The building in relation to the cityscape

Arne Jacobsens Søholm 1

Architects have always been fascinated by the internal external relationship in reference to the private, one of danish most admired architects Arne Jacobsen was a master of this disciplin as shown on the picture above from his house in Gentofte. But I find the reversed discussion just as fascinating; the internal-external relation in reference to the public, through wich we get the cultural landscape, the cityscape. If we take the typical danish parcelarea, every house will relate to its own parcel. The relationship is a introvert relationship, a controlled cultivated landscape extending the borders of the internal to the hedge. But if we remove the hedges, we suddenly place the houses in a landscape. Since we don’t want the houses to appear as objects on a plane, one important question appears, the relation between the elements in the landscape. The spaces between the houses. What ties the people living in the cluster of houses together, what makes us define it as a society or city?


The urban spaces is one place to start, for those of you how saw both Jonas from Polyform and Rune from Cobes presentations, you saw that one of their first thing they did in the planning fase was to place the important public areas. But what I find just as important is the border between the build and the ground level. How can we think the build as part of the cityscape?

How the building meet the ground. Especially in lower build residential areas, I see this area as being one of the sockets for a area to function as a lively cityscape but equally as a important I see it as a socket to support the democratic functions of a society. This treeshold between the private and the public, the dialogue, spoken as spacial between these two factores appears. How can we as planners work with this subject? There is often a freight towards shaping the building in the planning process, to leave the interpretation of the plan open to the building architects. But this creates a separation in the design fase leaving the overall impression or the experience of the city, weakened in the planning process. Can we in our schoolwork get closer to the build while still shaping the overall picture of the city in the planning process, or even work above the planning concept.
Jens Kvorning is discussing the planning process in the judge commentary from Öresundsvisioner 2040 below (freely translated to english) “

The Planning discussion that are at game is characterized by discussing the concepts: strategy, plan, project. If the strategy is defined as very open indications of the direction to be chosen, and the project is defined as the precise and definitive description of how a given area should be developed, the plan is somewhere between, with more concrete statements than the strategic, but still more open than the project. Plan may with advantage be omitted in favor of the general strategic guidelines at the regional level and project-like statements at local level?”

I know Jens is discussing at a higher level planningvise (and interlectual needless to say) but why is there a limit of how close we can go in the “projects-like statements at local level”. Getting closer to the concequense of the architectual guidelines we describes in the planning process, and investigating the local relationship between the elements in the cultural landscape we project, could or should stenghten the overall architectural concept.