One of my traveling companions remarked that Copenhagen was awfully nice, but that it looked as if they had put the same building everywhere. He’s right. There’s a uniformity to the old parts of the city, where all the blocks are built to a six- or seven-story height, with an identical, rather relentless pattern of high, wide windows lined up across long, flat facades. Yet the feeling isn’t banal: the buildings vary in detail, and are scaled so that they’re solid but not oppressive. The streets, open to the sky, are relaxed. The big windows let in daylight, a precious commodity in this part of the world, and their insistent rhythms measure one’s passage through the streets.
Of all the tasks an architect needs to contend with, crafting a compelling facade for a city building might be the most difficult. The street elevation is most often what shapes an image for the building and a character for the city. Copenhagen offers an important lesson in how simple a good facade can be: it’s just a wall with windows in it.