rafn’s claims, after Kampmann’s death, that he was responsible for the overall design strategy and particularly the idea of the circular court, need to be viewed in this context. As I have shown, the concept of a central court and the key elements within it, such as the coupled Doric columns, had already been used in a number of other Kampmann projects. Rafn certainly completed many of the drawings (although all under Kampmann’s stamp) including a finely rendered perspective of the circular court, but this certainly does not prove authorship of the design. Unlike Kampmann, Rafn had almost his whole career ahead of him after completion of the Politgarden, and yet (with the possible exception of his most highly regarded, but unbuilt, competition design for a Crematorium of 1921) none of his completed buildings give any hint of the brilliant mind which conceived either the Politgarden’s spaces or its elegantly resolved plans.
Further, if construction started in the August of 1918 and Hack Kampmann died in June 1920, almost two years into the contract, all the principal decisions and much of the detailed design would have been completed by the time of his death (indeed it would be normal for this stage to have been reached prior to construction commencing). The site for the police station near the docks had very poor bearing capacity and required piling. Three thousand eight hundred and sixteen piles were used to support the building, and examination of the sectional drawings shows that the piles were all under the solid elements of the building (i.e. there were no piles under either courtyard). On this basis, it must have been clear that when piling commenced in 1918, where the two courtyards would be located and thus the design strategy with circular and rectangular courts were already fixed at that time (two years before Kampmann’s death).
As to who led the team after Kampmann’s death in1920, again it is difficult to accept that one of the youngest team members, with the least relevant experience, who had worked for the practice for the shortest time, took over responsibility. I would suggest that the most likely candidate was Holger Jacobsen. He was the oldest member of the team, the most experienced, having already completed a number of major projects on his own account including the Bispebjerg Crematorium in Copenhagen of 1905–1907. Many of the interior details which must have been outstanding at the time of Kampmann’s death, such as the giant shell doorway and conference room interior, were executed in the mannerist style which he had developed, and he would go on to deploy so successfully in the early 1920s in his extension to the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen (1928–1931) and in his own house in Copenhagen of 1926.
In many ways, it’s sad that so many claims and counterclaims for design credit exist, as nothing should detract from Kampmann’s achievement; indeed had he not died prior to construction completion, it seems unlikely that the issue would have arisen. The Copenhagen Police Headquarters design was, without doubt, a team effort, as were all Kampmann’s later commissions – executed by a team whom he had taught, appointed and developed and under his creative direction. Together, as a team led by Hack Kampmann, they produced one of the greatest buildings of the Nordic Classical period.
